Mass Effect Thematic and Structural Fixes: The Extended Cut

Spoilers. Spoilers EVERYWHERE.

Here is my money / time no object rejig of Mass Effect 3. Some things to note:

I don't mention Starchild (much), Suicide Mission 2.0, choices not reflecting in the third game or the ludicrousness of basing your entire game solution on "Here's a magic space weapon, we don't know what it does or how it'll stop the Reapers and we'll keep drumming this into your head throughout the game because we literally have no sensible solution other than a magical off switch. If we tell you this enough times, hopefully you'll just accept and roll with it. Love, the writers". I already covered lots of those things here, so just assume all of that has been magically replaced - with space magic - by something that makes sense. Also Xzibit memes.

And here we go....

Don't place important plot points into optional DLC

1) As it turns out, the exploding relay in the Arrival DLC has caused lots of confusion with regard the ending of ME3 (did the relays blow up? a) Yes b) No c) Space magic). Worse, the supposed "trial" is completely absent from the start of ME3 so they can get to the shooty bang bang quicker. As a result, the start of ME3 makes little sense if you were expecting, you know, a trial sequence. There's no explanation whatsoever of why Shepard is even sitting in his room eating those three square meals a day.

Remove the railroading from ME2

1) "If you can keep up, great. If not, I'll stop the Reapers without you" I knew I'd end up going toe to toe with The Illusive Man when my totally Renegade Shep, who just gave TIM the Collector Base had the option of telling the guy he just gave the Collector Base to to "shut up".

My expectation before this happened would be that ME3 would have Paragon Shep working with the Alliance and Renegade Shep would be with TIM. The only possible reason you'd be forced into an artificial conflict with TIM would be if Bioware couldn't work out how to depict a conflict between small puny humans and 100 foot tall death machines in a satisfactory manner. I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.

(Don't) take back Earth

1) "Take Earth back" is a great way to convince Dudebros and those unfamiliar with the series to jump on board because they're more likely to get that than "Take Thessia back", but as far as Mass Effect goes my Shepard has the familiar sensation of being railroaded into being some other Shepard again. Renegade, space born Shep who sent most of the Batarian race to their grave without a second thought and killed a bunch of other dudes in various hilarious circumstances couldn't give two tits and a monkey about a planet you've never seen for the duration of the series.

Also: it makes no sense that Shepard would be so desperate to have every species battle the Reapers on Earth unless there was some poorly telegraphed plot point from near the end of the game that would require them all to be there, despite them not possibly knowing at the start of the game that this would be the case.

I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.

Hold fire!

1) Having the invasion kick in right at the start of the game is a nice distraction for anyone wanting to shoot things, but the amount of exploration and questing related to your search to find a way to stop the Reapers is severely limited as a result. Everything boils down to "here's a big shooty battle, and now here's another big shooty battle". They should have taken the "up against the clock" mechanic of whether you saved your crew by going through the Omega 4 relay in ME2 and really thumbscrewed the player into making some desperate choices. At no point did I ever feel any dramatic tension, because it was clear from an early point in the game that I was just going to railroad through a bunch of main missions in an order I couldn't alter.

How much more interesting would it have been if you'd been on a set of smaller, more intimate missions as you travel to places like Thessia and Palaven to come up with some sort of solution to the Reaper threat? Instead, I got a moon that looked like Tuchanka with a colour swap and a railroaded chunk of Thessia that looked like it used Ilium assets without the purple light.

Intermission: Don't reduce dialogue to background noise

1) Not really relevant, but then again maybe it is. There's a whole chunk of game on Palaven's moon where you're just running through endless bland rock corridors to reach the next objective. The whole time, Vega and Garrus are talking and you're just running....and running.....and running to get to your next objective. In previous games, they'd have taken the time to take a breath, have characters stand around and just talk. Instead, the player is focusing on running - and this scene seems to take so long that I end up focusing on "Are we there yet?" instead of listening to the conversation. This is an awful attempt at giving dudebros something to do instead of immersing themselves in conversation.

The enemy of my enemy doesn't matter, have some Cerberus

1) Well, looks like I'm bringing up that whole thing about Cerberus after all. Not only does it make no sense as to why my Renegade Shep is instantly plunged into conflict with Cerberus in ME3, it also makes no sense that the "protectors of humanity" spend their entire time trying to kill the one man in the Galaxy who has proven himself capable of killing the Reapers.

