User blog comment:The Milkman/No Love For Leviathan?/@comment-4237253-20120917050559/@comment-4237253-20120919000947

Even if they were worthy of condesencion, you should be above it. There's no excuse for it. Simple as that.

More than two doesn't mean several, and better does not mean good. I never said Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 had perfect endings with various outcomes. However, those two games had to tie into the sequel, and Mass Effect 3 did not. It had more liberties with its epilogue, yet games like Heavy Rain and Silent Hill: Downpour had more endings each with more wildly different conclusions.

It's not up to the player to decide what is and is not a conflict. All of your choices address it in some way. You must take the Catalyst's options, or you just die. The Catalyst forces you to make one of those three decisions, and they all approach the conflict in different ways. Synthesis allows synthetics to "understand" organics (which somehow makes war impossible, I guess). This solves both conflicts. Destroy removes synthetics, meaning there won't be any synthetic life to wipe out the organic ones. This doesn't guarantee the "Synthetics vs. Organics" problem will go away, but it has been dealt with, and for now, the conflict is resolved. Again, both conflicts are resolved. No matter what, the Catalyst's problem is still involved, and the fact that it was brought up at all is the problem. It's a new goal. BioWare did something similar with Dragon Age II; they had three separate acts with no real central goal or conflict. Everything was jumbled up and not at all enticing.

The fate of the council and the Illusive Man's alternative to destruction were not central conflicts. They were not themes. The idea that organic life will reach an apex culminating in self-annihilation however, is a theme. Is it a good theme? No. It's a great one. It's seen a lot in science-fiction, actually. It's too bad the creators of Mass Effect didn't think ahead enough to fully explore that theme.