2701

Because it’s all on you. Own your feelings for the game, don’t chicken out with this “oh, but it was a vague mess” or “three colors hur hur” crap. I thought the original ending was good. Skimpy on details and confusing on certain things but the main thrust was clear. You don’t agree. End of story.

I don’t get this line of thinking at all. You had all these experiences with the series, and all were invalidated by the last 20 minutes? How does that happen? Look, everything ends badly. One day you’ll have a massive coronary on the toilet. Does that make losing your virginity to the cute blonde in the back of a VW a waste of time? Your game was a journey. But you focus on the last step.

Sure, a lovingly rebuilt Paris with a McDonald’s on every corner. Lucky me.

2702

As they should be. Bioware, and any other gaming company, is not entitled to anyone’s money here. They’re selling a product, service, a story, whatever, no one has to buy it. There is a fine line between staying true to a vision and remembering you actually need someone to buy that vision… a lot of someones when you throw that much money around.

2703

I haven’t played the extended cut yet (in progress), but my main problems with the ending were…
[ol]
[li]My choices throughout the game meant nothing except +X war effort (this is not entirely an ending flaw alone, but it is most noticable at the end when you realize helping the krogan tanks means you get 10 points, not that you see them fighting for you in the end).[/li][li]There were multiple gaps in the end section.[/li][li]There was no feedback at the end of the game to show me the result of my actions.[/li][/ol]

I was explaining this to my foreign friend, but Americans LOVE heroic sacrifice endings where the main character spits in death’s eye and fights the good fight, one last time. Mass effect 3 half tries to do this, but fails completely because the ending lacks the same epic action feeling that was present in the endings of the previous two games. The kaidan/ashley choice is a pretty good example of a similar scene done well. Another great example in the very same game is the moridon scene which is probably my favorite in ME3.

It is almost insulting really. We know they can do this stuff because they have many times in the series and a number of times in mass effect 3. This is the conclusion to one of their hugely popular series and they just don’t even bother putting any effort in to it. It boggles the mind. They had to know people wouldn’t be happy with this. They had to know it would damage the Mass Effect Universe. But these are obvious and much asked questions.

2704

Pogue, I can’t speak for everyone but for me it’s not the fact that it was a bad ending (which it undoubtedly was), it’s the way that bad ending was handled. I mean a great game can recover from a bad ending, who remembers Bioshock for the less-than-stellar escort mission and shitty boss fight at the end? Most people just choose to ignore that stuff and focus on the great game that came before.

If everything after the “elevator of light” up to the Reaper AI star baby whatever-the-fuck had been a cut scene based on how I played the game up to that point (i.e. I played an entire damn trilogy as a paragon, it gives me the paragon ending I earned and I see myself destroying the reapers, or controlling them if I was a renegade) it would have easily been my GOTY or at the very least top 5.

While I would have been disappointed in the ending, I would have said “ah well, endings are hard. Still a great game though”. But I don’t see how you can care about the product you’re putting out or the story you’re trying to tell if you can let someone play 100 hours of an awesome trilogy one way and at the end just allow them to choose the completely opposite ending.

It’s like they got to that point and said “fuck it, we’re not gonna be able to please everyone so let’s just let them choose their own ending”. Which is bullshit.

2705

I don’t follow you, Gremlinclr. You hate the ending because it gave you an option rather than just basing it on your playing history? That sounds pretty arbitrary to me.

But again, if you don’t like the game or the ending, fine. Your prerogative, your time, your money. But I tire of people telling me the ending made no sense or came out of nowhere when I saw with my own eyes that this was not the case.

2706

The worst plot hole of Mass Effect 3 wasn’t the ending but the beginning. Two games spent stopping the Reapers from showing up… and then they show up.

2707

Sorry, this is dumb. The games never lock you into Paragon or Renegade, it’s not an option you select at character creation. It’s something you choose, case by case, throughout.

2708

To frame the argument as someone being “right” is everything wrong with this whole issue.

Someone was telling you a story. You got to pick branching paths that tricked you into thinking it was your own story, but the fundamental fact that you were being told a story never changed. Just because you didn’t like the way the story ended didn’t make anyone “wrong”.

Brad’s entirely right that you guys* have now forced EA – and probably other publishers – into a focus group approach rather than a storytelling approach. You deserve what you get from now on.