How much of this game do I spend fighting Cerberus, being distracted by Cerberus. being foiled at crucial points in the story by Cerberus instead of, you know, doing something about Reapers? Why does this game have no primary antagonist outside of TIM? Why does Harbinger have this great build up in ME2, only to spend the entire game mute with a brief cameo, even though the original voice actor is in the game? "Harbinger speaks of you", says the Reaper on Rannoch. Well that's good, because he sure as Hell doesn't speak anywhere else. Tell him Shep says hi.

2) I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that having 100 foot tall death machines as a foe is only a good idea if you have numerous interesting ways to combat them. Given that the sole fight you have with one involves rolling around like an idiot while a Reaper with an aim so bad I can only assume he's a Stormtrooper, it would seem nobody quite knew what to do with the things. They're great at smacktalking you; they're good at telling you their goals are "beyond your understanding" (lol kidding); having a satisfying showdown, not so much.

See also: the Benny Hill chase on the Galaxy map. I was expecting something other than a game over screen to appear should you be caught.

So what do you do? Yep, have some Cerberus.

3) Kai Leng. You don't even get the satisfaction of winding up TIM throughout the game, because you get this lamer thrown at you instead. Bad enough he recharges shields by sitting out in the open, he only even takes out Thane because a) Shep & co have a bad case of cutscene incompetence and b) we're supposed to believe that the deadliest assassin in the Galaxy decides to go close quarters with a Ninja waving a sword when he's armed with a gun?

Oh God. No....just no.

Intermission: "They were gunned down while having drinks and watching the game."

FULL BODY ARMOUR AND SPACE HELMETS.

Multiplayer and variety

1) There's no way to know this for sure, but I tend to suspect that even accounting for basic reskins in ME1 and 2, the variety of enemies in ME3 is reduced because it's a lot harder to balance things in multiplayer if you have an endless amount of different bad guys, skills, stats etc. Better to have  few guys from each group and be done with it. Of course, while this makes things more straightforward in Multi, it impacts on singleplayer. And it doesn't help that every other mission seems to be fighting Cerberus goons.

2) Hey look, another impact of multiplayer on singleplayer: poorly thought out battles. When almost everything in the game is shooting stuff, you'd better make sure the combat isn't predictable. A shame then that the combat in singleplayer often boils down to "fight three waves of goons", or "one of your squad has to fiddle with this button so now it's two versus about twenty".

Don't even get me started on that final shootout with the seven or so Brutes and the handful of Banshees.

3) As far as I can tell, most if not all of the N7 missions are just multiplayer levels with - you guessed it - horde style attack waves. Get rid of all of this.

Intermission: The Citadel is not the Normandy

Remember the Citadel in the first game, and how it was one big area and you could get lost? And how in the second game it was reduced in size to a sort of intergalactic shopping mall but still had a decent feel of "I could get lost here, and there's still a bunch of staircases"?

I've yet to see anyone point out that the Citadel in ME3 is pretty much the Normandy in structure and layout: a small collection of rectangular shaped boxes. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head the Citadel even has the same amount of floors. What went wrong here?

Intermission: What have we done so far?

1) Allowed you to side with TIM, or not.

2) Kept Arrival in the game rather than made it optional.

3) Delayed the invasion.

4) Kept the trial in the game, instead of starting it with a confused setup

5) Removed the focus on Earth because your Shep might not actually care, also horribly foreshadowed plot development.

6) Removed the conflict with Cerberus whether you side with TIM or not, because however you look at it this does not make any sense. This siding with one over the other should have affected gameplay and resource choices, not who you spend most of the game shooting at.

7) Made the Reapers relevant again by giving Harbinger his voice back.

8) Freed up resource by ditching the awful N7 missions. Goodbye forever, horde mode.

9) Ditched multiplayer, while I'm at it. I could be wrong, but I've yet to see Bioware mention that you need to do multiplayer to see Shepard survive at the end of the Destroy ending. This is all I can find.

Phew, that's a whole bunch of nipping and tucking. What now? Well, we assume the start of the game has better pacing and makes more sense. The first half of the game is Shepard & co finally getting to see all of the homeworlds you've wanted to explore since day 1 (with no corridor shooting, bonus). Then when the Reapers finally come knocking, the game would play out much as it did before I started typing because the "recruit the funny looking aliens" campaign worked fine despite my endless complaints over too much shooting.

Wind forward to the end of the game, which isn't focused on the Reapers anymore because in a brain straining effort on the part of the writers to try and think up a way to kill them we got that stupid kid, horribly circular logic and the knowledge that while Rannoch Reaper is allowed to comment on your (at that point) failure to unite the Geth and the Quarians, Shepard isn't given any dialogue option to point out that he did unite them both when the Starchild gives his speech.

