For nine years, I sort of avoided finding out how Mass Effect 3 ends.

It didn’t start out as something that I tried make. It just happened. It was in 2012. I had reached the point Mass effect 3 where I felt like I was one or two ends of the grand finale. Then, for various reasons, I quit. It has been almost a decade since. Somehow, despite the endlessly expanding spoiler galaxy that is the Internet, I still don’t know how the first Mass Effect the trilogy ends.

It’s not that I didn’t like Mass effect 3. I did! It was a sequel to my favorite dating game about dating cool aliens, Mass effect 2, which in turn was a sequel to my favorite game about spending time with cool aliens in bad cars and worse elevators, Mass effect 1. But when I realize the end is near in games where the central appeal cools off with the buds of the worlds beyond, I tend to pump the brakes. I don’t want the games (or the books, the TV shows, or whatever) to be over, so I leave them in what I perceive to be a state of perfect stasis. Anything can still happen, forever. It doesn’t matter if it means I’m missing out on any real time I could spend with the characters; brains are not rational things.

Obviously, I know Controversy. It played a role in my slow quitting the game. I had heard that the ending was bad, or at least unsatisfying, and I didn’t want the last-second shenanigans to weigh on a multi-game experience I would have. rather well liked otherwise. But also, that was all everyone was talking about back then, and I just got sick of hearing about it Mass Effect in general. Whether the ending was bad or not, it was disheartening to see thousands of people screaming in heartbreaking unison for a studio to reverse their artistic choices. It was obvious that the whole event was setting the stage for even uglier things to come – for him to become Just Another Day In Video Games whenever a roving herd of self-proclaimed “fans” harassed and harassed the developers, say. , edit some butt shots that were in hindsight misguided, on their own. I didn’t want this to remind me more than I should, so I hit pause on my Mass Effect playthrough.

I initially avoided spoilers because I genuinely believed I would finish the game in a few weeks or months. Then a year passed. Then one year became two years and two years became five. By the sixth or seventh year, it had become a sort of personal challenge to see how long I could avoid knowing the details of this thing, which had somehow become irrelevant despite its terrifying importance to one of the first Internet crowds loud enough to make history. . The moment has already happened, and it would have set a miserable precedent no matter what people did with electronic riots. During this time, I didn’t feel much for my particular permutation of the Mass Effect cast more. It had been years, after all.

It was surprisingly easy … not to find out. I made a point of avoiding articles and videos that specifically mentioned Mass effect 3The end, but otherwise I didn’t really do my best to avoid spoilers. I have read many articles on Mass Effect it wasn’t about the ending – including wild, unruly commentary sections where anyone could have pounced on me, wild fury in their eyes and recite every line of the final scene word for word. But that never happened. Here’s what I know: There are three versions of the ending. They are color coded for some reason. Each has a name that probably reveals something about it, but I forgot them.

I admit that in writing this article I have probably doomed myself. Someone on Twitter will try to ruin the ending for me, and they will probably succeed. It will be a disappointment, because the Mass Effect remaster rekindled my interest in reaching the end for myself. But at the same time, I spent nine years not knowing; I will live whether I find out or not.

Like I said earlier, the reason I play these games is to hang out with characters that I love. In time since Mass Effect 3’s unwittingly ending up blowing up an anthill, the characters in the game have – to a greater extent even than they did at the time – taken life on their own and escaped the notion of ‘cannon’ which contained them. Mountains of fan art, fan fiction, and talk mean I could live a thousand lives with them if I wanted to. No end can invalidate that, nor ever would. Endings are only suggestions. They tell you it might be time to move on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come back later.

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