Kadayi
2901
QFT.
Boiling everything down to ‘war readiness’ just democratized all the narrative decision making to the extent of robbing it of any sense of gravity. Especially when it was pretty easy to balance out any negatives by playing the MP and promoting a few characters to make up any shortfall. Gorge on MP and then act like a c**t to everyone and you’re still coming out golden as far as the games mechanics are concerned.
It wasn’t necessary to play the multi-player to get the best ending. You pretty much had to not bother with any of the side quest stuff at all in order to find your final choices limited.
It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t really hold up because you can’t get them all (unlike all the audio logs etc). You have to make a decision one way or the other at points and the rewards vary in terms of payouts.
Plain truth of the matter is the whole thing was a rug pull. The expectation is when presented with a narrative decision (for instance whether to assign Jacks biotic students to ‘support’ or ‘front line’ roles) that there’s going to be a narrative payoff to it, but in this case there’s not (You simply get a 50/75 point assignment and a paragon/renegade adjustment as well).
To their credit Bioware did add a cut scene payoff to the extended cut dependent on what decision you make, but that was after the fact, rather than at the time.
As regards the whole ME3 ‘garbage’ debate. ME1 your a typical Bioware narrative RPG and for the most part it worked but the actual combat was pretty ropey, mainly because what you saw was not what you got when it came to the dice rolls (especially noticeable if you went infiltrator and tried sniping early on) plus it possessed one of the most retarded inventory management systems ever (no ability to select/sell/compare by item category) . With ME2 Bioware responded to the criticisms and developed the combat model, but instead of revamping the inventory system they pretty much abandoned it and the game was less RPG and more ‘guns and conversation’ (to quote Jim Rossignol). With ME3 Bioware found a better balance I’d say when it came to the whole inventory thing, but on the RPG front they dramatically dropped away from the more cinematic conversational style of the earlier two games.
With ME1 & 2 pretty much every conversation you had instigated a cinematic cut scene and some dialogue options for you. Whether it was talking to Jack in the engines room or Joker at the helm. ME3 is made up of a lot of this (skip to 2:00): -
You’d think Shepard and Tali having a heart to heart over the death of a comrade (even Miranda) would qualify for some degree of player interplay, but apparently not. Instead we just stand there in third person and listen whilst the conversation rolls on. ME3 is full of that and it’s robbing you the player of involvement.
You get it for everything you do, just about, with popup notifications thereof. It’s impossible to play the game without it being thrust into your face dozens or hundreds of times. I’m not sure how it could be any more obtrusive.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if it were to serve some narrative or mechanical purpose. Speaking of which, what if it had been actually used in the game - not just setting switches for the ending, whether the questionable impact it has on the game as released or what I and Tom had sort of been expecting it to do - but actually, for example, being a currency you could use to buy support for missions (like Alpha Protocol’s intel), or needing certain types of war assets to do some side missions, etc? I think that would have been cool.
Well, to be honest, I have yet to play ME3 (I actually just got it for Christmas) – I have been holding off because my distaste for Origin and the gripes about the ending made me put it on the back burner. So my comments here are going to be about ME1 and 2.
I think it’s fair to say that Bioware’s writing is uneven – however, I think both the first two Mass Effects and the first Dragon Age were very well written compared to pretty much any other game in recent memory. I don’t think they compare very well to great works of literature, perhaps, but it’s a different medium and I don’t think you can really compare the two.
You said their handling of relationships is a little teen-romancy and I can see that, but as someone who likes relationships (of all sorts) between characters in games, they are one of the few companies that tries to make it even more than an afterthought. And some have been very well written – Jack in ME2 has a very well written romance path, for instance, one that deviates significantly from the “butter them up and then get the sex on” that tends to be the usual route.
Furthermore, aside from Obsidian, I don’t know many other companies that have done as good a job making your decisions during the game affect the actual outcomes. Deaths of characters and your successes and failures in the game have story consequences – yes, the ending is rarely vastly different; however, the context and the impact on your personal world is very different.