AMAZING.

But anyway. You heard me right, the Reapers should not have been the end of the game, the end of the game should have remained the Dark Energy threat raised in ME2. Everything would have come down to letting the Reapers harvest and look for a fix, or take them down then try to fix it yourself.

Rather than the "high level" Starchild, they should have been killed off with the somewhat more mundane (yet infinitely more believable) military might of your assembled armies. When I had to choose between Krogan and Salarian, I thought this is how it would go and my eventual alien race ally choices would save or doom the Galaxy.

Well, we know how that panned out. All the same, your choice of eventual allies should have been the dealbreaker. Not enough tech strength? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. Not enough brute force? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. A decent mix of the two but maybe one or more species had to bite the bullet to reach this stage? SHEPARD BEATS THE ROOPERS.

If you screwed up, everybody should have been squished in a tube and 50,000 years later we should have had a cutscene where some dude discoveres Liara's "warning: Repears galore" recording under a rock somewhere. If you got it right, you had a bunch of missions to solve the Dark Energy problem as per the ditched leaked script. Maybe there could have been an additional bonus where even if you allowed the Reapers to reap, they may have found a solution themselves after turning everybody into fishpaste based on if you'd done certain things throughout the three games. I mean, there's so many directions they could have taken this.

Feels bad, man.

Did you see Vent Kid on the Citadel?

I did.

There are people out there who think the ending to Mass Effect 3 is actually one big fakeout, and from the point where Shepard is hit by the beam onward nothing is real and its all a piece of attempted Indoctrination by the Reapers.

A lot of debate is framed around whether or not That Stupid Kid(TM) at the start of the game is real or not.

For example, why is Shepard the only one that reacts to him? Why did the kid go from the roof of one tall building, climb up the inside of another tall building in a VENT, say "you can't help me" then crawl back down again?

Okay, that last one could just be bad writing but anyway.

While the below doesn't solve the supposed mystery of indoctrination theories, this does perhaps address the question of whether That Stupid Kid(TM) is a real stupid kid or a pretend stupid kid.

I was wandering around the Citadel and decided to take a look at the tribute wall. I'm not sure if the pictures there change over time, but this is from the start of the game:

Click to Enlarge

See anything? Sure you do. Directly to the right of my FemShep there's two framed photographs.

Click to Enlarge

Boom, one stupid Vent Kid. "Last seen on Earth".  I did wonder if I had a case of mistaken identity, but that stupid face (first picture down) is forever burnt into my brain as the ultimate symbol of how to trash a franchise in ten minutes or less so there we go.

On the bright side, this probably means Vent Kid died horribly in the introduction.

So there's that.

