If you merge, you essentially force all life everywhere to either take on organic components or synthetic components. Mass Effect 2 did something really interesting with its conclusion. In the climax of the game, any member of your squad and even the protagonist, Shepard, could permanently die. In order to prevent this outcome, you needed to do loyalty missions throughout the game and then make sensible choices at the climax.
Essentially, Mass Effect 2 , more than the first game, was built around character relationships so that by the time the game ended, you were invested in every single supporting character. For example, on my first attempt at the final mission, I lost Thane, so I replayed it to find a way to save him and succeeded! Finally, there's always men like Saren and The Illusive Man meddling with forces they can't control, regardless of the consequences.
With so many examples of how organics doom themselves throughout the series, it makes a kind of callous sense why the Reapers think of themselves as necessary. To immortal machines, concerned with incomprehensible stretches of time, organics are noisy children playing with fire, inevitably threatening to burn down the forest through sheer ignorance. In this regard, limiting the player's choice and forcing them to gaze into eternity's abyss could have been one of the most frightening and meaningful moments in the entire series.
The problem is that it's poorly-conveyed. The Catalyst frames these ideas as a conflict between organics and synthetics, but Shepard can frequently deny this.
The artificial intelligence EDI has been a major ally since the second game, and Shepard can end an eons-long war between the organic quarians and their robotic geth adversaries. If the Catalyst had chosen its words more carefully, perhaps its ideas wouldn't have been rejected. Instead of developing these themes, however, the Extended Cut and all subsequent DLCs focused on the lore. Extra dialogue choices were added, letting Shepard better understand the Catalyst, and the Reapers had their entire backstory revealed in the Leviathan DLC.
The problem with these stories, though, is that their explanations kill the mystery of the Reapers. The revelations reduce them to a series of glitchy programs, undermining the immortal, totalitarian menace they imposed on the galaxy. BioWare would eventually fulfill that pivot. Three months after the backlash, Mass Effect 3 earned an airbrushing in the form of an "Extended Cut," which sanded away some of the chief complaints.
The Mass Relays survived, as did many of Shepard's crew mates. If you played your cards right, there is a chance the Normandy blasts off from the planet it crash-landed on in the epilogue, offering palliative care to the many bereaved hearts in the pickled gamer symposium. Once upon a time, it wasn't possible to retcon on the fly. George Lucas waited decades before he had the chance to smooth over the loose ends in the first Star Wars trilogy, but this nascent generation of gamers correctly predicted that with the dawn of live games and constant DLC maintenance, they could put the screws to BioWare and demand the gratification they wanted.
It worked, and the industry hasn't been the same since. Joshua Rivera published a good take on this at the end of for Kotaku. He noted that "player choice" is a bit of an oxymoron. It doesn't matter how much rope a studio concedes to the player over the course of a game story; the director at the far end of the table still holds all the cards. A franchise that emphasized choice so much that when its final act made a decision players did not care for, they chose not only to reject it but to demand it be changed.
In that sense, perhaps Mass Effect was doomed from the start. All of the rent accrued over the trilogy—the incisive conversations with suspicious crew members, the emotional devastation during its fork-in-the-road moments, the ownership that BioWare claimed to offer its players—finally came due.
The company needed to end the trilogy and thread the needle. It failed, and there was hell to pay. I also think the ending is talked up too much over the rest of Mass Effect 3, which was an incredible game before that point.
The game was made better with the altered ending and the Citadel DLC, and represents a collaborative process that is a lot more common in gaming nowadays. Citadel was just a missing moment that should have been there in the first place. And fundamentally, the endings of the game never actually changed.
They were just explained better. So yes, I think it was a good thing that pushback drove BioWare to create that. Abuse is never warranted. But criticism can be reasonable and justified and games can be improved because of it.
Mass Effect 3 was indeed improved by criticism in the end, though the path to get there was uncomfortable, to say the least.
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