What I was expecting in ME3 was that Bioware would go beyond this to at least try and get closer to what Obsidian has attempted in Alpha Protocol and New Vegas. That the end of the game would be a final battle where because I saved the Rachni, they would join in against the Reapers (or alternatively, that they would turn against me and join the Reapers). That because I saved Wrex and he went back and united the krogan clans, they were able to come in and help. Or if I didn’t save Wrex, they fell to petty squabbling and were wiped out. I expected that the end of the game would be decided by the actions that I took in the previous games (and during ME3), for good or ill. But the ending for ME3 is more like Deus Ex, which is not what I expected from Bioware, especially after what they had been hyping for literally years about the Mass Effect series.
That’s exactly what you get in Mass Effect 3! And Bioware wisely focuses on that throughout the game instead of during a boss battle, a la Dragon Age. But one of the problems with letting a handful of loud self-entitled Enders determine the public perception of ME3 is that you would never know this from listening to them. Regardless of how you feel about the last fifteen minutes, Mass Effect 3 is a grand conclusion to the first two games.
Well, sure, if you reduce the 20+ hours you’ll spend playing Mass Effect 3 and the myriad conclusions you’ll reach in those hours to a single final decision. It’s all about perspective.
-Tom
The ending is the ending. The whole game cannot be an ending to itself. I agree that there’s a lot to like in Mass Effect 3, but that doesn’t make its ending better.
It is quite possible that is the case – as I haven’t played ME3 yet. However, that video posted earlier with the conversation with Tali was disappointing to watch, as was the video that compares the various different endings side by side. That wasn’t what I was expecting to see.
Worst tautology evar.
The point, malk, is whether you regard the ending of the Mass Effect saga as a twenty-hour game or a fifteen-minute sequence. Bioware obviously intended the former. Enders assume the latter.
-Tom
But the argument is about the fifteen minute sequence, and the quality of the rest of the game (which took a lot longer than twenty hours for me, FWIW) doesn’t redeem that sequence. (And to be fair, neither does that fifteen minutes ruin the other X hours, at least for me, and I’m wholeheartedly behind the idea that it shouldn’t. I get really frustrated when people dismiss KOTOR II, say, over an ending that’s about as threadbare as ME3’s, if a bit less continuity-violating.)
No, this was a conversation about how the entire game plays out (feel free to read Isis’ post and my response). Once again, you’re trying to make it a conversation about the last fifteen minutes (i.e. “the ending is the ending”). Unbelievable.
-Tom
Wolff
2910
Well I just finished again and with the dlc after having done it on release. Much more satisfied with the experience. The final choice made a lot more sense, since I was able to “get” the purpose of the reapers and how the whole thing started.
No, I was trying to refute the fallacy that has been brought up before that the entire game of Mass Effect 3 is the ending of the story so it shouldn’t matter that the actual end of the game is crap. I admittedly jumped in a little hastily on that because it looks like that’s not quite what you were saying, now that I revisit your post. I would agree that Mass Effect 3 does deliver on some very key ongoing storyline resolutions during the bulk of the game - the Krogan genophage and the Quarian-geth conflict both get excellent, emotional resolutions that you can push in several different directions, for example. (Unfortunately, the payoff for the further narrative from both of those is a few war assets that, as previously discussed, don’t actually wind up mattering to speak of.)
Those fifteen minutes can still be bad. And a bad ending can sour even an otherwise good game. The end of DXHR soured me on the rest of the game (even though I liked it overall) for the same reason the ME3 ending stuff I’ve seen is bothers me. I feel like the arbitrary three choices presented as three arbitrary choices is a lazy way to have “multiple endings” (especially when they are so similar). It’s not even me taking a different action and as a consequence something happens – it’s just presenting you three options and saying “here’s what happens”. It would be like writing a choose your own adventure book where you make all these decisions but it doesn’t matter because when you get to the end, you end up on the exact same page and pick from three options that tell you exactly what’s going to happen.
I don’t need the ending to be vastly different – everyone knows that it’s never going to happen on a big budget title due to the expense, unfortunately – but it is nice to have that kind of closure where you can see, in the end, how your choices actually made a difference, however small. Alpha Protocol was great because even though the basic structure of the ending was the same every time you played, what happened during that ending was significantly different in terms of who lived, who died, and what the final outcome of Alpha Protocol and the other organizations was.
I’ll also point out that I tend to fucking hate deus ex machina (in this case, a literal deus ex machina) endings, so…yeah.
