That's ....an interesting read. This is fun. Advance apologies if this makes less cohesive sense than it could: it's been written in five minute gaps across two days.
Some gaping holes in bioware-logic seem to be
"All synthetic life eventually destroys its creators"
....in that case, where the fuck IS all this synthetic life? Synthetic life (if we're viewing the ME universe way) has almost none of the restrictions organic life is beholden to: life viewed this way is essentially 'information'. Organic life can only store this information in lossy, redundant, analog consensus-threshold squishy stuff. If you can't keep the squishy stuff alive while you move it from A to B, then sorry folks: you ain't going to B.
If you look at the geth as an example, they're purely digital. They're programs. As individuals, they're probably only marginally more complicated than deus ex's scriptedpawn.uc (which explains their pathfinding
), but they develop emergent consciousness via "fucktons of programs interacting". They're like uber slimemolds.
(interesting side note being that EDI was very clearly stated to be NOT pure information: she was a kind of quantum superposition, and as such restricted to her bluebox quantum computer, with all aspects of her personality being inherent to that particular box of entangled whatevers. They never really followed this up, however)
The key thing is: they're not stuck in those silly bodies: they're digital. They're pure information. Information can go almost anywhere. All they need is a platform to run on, and that platform could be almost anything (they happily jump into quarian exosuits, for example). Personally, were that my species, and were I concerned with self-preservation (which they clearly are), I'd fire off a fuckton of probes in all directions. A probe could contain a tiny nuclear power source, a solar sail, some USB flash memory (:P) and some rudimentary self-replication facilities (something which seems fairly established in the ME universe, unless we're assuming geth have trucker fleets to deliver all those bunkers and stuff).
You fire those off, any planet they hit: BAM, geth planet. Extrasolar capture? Use the solar-sail to gather energy, self replicate yourself up to a dyson cloud: gethstar!...Fire off more probes.
It would be the work of moments (on a galactic timescale) to so
thoroughly colonise the galaxy (and ultimately, the universe, since you could fire probes at andromeda and stuff) that you'd be unshakable.
Also note: this isn't even something that requires you to murder your creators. How many planets can quarians live on? Squishy bodies, elf needs food badly, etc. How many planets can digital information survive on?
And as I recall, this was pretty much the geth's take on things: they basically just wanted to be left alone to
be. They didn't rebel so much as 'get shot repeatedly while asking "why?", until they figured out that shooting back improved their survival chances'. It was self-defence from the start, and if the quarians hadn't been such dicks about it, there really wasn't even an issue.
So where was I?
Oh right: all synthetic life eventually etc etc.
So, assuming this stuff happened back in the "way back when", how did all this aggressive synthetic life get snuffed out? It's relatively easy to straight-up kill organic life. Even tardigrades (our own planet's most delightfully indestructible organism) have their limits. Plus complexity goes hand in hand with damage-sensitivity: tardigrades are never going to build spaceships, whereas we can...but we can also be killed vastly more easily.
But how would you kill a dyson cloud? Worse, a self-aware dyson cloud that DOES NOT WANT TO BE KILLED? It'd be like smashing bacteria with a hammer. You may kill billions, but in so doing you've spread the rest around....and they're self-replicating, so really you've made the problem worse.
So there's that.
Secondly, is "murdering (sorry: 'collecting') all your thrall races when they start making synthetics" really the best way to stop bad things happening to your thrall races? Seriously? That was the best solution they could conceive? That's like decapitating your children when they start playing near the road: sure you stop them inadvertantly hurting themselves by vehicular accident, but you've done so by fucking killing them. Would it not be easier to actually use your magical enthralling power to
stop them making synthetics? Crazy, I know. All the leviathan backstory adds to it is "Yep, reapers are dumb as tits. But SO WERE THEIR CREATORS!"...well, great. Glad we cleared that up.
It seems ludicrous to have a race of giant machines (which the reapers essentially are -they're clearly synthetic, as evidenced by susceptibility to RED SPACE MAGIC) going around murdering EVERYTHING, for the stated purpose of "stopping people being murdered by other machines, maybe. No srsly it's happened a lot." The reaper origin is just silly when phrased that way.
Hell, when you point this out to ghostbaby, he calmly informs you that the reapers don't really even
want to be fighting, they'd much rather just quietly get on with their murderation.
It's not a program gone crazy, it's a cult. A dumb, stupid nonsensical belief that melting people down to make more reapers is the RIGHT thing to do. It's the giant robot space-louse equivalent of burning pagans to save their souls. It's utterly stupid, but that doesn't matter if that's what they genuinely believe. And hell, once you get into belief systems then "core programming" and "religion" are just semantics.
This would actually have been an almost half-decent hook to hang the story on, if it'd been introduced as such, and introduced considerably earlier than two minutes before the end. Especially if you could have conversations with reapers where they merrily trot out the party line while
not quite hinting that "no, no they don't want to be reapers, they remember being melted down and they absolutely hated it". Make them essentially indoctrinated...by themselves. You could almost make them sympathetic characters that way.