No Fighting in the War Room: Mass Effect 3

End game spoilers galore for Mass Effect 3 here. If you haven't completed it yet, move right along.
Seriously, go. Get out of here.
Okay.
I completed ME3 a couple of days ago, fully aware of the furore over the ending as I made my way closer to it, thinking "can't be as bad as everyone is making out, surely".
Only to complete the game, sit back and think yep....a game that did almost everything right apart from the ending (and to be clear, I mean from the moment you go to retake the Earth). While most of the point I'd probably make have already been made, I want to make a few comments about the actual design of the finale (which is terrible). First the recap, which itself highlights some pretty bizarre scripting.
Destination: Citadel
The Citadel turns out to be a crucial part of your large space weapon that can kill the reapers. Shepard and company need to get on board. Rather than hide it in the middle of nowhere, the ancient and terrifyingly intelligent Reapers decide to place it directly over the homeworld that the deadliest Reaper killing son of a bitch in the galaxy is heading right for, with an army consisting of every tooled up species in the galaxy. Worse, the transport beam - used to place humans onto the Citadel for harvesting - is not only left switched on in the middle of Shepard's full scale assault to reach the Citadel, it is guarded by one solitary Reaper who doesn't stick around for the ten seconds afterwards to make sure that the biggest single threat to their existence - that would be you, Shepard - is actually done and dusted.
Apparently this same Reaper is Harbinger, who actually has some experience with Shepard refusing to die unless turned into a smoking pile of ash. Yet not only does Harbie not raze the ground with a few more blasts just to be sure, he sails off leaving their last line of defence to some husks and the brave Marauder Shields, who gave his life so that you may end up not seeing the horrible ending.
So of course Marauder is shot to pieces and Shepard reaches the beam.
What follows is an ending that replaced the original conclusion to the trilogy, and unfortunately doesn't improve upon it. You know when you played ME2 and kept hearing about dark energy, and even played through a mission that involved stars aging prematurely?
The original ending had the Reapers being the last ditch attempt to prevent advanced races from tearing the universe apart or harvest them and keep things ticking over until the next cycle.
This is a good explanation, it harks back to earlier games, it gives you one hell of a tough choice to make.
Then the writer left and they ditched it, and replaced it with....I don't even.
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them."
Now place this alongside their actions in the first two games - you know, when they're controlling the Geth. Now it reads like this:
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them with the aid of their own creations because our irony capacitors need calibrations."
If you're going to make man Vs machine the lynchpin for your Reaper invasion of everything, it would probably help if it made a lick of sense. The dark energy route has an elegance and a "yeah, okay, that works" about it. The "We heard you like..." motivation is the first of many fumbles at the conclusion of a trilogy years in the making.
Worse, the Reapers are controlled by Space Casper, the horribly annoying child littered throughout the game that you're supposed to give two hoots about. I'd pay $15 for a DLC that allowed me to stick a nailgun dart between his eyes. Game devs: there's a reason the "make children killable in Fallout" mods are extremely popular. Kids in games are always annoying. Magical space children that randomly end up being controllers of the Reapers - controlled from on board the Citadel at that - is a recipe for disaster.
Speaking of which: there are non essential characters in ME2 who I can have up to ten lines of conversation with for no other reason than "just because". Yet you place this batshit insane AI in front of me, at the culmination of the story, and Shepard just accepts everything he is told without hesitation and isn't given an option to question any of it. I can't ask where it came from, who made it, why I might want to do my own thing instead of jump through Casper hoops...nothing.
Not only does this not fit with the character, it doesn't mesh with the supposed design philosophy of the series. Shepard is about to make a decision that will reshape the galaxy or end everything, and he isn't going to take five minutes out of his busy workaday schedule to drag some answers out of Casper?
Really?
Three Way Failure

