So which ending is the best for you? *spoilers*

[GOD OF WAR SANCHEZ]

I have taken a look at all of them and so far, the thing with this game. I fail to relate with any of the factions.

There is no good or evil, there are various sorts of dirts. All the factions feel like greedy thugs. Their ideology is only a cover up and pretense.

Monks are the worst among all, they are not even humans at this point. It makes sense that monks are end bosses in the game (last fights).

So for me, I feel like an ending to ♥♥♥♥ you all is the best, either to turn ship back if you feel good by yourself living on a ship or use the lander and go down first to avoid all the chaos on the ship.

[Morgian]

I used the lander option, but I think landing the whole ship would be the best. It ends the centuries of strife and deterioration in the metal hulk and fulfills the original mission. Well, the dice will have been rolled anyway and it is do or die on Proxima.

Turning back to earth would be the worst ending. It makes everything that happened pointless, and will probably doom the ship, which is more of a flying wreck by now.

[LDiCesare]

Monks may not be human, but I disagree with you. They are the ones who don't have a personal agenda and try to serve the others above anything else.
They are the only "good" faction in my book. If your only reason for disliking them is because their race is not the same as yours, I find that a quite weak argument.

[Myth Alric]

I feel like turning back the ship is what you do, to save the aliens on the planet. You are screwing over everyone on the ship but they might deserve it, and you are saving the aliens who are minding their own business. I personally wouldn't call that a 'good ending' but it is sort of poetic and people get what they deserve.

[William Shakesman]

That's part of the fun of it. It's got a variety of routes and people to fight. If you want to battle some half machine A/C technicians to have something tough to fight, that is an option available to you. The writers have actually written something here that has a lot of... I don't want to say political as that is a charged term, but very human questions, touching on the nature of people and what people will tend to do, and given you total freedom over the answers.

Originally posted by LDiCesare:

Monks may not be human, but I disagree with you. They are the ones who don't have a personal agenda and try to serve the others above anything else.
They are the only "good" faction in my book. If your only reason for disliking them is because their race is not the same as yours, I find that a quite weak argument.

Nobody doesn't have a personal agenda. At least nobody human. And I hardly think handing the reins over to people who are hardly human themselves and can only relate to the happenings on the ship with amused indifference is the obvious right call. A bunch of glorified A/C tech robots are not in a position to lord over humanity with their obsession with analyzing percentage chances and nothing else.

I mean most of them are still alive from back when the ship actually worked, The Protector guy is a little mean when he says it but he is absolutely 100% right. If they had cut life support to the mutineers before this got out of hand, they wouldn't be on a half destroyed floating wreck right now and probably more lives would have been saved in that one act of brutality than were lost since then.

[Hypnophage]

My main ending was siding with the Church and letting them prepare for a proper landing. All the descriptions seemed pretty positive. The Pit grew, Jonas wasn't too happy but also didn't die. Hydroponics were just fine. There was no massive war as the Church rapidly took over everyone. Most of the description was saying how the ship prepared well for landing, made Proxima green, etc. I don't mind some theocracy as it is fine to have something like that in a hostile environment. I'm sure it will eventually become a freer society just like all the other theocracies.

[kaneki stockholm syndrome]

Pilgrims of Terra ending while my diplomat character stays on the ship and keeps everyone on their best behaviour.

[Tingly]

It is disappointing that the factions don't even seem to follow their professed ideals on at least some basic level, really takes out the tension in choosing any of them.

I guess I am a hopeful type of person, but not willing to pin my hopes on the monks to be the perfectly impartial overseers they present themselves as. There is something of an oxymoron in trusting that the technology that's made them this way is...perfect, while they seem to have been sitting around unable to even start taking steps to breaking the Gordian knot that is the faction's struggle for dominance while the planet is literally right there. Depending on how I'm feeling from one moment to another, I might lean towards making the shipborn land immediately or turning the ship around.

[William Shakesman]

You gotta cut em some slack. The people only realized combat was turn based a few generations into the flight and once they saw they were in an RPG they had to scramble to form factions because you can't have an RPG without factions.

I think turning the ship around is a very understandable step when you see what all has happened and how disgusted one might be at it, but I also think something like this is inevitable to some degree. Put a group of people in confined space for a long period of time and you're eventually going to have violent disagreements. It is just the story of humanity. If earth sent out 100 of these ships, I would be shocked if more than one of them avoided a similar catastrophe.

