2741

Can you give some examples? And I don’t mean focus groups prior to release. Examples analogous to EA’s downloadable revised ending for Mass Effect 3.

-Tom
2742

Games are always patched or fixed based on feedback and iteration. A good thing. I don’t have any problem patching stories in games just like any other facet.

2743

Yeah, I can’t see anything going wrong with that. :)

-Tom
2744

Oh, so the Original ME3 ending was just a bug.

2745

We will probably never know but I find the idea that all the ideas and assests in the extended cut were created after the firestorm hard to swallow. I really do think the extended cut was the intended ending but wasn’t in there at release for whatever reason.

Having played leviathan and from ashes I feel they were removed for cash grab. Leviathan a little less so.

2746

From the Ashes is obviously a cash grab, it should have been part of the basic Mass Effect 3 package from the very start.

What I hate about Mass Effect 3, and the other bioware games that I grabbed this holiday sale season is that the missions add-on DLCs for Mass Effect 2 alone is more expensive than the price that I paid for the Trilogy.

2747

That assumes your time has a value to waste.

2748

I guess this is what you say when you can really address the points someone makes.

2749

Oh, great, that discussion again. I’m almost tempted to revive my '‘endless ME3, no ending discussion allowed’- thread…

Can I, just for the sake of any innocent bypasser that just picked up ME3, wants to know what its like and stumbles upon all this, state that I, and probably many others, really really liked this game/series, and that you should really, really really go and play it? The ending, extended or not, good or bad, whether you yourself will like it or not, is only the ending. Even if you don’t like it, there’s still a great game to play through, and you really should!

There. That’s that. Carry on…

2750

Off the top of my head, Clerks had Dante getting shot at the end. Was not well-recieved.

2751

And it’s a damn shame too, because ME2 is by far a better game with all of the DLC included. My second playthrough with the full complement of DLC was deeper, felt better paced, and felt more in place with the ME2 universe (isolation from the prior game’s world was a major gripe for me). The game needed to be more than just: ID team member > get team member > get loyalty of team member. Not to mention the number of “hooks” from the ME2 DLC in the third game.

2752

Well, you got me there. I am a HUGE sucker for the big, sprawling, world/universe building saga. I’d rather read a series than a one-off novel. I enjoy Star Wars, Song of Ice and Fire, the Marvel Universe, and Mass Effect because they take place in a coherently crafted world that exists beyond the confines of the story.

And then the end of ME3 fucks with the entire goddamn universe for no damn good reason. Of course, the reapers must be defeated or diverted or countered somehow, but it’s not too much to ask that I be given a foundation to make a meaningful choice, or that I be shown the consequenses of that choice.

ME3 failed mechanically as a story because it did not provide me with the knowledge to make what was clearly intended to be a meaningful choice for the entire story world. ME3 failed dramatically as a story because it ignored the consequenses of what was clearly intended to be a meaningful choice for the entire story world. Watching the synced red/blue/green endings was a heartbreaker for me. It was cheap, lazy, and disrespectful to the audience who paid upwards of $200 to experience the full saga.

Further, it was also a shitty business decision to “break” the world and alienate the player base when it is clear that EA intends to continue to exploit the ME universe for years to come. Seriously, from a story perspective, how the hell do we move forward from here? Either all life is merged into some synthetic hive-mind, the reapers are still hanging around under Shep’s control, or all synthetics are dead. There is no possible way to make a meaningful ME4 or new ME trilogy without picking a “right” ending.

That is the essence of my gripe. I don’t believe the auteur theory or deference to ambiguous European-style endings has a place here, because the ME trilogy was not a singular work of authorship, it’s a collective work within an existing story world that is expected to continue beyond the story at hand.

Bioware chose to create the ME universe within that framework, yet as a work within that specific framework, it completely failed at the end. Somebody fucked up. No matter how much you want to defer to authorship, it’s just a bad product.

2753

I think that’s an oversimplification. ME3 was a great third act. It resolved plot threads (the genophage, the geth/quarian* thing, character stories from ME1 and especially ME2, so on and so forth) in ways that were informed by past choices in the series, to the extent that the two playthroughs I made felt very different. They told me a story and did so competently. Then they went and released an ending with some apparent inconsistencies, and given they hadn’t really been particularly subtle to that point, I wasn’t expecting to have to fill in the blanks myself.

