It's definitely the best outcome. Maybe I'm just biased in thinking that it's harder than it really is to get, because I didn't get it myself. And I feel like I should have. I maxed out my reputation-boosting talent before anything else, chose Paragon for every option, wandered around the citadel and my ship between every (every) mission talking to people and doing the sidequests, scanning planets, etc. I also rescued the Quarian general and did everything else that seemed relevant, too, before the main mission. And all I got was "Geth or Quarian?" I even re-loaded to make sure I hadn't missed an option. No luck. Maybe I missed some tiny little thing, but my guess is that you have to have imported an ME2 save get the option. And it seems unlikely that most players still have that save. But who knows, maybe they do.




From the very beginning everyone was certain that they couldn't beat the reapers in a conventional war. If the hammer failed, then everyone would have known that was it. Including Hackett. He likely stayed because there was nothing else to do; he couldn't abandon the fleets he was in charge of, and there was really no escape at that point. I suppose fleeing is out of character for Garrus, Tali, etc, but you can find motivations if you want to. For example, maybe they were planning to go seed Crucible plans on as many worlds as they could before their cycle was wiped out. Or maybe they were going to warn other planet / habitats to flee. That kind of thing.

As for the time issue, doesn't Shepard black out after his near-miss with the beam? That might have added some off-screen time. Even if not, the Normandy was likely hanging around near the surface waiting to evac Shepard and co, and there were probably a bunch of shuttles left from the hammer forces that dropped. So Garrus and friends see the Reaper drop, see it start laying waste to everything, realize that all is lost, retreat to a shuttle, rendezvous with the Normandy and hit the big red "FTL" button.

Anyway. It does take some explaining and might be unlikely, but it does seem possible and as long as that's true, it doesn't feel like a "plot hole" to me.




Yeah, that's true. They did have those weird dream sequences throughout the game, but probably not enough mysteriousness to justify the ending.