User blog comment:The Milkman/Extended Expectations/@comment-99.251.227.190-20120704092928

At risk of tooting my own horn, when I heard everyone back in March freaking out over the "unanswered questions" left by the endings I thought "it isn't that complicated, can't these guys between the lines or use their imaginations?"

To me it seemed completely natural and so I assumed that after Harbinger's strike, Shepard pressed on and the squadmates-- having also survived but being in no shape to press onward-- were evacuated by the Normandy. And It seemed completely natural and so I assumed that, either a) during that pick-up the Normandy picked up a Reaper pursuer; or b) afterwards, as the Crucible was gearing up to fire, Hackett ordered the fleets to withdraw to an assumed safe distance; and that one of those was the reason Normandy was leaving the fight.

So along comes the EC and sure enough-- Normandy evacuated your injured squadmates, and was then ordered out of the immediate area as fast as she could run in anticipation of the Crucible firing-- and while it clearly hasn't placated everybody, the ones it has seem to be saying "oh, well, that clears up the bits that were really bugging me." So if some of us were satisfied (if saddened) with the original endings because we could interpret those details, and others were furious over them and demanded some kind of correction, and if that correction turned out to be pretty dead-on what the minority of us could figure out without the delivery on a silver platter, then who was *really* implicated in the dissatisfaction toward the original endings? The studio people who made it clear enough for some attentive players to infer, or the complainers who apparently needed it spelled out for them? :-P