-Tom

  • Well, maybe not you guys. Mostly the shrieking loudmouths on the internet who banded together and treated the whole issue as if it was the frickin’ Arab Spring.
2709

I think the extended cut, especially with Ashes and Leviathan DLC installed for both the context and extra dialogs throughout, really is beter. Anyone who plays it now they gets a better story. The retconning was a plus – I’m glad there was pressure to improve it.

Games are already focus tested to death. The original ending does not seem like a strong creative vision, rather pieces thrown together by whoever was left working on it, rushed to meet a deadline. The original ME1 and M@ Drew Karpyshyn reapers-are-trying-to-save-us-from-Dark-Energy concept would have been preferable. But I actually don’t mind the ending now after Leviathan + Extended with Leviathan lines.

2710

No, the options were everything you did up to this point. A situation that lacks real options is one that ignores everything you did in favor of a last minute focal choice that has no meaning.

For example, if i go in to work every day this year and am a complete ass, the options i took that led to me getting fired at the year end review are likely not me being on my best behavior during the review, but my actions that led up to it.

If they want to have you make a major decision in the last minute, so be it, but don’t just throw away everything i’ve done in the last 2.99 games. While i can really only speak for myself, i play bioware games because they let me have some influence on the story and give me the feeling that my choices actually matter. If i didn’t care about these things, i’d play Skyrim or some jrpg (i do actually like jrpgs, but generally they are very static story wise).

Mass effect 3 just fails at making our choices matter. You may not think this is needed in a game, but (many) bioware fans are used to it so of course they’d be disappointed at the lack of it. Even more so when it was so hyped that my actions would matter!

I was under the impression that #1 was stopping the reapers from using the warpgates to jump instantly to our space, and #2 was about stopping the collectors from establishing a beachhead (Step 1: establish beachhead using human form reaper from Contra Game, Step 2:???, step3: profit). Even winning both times, the reapers would still be here eventually, but by then we would have had time to prepare (Except they don’t listen to shepard for the 100th time in a row).

The mass effect series is basically about the fight against the reapers, even if #2 basically forgot about this. It just wouldn’t be the same (in my opinion) if #3 was solely about fighting against the illusive man, without the shadow of the reapers.

If you don’t like someone “telling you a story” why are you playing a story based rpg and not an open world rpg? Good or bad game arguments aside, this seems like the bigger issue as no matter how good or bad a game is, if you don’t like that type of game, you won’t like it no matter what.

Oh and you forgot your favorite term.

2711

Like 99.99999% of other games out there?

I am a Bioware fan and I am not disappointed. But kindly name one Bioware game where your choices (actually, really!) matter. Just curious as to your definition on game choices that feeds the illusion that it matters.

As hyped as TellTales’s Walking Dead? which generated 1/10th of the controversy that ME3 unfairly did.

2712

How does the idea that Mass Effect 3 is an extended story of closure for fans invested in the series, while the “ending” is really just a coda, or a preview of the future of the ME universe, sound to those of you who hated the game’s original ending sound? Even though I was fine with ME3’s original ending, I’m not trying to trap anyone with this question. I sincerely want to know if that idea works for any of you.

2713

It’s been brought up, and it’s why I don’t feel the ending ruins the whole game, but even though Mass Effect 3 is the end of the trilogy, it’s still a game unto itself and deserves an ending that matches the quality, themes, and execution of the rest of the game. Which it decidedly did not get.

2714

Nearly all of them.

Even mass effect 2’s ending does decently at this. The basic idea is that my actions should have a lasting effect and the universe shouldn’t just instantly forget about them as soon as i do them.

One of my favorite examples is in Dragon age 1, you’re given the option to basically desecrate the most sacred object in a party member’s religion. This action is the equivalent of finding the Arc of the covenant and urinating in it in. Anyway, if you do this action, it will spark a fight between your party where you will have to fight, and kill, party members who disagreed with said action.

When i say i want my choice to matter, i mean i want people and the world itself to react in meaningful way to my actions/choices. This is why i don’t like the ending, because there is no meaningful feedback.

Mass effect 2 does not move the fight against the reapers forward at all. It is basically the empire strikes back, a side entry in the series. Thus mass effect 3 needed to be the final (well, maybe not final) battle against the reapers. It needed to be the conclusion. It needed to be return of the jedi.

