If you pick the evil ending in BG3 you get a 2 minute (or even shorter) cinematic that's the same for every playthrough and that it's it. If you choose the good ending you get the cinematic showing the city being saved which is also the same for every playthrough PLUS you get one or two lines from a select few companions. But this isn't really the saving grace you think it is. The flaw of ME3's ending wasn't that there's no slideshow or banter adding a bit of context to the state of the galaxy with your red/blue/green ending - after all, they added that to the game's extended cut on and the endings still sucked. The fundamental flaw was that with the way the Mass Effect series handled player choices people expected the culmination of that series to be a tapestry of those choices. But none of your actions leading up to the ending actually affect it. No matter what you did, you would end up in the same spot choosing A/B/C. With BG3 it's exactly the same. The issue with both games is that your prior choices come to nothing and get supplanted with a choice that's the same for everyone. I'd argue BG3's ending is even worse because they don't bother properly setting up the stakes for it until it's already there but that's a different issue.
Disagree again.
Spoilers for ME3:
There was a whole bunch of narrative problems with the ending to ME3 that we don’t have here. Your whole goal until that point was destroying the reapers, but that is suddenly presented as the worst choice. Controlling them was the plan of a space Nazi who is no longer in control of themselves, but that option now looks more reasonable. The third option was just a bit weird. All that came out of the blue, they weren’t options you were working towards during the game or even considered until then. You don’t fight to seize the power for these outcomes, there was no climatic show down. The game’s big bad, who is totally winning at this point, just turns up, gives up on what they’ve been doing for millions of years and leaves everything up to your tiny meat brain (because you’re so awesome, I guess). None of which made sense. Then there’s what was actually shown in the cutscene. Whatever you chose, the mass relay network was shown to be destroyed. That made all your decisions pointless, because galactic civilization depended on them, so whatever alliances you made or peace you brokered would be moot, whatever the ending. And if your crew survived they were likely stranded on some alien planet. Bioware tweaked some of that, but the whole thing was still very jarring. There’s good reason it got such a backlash.
BG3 is very different. The game makes it clear that taking the power for yourself would be bad news for everyone else. It’s hardly surprising if taking this option trumps decisions like whether you saved a few refugees along the way. Maybe that your plan all along, maybe you did a last minute heel turn, either way you should have an idea of what a massive deal that is.
If not, the decisions you made up until that point mattered. Some of the those decisions are reflected in the final scenes where characters talk about what’s next for them. Others aren’t shown, but that doesn’t change what you did in the game.
I’d be fully up for them expanding on how it plays out at the end, but it’s nothing like the ME3 mess. I was pretty satisfied with the end I got for my good playthrough.
