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Unofficial ending mod for Mass Effect 3
12-07-2012, 10:51 PM
A couple of programmers with a lot of skill recently decided to mod the ending to Mass Effect 3, replacing the lackluster "3 choices" ending and removing the entire Space Child sequence, and putting the ending everyone actually wanted in its place.
http://social.bioware.com/project/8587/#files
I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to sometime soon. It's even being tweaked and perfected as time goes on, so the finished product should be even more interesting. Depending on how awesome it turns out, I may simply ignore the original endings, and consider this the "official-if-they-had-any-sense" ending.
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What if you liked both the original and extended ending?
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Heh. I don't know. It depends on how the mod alters the endgame section. presumably you'd have to back stuff up before using this.
But I found the endgame to be totally contrived, for probably every reason that's been ranted about already. But suffice to say that I was going great guns on this game until near the end-game, and after discovering how they butchered the final content, I haven't had the interest in playing it since. I play multiplayer, which is odd, when you consider I can't stand 99% of all MP deathmatch-style games out there. But I really like how they structured the ME3 multiplayer. But I haven't had any interest in finishing the game.
Now, I do. So even if most of the community doesn't care about the mod, if this makes me want to replay the game again, then it's worth having as far as I'm concerned. 
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I'd love to play multiplayer. EA doesn't want me to 
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Huh?
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PCGamer has links to the unofficial mod as a rendered video. I had a M. Bison-sized banana grin the whole time. If Bioware had delivered this option, I'd have been dancing on clouds the last six months.
The "choose 3" endings suffer from the fact that the entire premise behind them is introduced literally in the last 5 minutes of the third game. It feels like the players are being gut-punched instead of delivering what was promised across the entire trilogy. This mod delivers. And all it really does is it eliminates the Star Child conversation, delivers on the Reaper Destruction the trilogy was promising, and allows Shepard to live. Everything else is pure gold, and totally unchanged. They even did up a custom end-scene for the monologue, showing the Geth and Quarians working together, which looks every bit as professional as the rest of the scenes. I'm really, *really* impressed with the work they put into this.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/08/mass- ... nding-mod/
Even if you're a fan of the original work, this is still worth appreciating as a fourth possible ending in its own right.
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To make a long story short, the monkey that handled the network code for multiplayer needs a punch in the balls. I very rarely make it to the extraction wave without DCing, and it's a damn rare occasion when I make it through THAT.
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Okay.
I'm going to wait for some more news and some more upgrades to this effort.
And if and when some more of the kinks get worked out, I may... MAY... finally be convinced to buy and play ME3 based on this.
Cautiously optimistic.
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Okay. *Deep Breath*
After much thinking about it, I decided to check up on this again.
Looks like the project of theirs is more or less in a finished state (or pretty near). Some additions may be made later etc. Okay I'm good with that.
So. I've downloaded this now, preparatory to re-installing ME1 and ME2.
Anyone know where I can find a good used copy of ME3? Preferably the deluxe digital with the "from Ashes" as part of it, I think so I don't have to download Javik's stuff separately.
No rush. It'll be a long while before I get around to ME3 still. I need to re-familiarize myself with the first two games again.
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Not sure, myself. But you definitely want "From Ashes." There's really no question that those missions are necessary to get the most out of the game. Plus, Prothean beam-spam rifle. 'Nuff said...
If you decide you like it, I'd recommend the other mission DLC. Citadel gives you an apartment, and adds a lot of relationship work between LI's, which is nice. Omega is another blast through the Omega space station, this time blowing away Cerberus occupying forces in order to reclaim the fortress for Aria. And Leviathan deals with a renegade Reaper and fills in a lot more backstory.
I've just finished playing ME1 through with a new character, and I'm starting ME2 now. I figure I'll have that character ready in a month or so for ME3. So by then, I'll have had a chance to see if the MEHEM mod has been tweaked at all for the Citadel DLC, or if it wasn't necessary (current scuttlebutt says it doesn't change any of the endgame flags.) So that should be good.
It's odd that the fan-mod is necessary to deliver on the promise this game had, considering how much promise it had going into the third game. But at this point, I'm just glad someone made it.
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Yeah. I figure since Citadel DLC is the final one, that I can and will just get all of the DLC downloaded in one go before I even start with ME3. Even the EC, just for completeness sake and because I -think- some other scenes other than the post beam game are also modified by the EC as well. And I don't want to miss that either.
And because I MIGHT want to play one playthrough with the official "endings" with the EC and see how it goes.
While we're at it, what do I have to do in order to wall off/sandbox/disable/neuter Origin?
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So, I went and found the ending mod on Youtube. Uh-huh. You guys know how we pretty much completely disagree on the ending? Yeah. I think we're gonna do the same here. Citadel starts to fire, reinforcements appear out of nowhere, they magically save Shepard and everyone lives happily ever after. I'm all for happy endings, but this? Meh.
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Not sure if what you saw was the final version or not. I don't recall it being quite that simplistic.
In any case - no Starchild = 100% better no matter what.