They just set the reapers up to be following some "deeper purpose than a mere person could comprehend", when really they're just following a flat quasi-religious imperative that is also fucking dumb as hell. They don't act as repositories of previous races, because absolutely nothing of any note from previous races survives reaperification, other than "MOAR REAPERS LOL". Hell, apart from the ludicrous robot skeleton "human reaper" that was never adequately explained, they don't even look like their respective race: they all look like space-lice.
They could've picked so many different arcs for the reapers' underlying purpose, and the "we're stopping you inevitably fighting the geth/insert eventual synthetic race of choice" is one of the dumbest, stupidest, left-field wacko arc to suddenly spring on you. ESPECIALLY since many players will have managed to secure peace between the geth and quarians by that point, and ALL players will be pootling around in a ship that IS a synthetic lifeform. There is essentially zero evidence of the reapers' claim that such conflicts are inevitable, save that evidence demonstrated by the reapers themselves. They're melting you down to stop you from being melted down, basically.
"SYNTHETIC LIFE WILL ALWAYS BE DICKS"
"Where's your evidence for that?"
"WELL,
WE ARE. HOW MUCH MORE DO YOU NEED?"
Reapers could've been doing exactly the same thing but purely as a form of replication, for instance: they need to harvest advanced life to breed. It's a bit stupid, but still: it removes the stupid "HAY YOU SHOULD BE THANKING US FOR MELTING YOU. WE'RE DOIN YOU A FAVOUR" element and becomes just "WE ARE THE ULTIMATE FORM OF LIFE. WE ARE KNOWLEDGE. WE ARE FOREVER. YOU WILL BECOME US." They could even shoe in something like a desire to take only the strongest, bestest species for their new reaper babies, which would explain the otherwise inexplicable gross amount of conflict they provoke.
Or maybe they were like..giant space spartans, returning periodically to test themselves against the best the galaxy can muster, thinning their own herd of weaker reapers, hoovering up the best opponents to make stronger reapers.
It's just impossible to reconcile their apparent desire to "save" species from hypothetical disaster (and ghostbaby's claim that they don't want conflict), with the utterly abhorrent way they go about it. They're not even simply "uncaring", they're
actively dickish. They go out of their way to inflict pain and horror. Husks and cannibals and marauders are all purposely intended to be things of revulsion. They don't want people to go "very well, I shall allow myself to become a reaper", they quite clearly want people to go "O GOD O GOD WHAT THE FUUUU" and fight back with everything they have. And bear in mind it's also demonstrated that they DO have the power to make people go quietly: they claim to be patient, but it's pretty obvious that if they were a tad MORE patient they could take the whole galaxy without a shot being fired. Ergo: they either fucking
like doing this, or the fighting is somehow integral to the process. Neither of these are explained by the "saving you from synthetic wars" story.
Also, while I'm on the subject: the mass relays simply serve to enhance galactic travel, driving technological advancement and inter-species mixing, things that are wholly counter to everything the reapers desire:
"WE MUST PREVENT THE SAPIENT ORGANICS BEING EXTINGUISHED BY THEIR SYNTHETICS"
"LET US BUILD A GIANT SPACE TRAVEL NETWORK TO ACCELERATE ORGANIC TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT"
"GENIUS"
It's made clear that the reapers can travel faster than everyone else WITHOUT relays, so all the relays do is reduce downtime between galactic reapings by helping organics spread and develop, and remove one of the reapers' competitive advantages.
Nothing really fits together, essentially, unless ghostbaby is made of lies and candyfloss, in which case the fourth ending is the only real one.
It's a classic case of "less is more": even if they'd left it ambiguous, it would've been more satisfying than revealing...this steaming pile.
That would've been a great ending, really (which having now seen it, the ME happy ending mod almost is): Shepard/TIM kills TIM, then shep activates the crucible. Some sort of hum builds in the background while Shep and Anderson sit and have their little conversation, then lights start flashing and big ol' power conduits start zapping and you hear hackett on the radio shouting excited things about exploding reapers, but the sound has been slowly fading out and all this manic excitement and energy sorta just happens in the background. You get these two warriors, one old and tired, one old beyond his/her years and equally tired, and they finally get to..sit down. Shep and Anderson sit and look out the viewport at earth ("Hell of a view." "Best seats in the house.") and slowly slowly drift off to sleep/death...fade to black.
Crucible remains magic macguffin, reapers remain unexplained antagonist, but are ultimately defeated by space magic that you don't have to actually see. No silly ABC choices at all (hell, it worked for mass effect 1). Shepard dies....maybe. Could tie that into military strength I guess maybe, if you really wanted a denouement. Waking up in hospital surrounded by friends, or friends around a memorial. I'm not sure a denouement was really necessary, tbh.
Anyway: The end.
Ultimately though, they just needed to provide one non-shit ending. If you give people choice, they'll laud you for offering choice. If you give them a happy ending, they'll laud you for that.
If you give them a choice of endings, even if all of them are shit BUT one, they'll pick that good one, watch the shit ones on youtube, and laud you for fulfilling both of the above. But if you give them choice BUT ALL THE CHOICES ARE BAD, then ....lol shitstorm.
I suspect that if they'd left the ending at the literal "A, B or C?" walkway, people would still have been disappointed, but not anywhere NEAR the level they were when it became clear that
every way off the walkway was either depressing as hell, or random as fuck.