Your statement makes it sound like the story was concluded elsewhere and #3 is just “an extended story of closure” when there was no basic “story of closure” in the first place.

I would be much more forgiving if there was a 4th game in the series. That way bioware could point to that and say “#3 might not have ended things with any sort of conclusion, but that is because #4 is about what really happened and how your actions in the previous 3 games affected things.”

2715

Bullshit. The disappointment funnel that discards all of your cumulative choices was neither thoughtful nor challenging. In fact I was dismayed due to its rushed and incomplete nature.

2716

Thoughtful post. And I would agree with you that Bioware games generate meaningful choices IF they are confined to a single game. To take your Dragon Age 1 example, the game has a meaningful ending for i.e. it gave the player a choice on who they want to install as a king. But it breaks down in Dragon Age 2 where most of the choices you make in DA1 don’t matter at all.

And it’s partially the same in ME2. Whether your crew live or die in ME2 will have little influence on the subplots in ME3, they will just be replaced by another NPC.

Here’s what I don’t understand and I say it respectfully. There is meaningful feedback. You get to decide whether to kill the reapers or co-exist with them. And also…different colour endings! :)

2717

You refuse to acknowledge that the problem was not “the way the story ended” but rather the half-baked, non-foreshadowed, jammed-on, unnecessary, pick-your-color star child mechanism. It wasn’t storytelling, it was the opposite of storytelling and a rejection of he series’ fundamental premise.

To be clear, everything up until the star child’s pick-a-color challenge was acceptable, if not exactly masterful. I expected Shepard to choose sacrifice. I would have been disappointed to see the stakes be less than that. The scene where Shep dragged himself up one last time was magnificent. The resolution of he Geth-Quarian dispute was the emotional peak of the trilogy. But the writers’ imagination failed them at the end and they made a shitty story ending.

If a focus group would have prevented that from happening, that would have been great. As it is, it felt rushed to meet a deadline. It would have been better if some of the assets thrown at the multiplayer had been used to make the conclusion of the single-player story (i.e., the point of the product) more developed and satisfying.

2718

This is such a ridiculous canard. It sounds like you didn’t even play Mass Effect 3, a game that plugged into your previous choices at more than 100 places. I guess this is the school of thought that the final 15 minutes is all that matters, never mind the entirety of the game you just played, not to mention the previous 100 hours you spent in the last two games.

You just can’t see the forest for the colors of the beams, can you?

-Tom
2719

To some of us, those things you mention were the story ending. And certainly satisfying enough that I didn’t really care about the weird ambiguity that has people demanding Bioware go back and do it over a different way. Maybe I just don’t have high enough standards when it comes to young adult space operas.

-Tom
2720

Actually, I think you’ve hit it right there. What is the average gamer’s age tho for these games? If I played Baldur’s Gate and I now “old enough to stop” or should I just accept my games will be written for a 14 year old male and pack it in. (BTW, female, old, gaming since had to compile my own games on mainframes). Really, any ending is fine as long as there are plenty of gratuitous shots of Miranda’s ass? Or is it that blue alien doing the lesbo kissing?

OK, sure I’m an odd outlier. But most of the “young guys” I’ve met gaming are now married, with kids themselves. Even my kid’s friends have higher standards than what you seem to think is ok. Bioware set this standard themselves and marketed it. I think its fine to hold them accountable. Though I too can do without the internet hysteria - aka GW2’s fractals loot review bombing, which was silly. I think fans can and should complain though if it bothers them. Some of us don’t buy ME for Miranda’s ass. I bought ME3 but haven’t played it yet. Partly b/c the lack of story resolution, but I’m sure I’ll get my money’s worth out of it on my backlog one day.

But you want to slam/praise story games, why not give more credit to TSW (just for that angle)? Yeah, they had bugs, but ack, after my son just couldn’t finish yet another GW2 dungeon tonight, so do the other MMOs. Granted, its not the “story changes by action” of Bioware’s, but they Funcom did try to a non teen story as a highlight and reviewers didn’t notice. I think you are doing mature RPGers a disservice here. I think there is a market segment beyond young adult (flavor of choice) soap opera out there.

And yeah grey-haired old lady “Hi! I’m Imoen!” (I so hated that line) shaking her stick at you and mumbling something about a lawn mature, fwiw.