Quote Originally Posted by Olinser View Post
The main problem that people had with the ending was simple - they were promised that the choices that they had made throughout the entire trilogy would affect the ending.

They did not.

You could have played ultra-Renegade and exterminated the Rachni, sacrificed the Council and formed a human council, wiped out the Thorian colonists, killed Wrex, killed the Geth heretics, and yet you are given the EXACT SAME OPTIONS as somebody who allowed the Rachni to survive, saved the original Council, spared the Thorian colonists, and rewrote the Geth heretics (those are just off the top of my head to Mass Effect 2, but that list could go on for a long time, as I'm sure everybody is aware).

That is what made a lot of fans angry (myself included). For 2 full games I'd actually gone to the trouble of keeping 2 full game completion saves with Pure Paragon/Renegade choices maintained throughout, thinking that they might be necessary to access the final endings for each path. It was utterly pointless.

NOTHING you do matters or changes the endings. The endings are flat and fixed. The Mass Relays explode, incidentally devastating every major world actually visited throughout the games and presumably killing just about every major character not on the Normandy. No choice you make actually changes anything, and what really set players off was they were too lazy to even make actual distinct cutscenes for each one.

That's the problem at its core. BioWare promised fans something they pretty unambiguously did not deliver. And you can still think that the endings were good (I thought a couple were decent ideas but utterly refuse to accept that there was no option to reject the core premise that AI are inherently evil), while acknowledging that BioWare did not keep their promise.
You're missing a lot if you are only counting the last cut scenes as the end of all the story arcs. So many of the big side plots are wrapped up before you get there. If you saved the Krogan or killed them that is going to be the case no matter which way you handle the Reapers. Finishing the Reapers doesn't change who's in charge of the Council and what that means. You already know the end results, the "ending" that you've helped accomplish across the many conflicts in the games by the time you get to the final confrontation with the Reapers at the Crucible. Just like most movies and books, not everything is restated in the last few pages/minutes because they don't need to be. You're choice to control the reapers or cause the singularity doesn't change whether or not you killed the Rachni.

There is also *nothing* supporting your implication that AIs are portrayed as inherently evil, they are in fact portrayed to be very similar to other life forms. They just want to survive, and some will fight and kill for it, but others will try for peace. The Reapers even aren't portrayed as just killing for the sake of killing, they're just trying to maintain balance, they've just picked a "tough love" approach that no one else appreciates. It isn't like their idea is entirely without real world parallels. "We're killing these things for their own good" has been used a lot and that line of thinking is still being used today by a sizable portion of the population.

I'm also under the impression that the synthesis option is only available to some players, if you've stayed high paragon. But I think not having the choice, having it pre-determined by what you've done previously and simply showing you the matching ending, would not make anyone happy either and we would have more complaints about that.