Honestly it feels a bit more natural than New Vegas where you had NCR speedrun to just be identical to modern American bureaucracy and ennui where it felt like the writers' thumbs were on the scale hard to force everyone to line up for that. (On the flip side, then I understand why, say, NV presents an easier choice of "violence directed to end the violent wasteland vs. ineffectual America nostalgia vs. let the guy who built the place have the crown." while the CSG faction choices are just "a group of guys vs a group of guys vs a group of guys" but the story is told at a level where there is just not enough room for a high minded ideal sort of choice, so I don't mean to knock CSG for that at all.)

That said for me the faction choice is very easy, as having evaluated all the factions and seen their stories, the important factor is that Cobra is my waifu.

[Gopblin]

I feel the faction design is pretty great because there isn't any perfectly good or evil ones. I think Protectorate came off as being too Nazi-like, but everyone else has pretty good arguments for joining.
I sided with the Monks because I wasn't sure that ship was actually over Proxima until much later in the story, and Monks path ensured ship keeps flying for much, much longer giving the best chance of reaching it.
If I knew that, I'd probably side with the Church because they're by far the nicest of the factions - the leadership is still kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but not as bad as the other two. And they support the Monks, anyways, so I'd assume there won't be much difference (also I wasn't able to side with the monks due to failing a persuasion challenge and unlike the other two you can't talk to the church leader without successfully completing a quest).

[LDiCesare]

You can always side with the monks in the end.

[Morgian]

You even must if you are going pacifist.
At least I found no way to pass the monks on the rails peacefully. So you end up with them anyway after telling them "no" in the Armory.

I wonder about the maintenance station at the bridge. If you can call Romeo there, does that mean there is a possibility of a fight on the bridge? A last minute turnabout?

[mojave_wastelander]

Didn't care that much about other endings because the moment I was introduced to monks I knew that their ending was most straightforward: they are hell bent on actually getting the mission done as opposed to other factions that are either stuck in the past or have no grasp on what colonizing a planet means. Ending slides are giving a good understanding that monks are getting results with brutal efficiency because for them the mission to colonize the planet is above all.

[Yaldabaoth]

Actually landing the ship has a nice image of what a functioning colony might look like so that seems to be a good ending (even though a few people didn't make it).

[William Shakesman]

Originally posted by Morgian:

You even must if you are going pacifist.
At least I found no way to pass the monks on the rails peacefully. So you end up with them anyway after telling them "no" in the Armory.

I wonder about the maintenance station at the bridge. If you can call Romeo there, does that mean there is a possibility of a fight on the bridge? A last minute turnabout?

Romeo on the bridge is there to help with the robot fight and with some fights in other endings (That said I don't think it is possible to be the sort of person who has a useful Romeo and not be able to just unplug the bridge robot boss.). To spoil it if you can arrive at the bridge with a bridge officer implant and enough technical knowhow to access it, you can do things on the bridge that might cause fights.

[GOD OF WAR SANCHEZ]

Originally posted by Morgian:

I used the lander option, but I think landing the whole ship would be the best. It ends the centuries of strife and deterioration in the metal hulk and fulfills the original mission. Well, the dice will have been rolled anyway and it is do or die on Proxima.

Turning back to earth would be the worst ending. It makes everything that happened pointless, and will probably doom the ship, which is more of a flying wreck by now.

It is not the worst ending because going through the ship story you realize how bad these people are, they were bad initially, and after 400 years of degradation and infighting, it is a pure egoistic greedy evil. They will cause doom to the planet.

The lesser evil is to eliminate all those people at once by turning the ship back.

Originally posted by LDiCesare:

You can always side with the monks in the end.

I think you are pretty much forced to side with monks unless you have top class fighting ability which is not possible if you playing smooth talker character (avoiding fights).

At least I have not seen a way to talk out monks from taking the machine.

Originally posted by LDiCesare:

Monks may not be human, but I disagree with you. They are the ones who don't have a personal agenda and try to serve the others above anything else.
They are the only "good" faction in my book. If your only reason for disliking them is because their race is not the same as yours, I find that a quite weak argument.

They do have an agenda and they are no longer human. Personally being stuck in the ship before monks allow you to land feels as a depressive ending. Ofcourse the ending we have, is like an open box, anything could happen on the ship or with the colony after landing.