User blog comment:The Milkman/No Love For Leviathan?/@comment-5038903-20120916134142/@comment-24174486-20120919132728

"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."

Heavy Rain and the Silent Hill series do multiple endings in a different way than Mass Effect. I'm not saying that any specific way of doing multiple endings is bad, but it's a poor argument to say that a Mass Effect game shouldn't do multiple endings like a Mass Effect game does.

"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."

Calling your options "the Catalyst's options" ignores the fact that the Catalyst explicitly condemns one of them and explicitly supports another. If the Catalyst really came up with these solutions and only wanted you to support its goal, then why wouldn't it have not told you about Destroy or Control? After all, it introduces the Destroy option by saying that it knows Shepard has been thinking about destroying the Reapers. We cannot assume that each option is "you're only capable of doing this because the Catalyst lets you", especially when two major factions in the game sought to use the Crucible for two of its possible uses.

"Destroy removes synthetics, meaning there won't be any synthetic life to wipe out the organic ones."

Which is exactly why the Catalyst condemns Destroy. As it tells you, nothing stops future generations from making new synthetics. It makes it quite clear that it does not consider Destroy to be a solution to its problem.

Also, I can't help but to notice you didn't bother to address how Control affects the idea of organic/syntheic conflict... :3

The problem here is that you're adamant on seeing the Catalyst's problem as "this is what the creators wanted you to address". There's a simple reason that each of the choices are framed in how they address organic/synthetic conflict: the character who is telling you how to do each option exists for the purpose of focusing on preventing organic/synthetic conflict. You can heed its stance and take it into consideration when making your choice or you can disregard it. In the end, the Catalyst is simply a character who is telling you what it thinks you should do with the Crucible and why you shouldn't do what the other sides are advocating—just like Anderson and the Illusive Man did.