And then they tacked on an ending that wasn’t necessarily incompetent, but I can’t see it as anything but a huge fumble. They’d un-subtly hit on a bunch of classic sci-fi themes through ME3, and then they skipped arguably the most central one in an ending that basically required it be mentioned.

Here’s what I would have done: there’s no mysticism to the Catalyst (beyond the standard magic science stuff). It’s just a superweapon that kills artificial intelligences. The ending plays out exactly the same up to the point where Shepard hits the button and collapses. That’s the payoff: if you built enough war score, secured enough allies, and finished the Catalyst, you get scenes of your allies fighting and dying while it activates, and then it works. The Reapers and the relays blow up. Survival and death of your allies and your crew depends on war score. Score very high, and you get the shot of Shepard maybe still alive, buried in rubble. If you don’t get enough war score, the Catalyst doesn’t work and you lose (maybe use Liara’s time capsule to wrap that one up). That would have been the bold storytelling move in a modern game—allowing for an ending where everything goes wrong, and you don’t get even a chance at victory for another 50,000 years.

Typing that served to gather my thoughts a little bit better. I would have vastly preferred the ending above, but it’s identical in terms of consequences and nearly identical in its details to the Destroy ending. Clearly, it isn’t the actual ending that bugs me, but the way they got there. The whole Catalyst choice section is superfluous, and tying my end result to a story element only introduced during the coda of a sixty-hour series of games cheapens the other choices I’ve made through the series up to that point. The ending should have been an ending: I had plenty of time to make my bed; I would have been happy to lay in it without the writers sneaking movers into my house, stealing my bed, presenting me with three new ones to try, and stretching a metaphor to the breaking point.

  • One of the things I admire most about the ME universe is that it doesn’t capitalize alien analogues to ‘human’.
2754

What was mystical about the Catalyst?

2755

I suppose that’s more an impression of mine than something I could support very strongly with evidence from the game. The whole combination of “I have chosen a form familiar to you,” the presence of the fusion option (a device that can do both Control and Destroy at least makes some sort of space opera-level pseudo-science sense), the Catalyst and Citadel combo being less a widget wot does something than a temple to the deus ex machina who basically says, “I will grant you one of these specific wishes,” the inability of anyone to suss out what the Catalyst does even while building it from nothing. It’s not really a critical element of my point; the nature of the Catalyst doesn’t matter given that I don’t think the choice element at the end was a good idea at all.

2756

I’m not trying to pick apart your argument, I just got the opposite impression. Or rather, I accepted that the Catalyst’s actions were more science fiction mumbo-jumbo rather than any kind of supernatural stuff. In a game universe where we accept biotics, it doesn’t seem unlikely that the Catalyst would choose a form that was weighing heavily on Shepard’s mind. And since it was more or less the Reaper Boss ™, it doesn’t seem like a stretch that it could shut down or modify the Reapers. Don’t ask me about synthesis though, I got nothing.

2757

The Catalyst scene was great cinema but a terrible gameplay letdown, and the way War Assets tied into your final choice was utterly banal and obviously rushed to release.

That said wrecking the Reaper rigged universe fit with the scale and tone of the narrative, and the Synthetic vs Organic conflict was clearly the whole point of at least the third game and can possibly be reversed into 2 (with Harbinger’s “we are salvation through destruction” at the very end), and Synthesis was clearly the “right” choice in the end. I think you can have legitimate criticism about the War Score mechanic, think the Catalyst choice scene was poorly shoehorned way of providing player choice while still appreciating the overall narrative structure and conclusions.

2758

Fair enough. I think the contrast between biotics and Reaper Central Control was that they put a lot of effort into writing all those encyclopedia entries (that hardly anybody read) and all that dialogue with Kaidan (that I couldn’t stand) to justify biotics in a setting where honest psi would have been out of place.

I can find some comparison to the way the ending was handled in the way the rachni were handled—you free them, they send a creepy asari to say they’re doing great, then the next time you hear from them the Reapers have taken over somehow. There wasn’t any setup, and I found it jarring.

2759

There is no way in hell that Synthesis was “clearly” anything at all.

2760

There is no way in hell that Synthesis was clearly anything at all. If the guys who are arguing that the ending is a jumbled mess decide to make Synthesis their tentpole issue, I’d have to retreat. That ending makes zero sense.