So yeah, claims of "It won't be anything like ending A, B or C" aside, that's exactly what you get.
Except...the design of your defining moment is awful. The developers try to influence your choice, not so gently nudging you down the path of what they feel would be the best ending - they have "control the reapers and let them live" as Blue (Paragon), and "kill the reapers" as Red (Renegade) and "magical galaxy wide biology alteration" in the middle as glowing white ("pick me! pick me!") At this stage in the game, the player should not feel the additional burden of a developer breathing down their neck and saying "You want this one...don't you?"
The end result of whatever decision you make - all the mass relays destroyed, presumably billions killed in the explosions, the Turians, Salarians and Quarians trapped in the Solar System (and at least two of those species can't eat human food, so enjoy your slow horrible death) and a Universe plunged into the dark ages isn't mentioned, isn't explored, isn't given a second thought.
If that had been presented as one of the options, you'd have probably just picked a "Let the Reapers squish us all, thanks" ending and walked into one of the darkest finales ever. Which would have been amazing.
So of course, the game doesn't actually have a "Reapers win" ending, nor does it have a more traditional "Shepard wins, but at some cost" ending.
All you have is SPACE MAGIC, now in three colourful flavours. Turning everybody into synthetic / organic hybrids by....I don't know how....is as bad as "A Wizard did it", and has no place being dropped into the last ten minutes of a series based in fairly standard sci-fi lore trappings.
Of course, there's no explanation how this is done. And in an amazing slice of asset reuse, the developers give everybody an identikit ending based on three space magic choices that has absolutely nothing to do with any choice you've made so far (this is all so lazy, the movie files are actually listed by colour in the game files). Even Fallout 3 managed a couple of different slides depending on the choices you made throughout the game. And New Vegas is a great example of how to do it (go check the End Game Wiki page).
This places all the eggs in a very lacklustre FMV basket and leaves it at that.
An interesting result of the identikit ending (accounting for pretty colour variations, of course) is that I'm seeing lots of people lose interest in a second playthrough because the endings are so similar (hey look, this one is green instead of blue!) that they couldn't be bothered. I'm guessing Bioware are noticing something is going horribly wrong in their stat tracking, hence threads such as this (I've read that a number of Bioware writers didn't like the ending given to them, but one guy had an override button and dismissed their concerns. If true....whoops.)
Now, there is a counterpoint to the "these endings are terrible", and either misread the complaints as "crybabies demand a happy ending" or something in a bit more detail. To address some of his points:
1) It's Confusing: No, they're not being "preserved" despite what Space Casper says (and you taking that view seems to suggest you believe what this AI - who controls the Reapers - is saying at face value. The AI is hardly going to say "Kelly Chambers in a jar, lol" is it?)
They're being turned into mush in the most horrendous way possible then turned into some sort of mass intelligence fishpaste that then goes off to fishpaste everybody else. For the first two games, they even used synthetics created by the organics to shoot the organics with laser guns and rockets. Are all of the victims of the Reaper controlled Geth slaughter throughout the galaxy "preserved" too? Because you might want to look into that.
If the Reapers are so smart - and they apparently are, given their commander has a space magic button that can change biology across the galaxy - why don't the Reapers avoid all the hassle and simply turn up every 50,000 years to kill all synthetics?
2) Lore Errors and Plot Holes: Sorry, but if you openly admit you don't know what happens when a Relay explodes (despite that being the thing that ends the Arrival DLC, places Shepard on Earth at the start of ME3 and is actually detailed in the Codex) you probably don't have any business snarkily comparing some of the many, many batshit crazy plot holes listed above to Star Wars nerds obsessing over the length of a Star Destroyer. Speaking of which: leave your explanation as to how Joker is flying through a relay when you make your choice and how the squadmates on Earth with you are also on board at the door, thanks.
3) Player choice is completely discarded: Glad you mentioned this, because it's more of an issue with the underlying game mechanics that the third game is supposedly built on, rather than anything to do with the plot. Shall we race towards the home stretch?
Building your fleet has never been so pointless
All throughout Mass Effect 3, you're told to recruit allies, build a force capable of stopping the Reapers. You negotiate with morons to grab some assets for the Earth battle, you talk down species from a two way holocaust to have their fleets aid you as you reclaim the solar system, you fiddle with gene cures to get this guy to help that guy and did you save the Rachni because they'll come to your assistance in your darkest hour...
....except none of this actually happens when you finally have your fleet and go to "take back Earth".
I assumed Bioware had expanded the mechanics of the suicide mission in ME2 - that is, your choices both in the build up to the finale and the choices inside of that finale would shape the course of your last stand.
Everything points to battle readiness and the strength of your fleet. The first thing you see when you load the game is the battle map, locked at 50%. The first thing you see after a mission is the War Room, and your increasing supplies of decision making allies. Everything you do pops up a little "your military might has increased" with a little picture of a Krogan on it or whatever.
You upgrade the Normandy, because you guess that based on previous experience when the space battle begins you'll probably lose people unless you upgraded.
LOL NOPE.
Any visions you had of telling certain fleets to attack certain Reapers, protect various support lines or planets or holding points while the Alliance punched a hole through to Earth, any hope you had of calling in Turian air support while faced with 6 brutes and an instakill Reaper, any notion of seeing certain sections increase / reduce in difficulty while duking it out on Earth are all gone.
Because none of this happens. Instead, Bioware take all of your assets and fishpaste them, Reaper style, into a number and a text blurb on a "build the crucible" diagram and that's it.
This is a massive, massive disappointment after seeing what they did with the suicide mission. More of a let down than letting the council die in the first game only to see it populated with what look like the exact same aliens on the Citadel in ME3. More of a let down than choosing to not save the Rachni, only to run into an "artificial queen" (dear god) dumped into the game anyway. More of a let down than having made all those choices in earlier games to get to the stage where you could save both the Geth and the Quarian, only to watch the Geth potentially die as a result of hamfisted "either / or" choices on the Citadel (why do regular synthetics die alongside the Reapers anyway? For all intents and purposes, the synthetics are the evolutionary equivalent of a tomato next to the Reapers so why would the space magic beam wipe them out too?)
As a final nail in the coffin, the only impact the battle fleet / war readiness has on anything is a few (slight) modifications to the FMV, and should you desire to see Shepard Commander wake up at the end you need to play multiplayer to increase the score. And of course bolting "Shepard survives" onto the "bad" renegade ending ensures that all synthetic life dying for him to live is the trade off, even though he should be dead too because his entire body only works because of Reaper tech.
Plot holes? Holy shit, yes. Finishing the game and seeing the "Continue the legend with downloadable content" popup is the final icing on the cake.
The majority of this game was fantastic. The cast had some great lines, the injokes were actually funny and using music and locations from the first game made the whole thing very nostalgic.
Even the increasingly tiresome "survive fifty waves of enemies" in the London sequences and the "here's six brutes, a Reaper and two banshees because we're starting to flag a bit now" didn't faze me in the long run.
But for a game based on choices supposedly making a difference, only for those differences to end up at the bottom of an exploded set of space relays based on three space magic options given by a last minute introduction that you can't even debate with or question, there's only one thing to say.