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I'm not entirely sure about this, but I don't think you can get a "used" copy. As far as I know, each and every copy of ME3 is irrevocably bound to a single Origin account. So I don't think you'll be able to get one that isn't new. As for Origin, if you really want to be paranoid about it, set yourself up a separate partition, install some VMware, and battle your heart out to make things work in a relatively safe virtual environment. Personally, telling it to not start up automatically is enough for me. No matter what you do, though, you will need to have it installed and running to play ME3.
As far as unofficial endings go, I prefer this one:
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The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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There's reams of analyses about why the ME3 stock endings are a horrible bit of bad storytelling, so I won't go into it all here. Suffice to say, if you really want to read/watch those reasons, you can find them without too much trouble on Youtube, or various other sites.
What made me hate the stock endings was the simple fact that in all 3 games, it's all about how you're going to save everyone by getting all the races to set aside their differences, pull together, and defeat a seemingly unstoppable alien you can neither understand, nor reason with.
And in the last five minutes of the last game, you're presented with endings which collectively prove that you could have blown off the whole trilogy, let all the races fall apart, ignore Saren's meddling, and allow the Geth and Quarians to blow each other away in a pointless genocidal war. You get to push one of three buttons, and that ends the game. Oh, and you die no matter what.
(spends several more minutes trying to add to that.) Nope, I've got nothing else. That just totally sums up why I can't play this game without the MEHEM mod.
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What he said. Or, to put it another way. Me, Dragonflight, and many others simply can not deal with the official endings as presented. And that's all there is to it. It's just a simple fact. In one of the other threads on this topic (locked now, for good reason, by Bob) we were admonished at one point - "Hey, if you don't like the endings, make up your own." Well this is about as close to "making up your own" and having it put into the game as we're likely to get. From what I can tell it's so close to what I wanted as to make no difference. It doesn't put anyone else out who likes the official endings. You like those, go with it. It IS all about choice in the end, right?Well this is ours. Look at it as a win-win all around. You get what you want, we get what we want. And you MIGHT even get me to play the multi-player at some point. What's not to like?
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Quote:Ankhani wrote:
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I don't think you can get a "used" copy. As far as I know, each and every copy of ME3 is irrevocably bound to a single Origin account. So I don't think you'll be able to get one that isn't new. As for Origin, if you really want to be paranoid about it, set yourself up a separate partition, install some VMware, and battle your heart out to make things work in a relatively safe virtual environment. Personally, telling it to not start up automatically is enough for me. No matter what you do, though, you will need to have it installed and running to play ME3.
I seem to recall you could get a used copy, but you'd have to do a separate Origin registration at the website to create a new account. I'm okay with that.
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I've found a screenshot of this "happier" ending...
03-14-2013, 01:20 AM
![[Image: 6ae261e18e4d3a9f09cef10e1a8403e24dfc3dcf.jpg]](http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumimportfiles/6ae261e18e4d3a9f09cef10e1a8403e24dfc3dcf.jpg)
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Well this and the Citadel may actually get me to play ME3.....once I actually go through the Omega 4 relay & finish ME2 first. Just one problem, I've forgot just what releases I've got & where I'm up too in each.
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Heh. A few hints about ME2...
Don't do the Legion mission until you're ready to commit to the ending. Once you get Legion on your crew, you have enough time to do his loyalty mission, then hit the Omega 4 relay. If you don't immediately go to the relay after you get Legion and do his mission, you start failing things.
Earn everyone's loyalties before doing the Omega 4 missions. You can tell they're loyal because of the glowing circle under each of them. If there's a circle missing, do their mission before you go get Legion. (You get Legion when you go investigate the derelict Reaper for its IFF. Don't do that mission until you've done the rest except for Legion. For the best ending, once you do the Reaper IFF mission, you're pretty much locked into the end-game sequence.)
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Also - if you've done a member's loyalty mission, they'll have an alternate costume option open up. Even if you haven't bought any "alt-costume" DLC, the basic game has this.
Interestingly enough, though the alt costumes individually don't seem all that different from the base outfits in many cases (with a couple of notable exceptions like Miranda's loyalty outfit being all black with yellow piping where her normal suit is mostly white) if you get all the loyalty missions and then have your team in the line-up window all in their loyalty costumes, the overall effect is that of a UNIT of people rather than that of a group of disparate mercs. It's one of the reasons I started changing my ME2 Sheps armor from the standard red stripe N7 colors to using the angled stripe alternate style about midway through their respective playthroughs. Blue with gold stripes for my Vanguard, Black with Gold for my soldier. It seems to fit in with the other squad members once I have their loyalty missions done.
There are only two alt/loyalty costumes I don't really like. One is Legion's. Having a white/chrome geth with a red eye just looks wrong to me. (But I can understand why they might've done that - if you take him in up against other geth (like, say, in the Overlord DLC) it really does help distinguish him so that you don't shoot at HIM.)
The other is Kasumi's. Her normal outfit colors make a lot of sense. Changing her costume from all black to largely crimson red??? Er... As a stealth based character in a (Mostly) realistic and believable universe, I have a slight problem with putting her in a "Yoohoo! Over here in the BRIGHT RED OH SHOOT ME NOW" outfit! 
On the other hand, maybe she's just that damn good.
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