octavius
Nope,Shepard dies no matter what. You can be the best Shepard in the world, have friends with whole galaxy and he/she dies almost the same way as horrbile Shepard from hell.
Thats why all this major butthurt.
But are they butthurt for the right reason?
Are they butthurt because they have no control or because it leads to a sad cutscene?
They are mostly butthurt because Shepard dies and there's no ending slides/videos telling what happened to the galaxy..not because the ending makes no sense at all.
Actually to be honest, the indoctrination theory would be a pretty good Biowarean mindfuck coming as it does from a company incapable of any subtlety. I certainly raged at the pure shittiness of the endings, how nothing was resolved; shit you didn't even really knew what exactly was happening apart from seeing the Earth in various stages of destruction and your crew having 'Robo eyes' when leaving the Normandy. Even though indoctrination is obvious when one thinks more than 30 seconds; James going on from the start about the hum on the Normandy and the way Cerberus always gets to where you're going before you(which at first seems pretty 'cheap' until you think that there is a reaper beacon on board somewhere), the beauty of it is that you expect Bioware to make everything at face value and when they don't it's actually pretty cool for a few minutes.
The ending is so fucked that only indoctrination makes sense, otherwise:
Why would the reapers take the form of the kid if they weren't in his head?
How did a magical space ray turn everyone into into cyborgs?
Why did the reapers wait for Shepard to jump into the magic beam instead of just putting anyone over the last few millions of years into it if that's all it took? They needed the ultimate Deus Ex Machina in the form of Shep? Who'd give a shit?
Since he's the first organic to get that far, wasn't it nice for the giant squids to make consoles on the Citadel just for humans in advance along with a 'do not touch this button' console that would destroy them?
Why was the Normandy going through a mass relay and how did my squad mates suddenly appear on board?
What happened to Shep's armor?
Not to mention the actual reasoning makes absolutely no sense at all, sounding like a bad meme:
YO DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE SYNTHETICS SO WE PUT SYNTHETICS BEFORE YOUR SYNTHETICS IN ORDER TO KILL YOU BEFORE THEY KILL YOU.
I now understand why Harbinger didn't explain anything and just hid behind the 'your brains cannot comprehend this hu-man' bullshit as the fucker had no clue himself or was embarrassed about the plot so much that he didn't want to say. Shit, we still don't know who built the reapers in the first place and why would they have been bothered about synthetics taking over when they did just that by building the reapers!
etc.etc.
Some Biotard picking up that the rubble when Shep gets up half dead is made up of Alenko/Williams' armor is also a neat thing by Bio and further hints at the hallucination/indoctrination theory even though I personally didn't understand why Shep would care about that fucker. I certainly didn't.
All this shows that Bo actually has had the indoctrination ending in place from the start and it's not just tacked on in a day.
Indoctrination as an ending itself isn't the problem; the problem is that it's the only ending it seems, all your work until that point counts for almost nothing.
What should have happened is have the indoctrination and depending on your Paragon/renegade score along with stuff you had discovered during the game(like buying stuff for Normandy in ME2 which helped crew survive)you could either see through or fight through the indoctrination and get another set of endings. Alternatively make the ending area like in STALKER where if you take a different route, you get a different ending. Perhaps you could get hints that a frontal assault is not the way to go and you take a roundabout route to the citadel, ignoring orders? I don't know, anything would be better that the 'open ending for DLC' that Bioware seems to be going for.
Buzz Aldrin farting some lines about 'the Shepard' and how his story may not be 'accurate'(hint hint, buy DLC to get the FULL PICTURE!) is just fucking pathetic.
As for the way of getting the endings I've never seen a company fuck up such a simple thing as tying endings to a point score system so totally, in that you cannot achieve maximum results no matter what in a basic SP walkthrough, but then you can get everything just by doing it again or playing MP which is just as bad. In both instances your efforts are essentially meaningless.
What should have happened is making the choices throughout the games a lot harder, more ambiguous, difficult to achieve. That way you can get the average and bad endings quite easily, good ending if you are really thorough and maybe a super secret uber good ending if you bust your arse off and do everything perfectly(like in those Jap games).
Even so the score thing is ironically a small measure of incline in ME in that your approach to quests throughout the series does have some impact on what endings you are allowed to see. Yes it's half-arsed and boils down to a numerical assessment of what you did in the past and is ultimately pointless as you can max out the war score in some way anyway but there it is. Too bad that both good and bad have pretty much the same endings at each readiness tier.
I know it's fun to laugh at Biofags and their collective howling, but objectively as a gamer it doesn't bode well for the future(as if we needed any more decline from the mainstream) as it's really starting to look like a deliberate policy to just shit out some half-arsed ending in the knowledge that people will end up buying a 'new and improved!' ending soon after. I wouldn't be surprised if Bio looked at Beth's Fallout 3, the reaction and response and thought...hey, we can have some of that. Like this they get feedback on what ending the majority would like, put it in as DLC, everyone buys it and suddenly with tears of joy in their eyes at their benevolent masters actually listening to them, they forgive Bio for everything.
of Hitler right there!