There were no full cutscenes, but there were a few new lines of dialogue (mainly attempts to address the dropped dark energy foreshadowing).
^ Thanks, good to know. I did appreciate the video logs explaining what happened to Shepard during his 2 years where he was mostly dead. Wasn't sure if that was new or original, but it sounds like it was originally there.
What, whoa, really? I had no idea, ATimson. Are you... certain? I only ask because I lurk BSN (actually, I post there sometimes, but I often find myself wondering why these days...) and I hadn't seen any mention of that. If you'd be so kind as to PM me with details or put a spoiler tag or... something, I would be in your debt!
Yeah, I noticed nothing during the Cerberus mission and I've not seen anyone find any proof of anything new during that mission. The wiki article (don't read that, Ood) has a list of all the additions and doesn't mention any new dialogue during that mission. It's possible that there's new content there but I've never seen anyone prove it.
I imagine they intentionally left a gap to A) Give you a reason to start a game+ (and get your weapons upgraded to lv10) & B) To allow for future plot based DLC. IIRC, before the story based DLC for ME2 came out, you couldn't get much past lv27 on your first game. Even less if you didn't have the Zaeed or Normandy DLC at launch. I could be wrong though.
Hmm. I may have to play through again, and look up the lines. It's possible that maybe I just wasn't remembering something that had been in place beforehand, and thought it was new.
Ok, made it back to where I was. Barring an unexpected change of plans, I should start the Earth mission tomorrow night and finish the game within a few hours of that. I'm looking forward to it. And then I can finally read all the spoilers!
Well, I finished it! That last mission was a doozy, the "everything but the kitchen sink" there was really tough to get through. Took me a while to realize there was a heavy weapon to take out one of the Banshees. Loved the speech by Hackett at the start of the mission. The end kind of surprised me. Honestly I'm pretty happy with it, I was afraid by all the negative reaction that the Reapers were going to win or something. Glad to see Shepard made a difference. And I am bummed about Anderson. I picked the ending where he jumps into the beam and now the Reapers are good and everyone has green eyes. Actually I'm still watching it, because about 15 minutes into it, I got a nasty disc read error and had to restart the ending. I may post again with my final thoughts on the complete ending.
Looks like my disc is bad, so I watched the rest of the ending on YouTube. I only missed the last two minutes or so. Didn't like zombie illusive man, kind of a lame way to go out for him. Overall I'm satisfied with the ending but not super jazzed about it. Definitely the weakest ending of the three games.
No kidding. I tried it 3 times - after the second failure in the exact same spot, I took it out and wiped the disc with a cloth (as it suggested on screen) but to no effect - it stopped in the exact same spot every time. I'm just glad I left a save point right before the "point of no return" so that I can play any future DLC. What I don't get is that the point it breaks appears to be in the Extended Cut scene - so why should it get a disc read error when the content ought to be on the memory unit?
You are the worst kind of person. It's better than the original plan for him, which was to turn him into some form of super-brute as the final boss battle. His final scene certainly wasn't his best, but at least he went out the way he lived, in a philosophical debate. Did you consider that the game was trying to stop you from picking the hokey synthesis ending? In case you haven't seen them yet, here's the original RGB endings. [yt]v=qjoorZo1IlE[/yt] Victorious and uplifting, no?
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I'll take ME3's endings over ME1's and ME2's. Not vanilla, mind you, but with Extended Cut. ME1's was basically a few short minutes where you choose a councilor (that doesn't even particularly impact later games, but to be fair, that isn't ME1's fault) and then Shepard says like two lines about stopping Reapers, we're treated to a cheesy-looking cutout-looking... Shepard... thing... and then the Normandy takes off. ME2's is nicer, with Shepard telling The Illusive Man off somewhat, and a few (but certainly not all, geez) of your surviving crew members nodding to you and stuff, and then that last, haunting image of the Reaper fleet approaching. But really, both were skimpy on content, and so I begrudgingly stepped into ME3 expecting more of the same. When the vanilla endings leaked, I was one of those (un)lucky couple of dozen individuals on BSN's spoilers-only group who knew shit was going to hit fans like never before, and to a point I felt the same. Even beyond my quibbles with ME1's and ME2's endings being so abrupt and relative-to-the-rest-of-the-games lackluster, this was bad. Really bad. But with Extended Cut, well, hell. I'll never in a million years argue it's perfect, but the sense of genuine closure and the fact that the whole sequence is longer than just a few quick jogging minutes (which all three games had issues with) really seals the deal for me. I'd give the endings 7s, 8s and maybe even a 9 for one of them, whereas before they were all 3s. Good show, EC. Good show. At any rate, glad you enjoyed the gmes, Ood.
I think most people forgive the endings of ME1 & 2 for their brevity because there was the promise of more to come. Not a "The End" so much as a "To Be Concluded." With ME3, the fans rightfully expected a full and complete pay off, not just for ME3 in and of itself but for the *entire* trilogy. So the way I see it, the first two games' endings were appropriate and satisfactory. Indeed, the bit where you don't pick Udina (seriously, who did that?) isn't really an ending so much as a denouement/epilogue. The game "ends" when that hoppy jumpy Saren husk thing is killed and Sovereign is destroyed. It was the stated goal of the game from the get-go. The bit that comes after is just a reminder that there's more to come. Same deal with ME2. The game ends when the Collector base is destroyed/fried and you get an extra bit when you get to tell TIM to go jump in a fusion reactor, plus *another* reminder the there's *still* more to come. All we got with the original endings was: pick a colour>relays blow up>Normandy crashes>roll credits. Say what you will about the first two games, at least the plots are resolved. Those last five minutes of ME3 introduced so many problems, plot holes and utter confusion, the mind just boggles at how they thought it would pass muster. Ood: Have you checked out the original ending yet? I ask because I don't know if you're aware, but that bit where your squad get picked up as you're running for the beam is where the EC starts. Yeah, in the original ending, they just magically teleported aboard the ship without any explanation. Nor were we given any idea how or why the Normandy was in FTL during the finale.
They didn't. Which is why Bioware asked for more time when they knew they were going to miss the fall 2011 deadline. They asked EA for 6 more months to finish the game. They got 3. The ending still came after 6 months, but came with a wave of nerd rage that won't subside for years. I would hope that EA would give Bioware much more latitude with Mass Effect 4, but I have a feeling they're more likely to clamp down on content instead. We'll know if there's a wave of departures once the DLC is done. If there is, then Bioware is probably already dead. If everyone sticks around (aside from the usual churn), then there's hope. Though, at bare minimum, I hope they don't go MMO next round. MMO's are always about grinding for the next thing, and that cheapens the story.
I didn't at first, but ever since the books - and now ME3 - canonized Udina as the Councilor I've run with that.