I will probably start playing ME3 in the next couple days, since I’m almost done with my all-DLC playthrough of ME2…once I go through that I’ll have to see what I think of the ending.
Soma
2913
Black Isis, at some point you have to actually play the damn thing and form an opinion of your own, instead of reading other people’s opinion.
As someone who doesn’t like either endings, I can honestly say ME3 overall is all good. I’m with Tom in saying that the last 15 mins does NOT ruin the preceeding 100+ (including ME1 and 2). FOR ME. YMMV. And I never feel like demanding Bioware to “fix” the ending. (Whether those “Enders” are self-entitled man-child is another debate…)
Indeed I think less of Bioware’s cojones when they decided to do the extended cut. There are other ways to placate disgruntled fans without sacrificing creative integrity, like tons and tons of free DLCs. Instead they spend their energy on “clarifications”.
Fixing a broken element of your game is not sacrificing creative integrity. Unless, of course, Bioware didn’t agree that it was broken and only changed it based on widespread pressure from their audience. But as far as I know they acknowledged that it had some issues and the extended cut was their way of addressing them.
I was wondering how long it would be before he started throwing around the Ender term again.
Soma: Tom basically invented the idea of Enders to insult people who thought the ending was of low quality (if i say “bad” they will instantly say that i wanted a happy ending so i need to be careful). I never remember anyone (here, i’m sure someone in the world did before they call me on someone complaining on youtube) claiming that they were entitled to another ending. Would it have been morally correct to fix something that a large number of people felt was of low quality, if not unfinished? Probably, but nobody expects it since most publishers treat their customers like shit after they have their money.
I also never expected Kotor2 to get a finished ending, but was happy when fans threw something cool together.
Did the last 15 minutes being of low quality ruin the whole trilogy? well… no, not really, but the series will always be tarnished by this in the same way a person can do good all their life, do something really bad (a generally good person who gets drunk and kills a few people while driving) and then always be remembered for the bad.
I also find it hard to believe how people could not understand how the end of a story can matter to people who are interested in said story. The viewpoint that mass effect 3 itself was an ending to the series would have been valid, EXCEPT as pointed out many times, mass effect 3 does not start to resolve the mass effect story line until the last 20-30 minutes.
The 90% of the game where i’m assembling a coalition to fight the reapers is NOT the ending, it is a build up to the ending. This really seems very obvious to me in much the same way that the assembling of the team in mass effect 2 was in preparation for the ending of that game.
olaf
2916
I didnt like the ME3 endings.
I did like the game though but the War Score really pissed me off. The concept was cool but the scoring itself and the threshholds, complete bullshit. I imported a save that had ME1 and ME2 data. And I made pretty much all the high scoring choices, all of them AFAIK, but I still didnt have a score high enough to qualify for the highest ending (which I didnt like but thats beside the point). It seems that you had to play MP to get the best ending, at least initially, and I dont understand how that decision was reached.
There’s a difference between someone who doesn’t like the ending – which is a perfectly reasonable opinion that I’ve said repeatedly I understand – and someone who signs petitions demanding Bioware change it. Why are you unable to comprehend that?
Oh, wait, let me guess: you signed a petition?
-Tom
Is Bioshock “broken”? Serious question. I don’t think it is. I hate hate hate the ending and I would never use the word “broken” to describe it.
I see what you did there. That’s a pretty clever way around terms like “vast majority”. :)
-Tom
That would actually be a critical sticking point for me as well. But to the best of my knowledge, and all the press I have read, Bioware has never said that the original ending was broken or anything other than their intended vision all along, just the the extended cut expands on the original content. If I saw an interview or press release where someone at Bioware said that the original ending was busted and the extended cut was intended to fix it, I would drop that argument entirely.
You would be incorrect actually. I don’t think there is anything wrong with signing a petition, but i don’t personally feel they serve any purpose. I personally believe that the general fan outcry convinced them to release the extended cut DLC and not some petition.
I’d imagine there are petitions for every game that is unfinished or buggy, and few amount to anything.
A matter closer to my heart, Valkyrie chronicle 3 had a petition to localize it and that never worked out.
I’d say it is more that you tend to sound like you’re implying everyone on these forums who thinks the ending is of low quality and/or unfinished in its original state is an entitled child. I do personally believe that having paid money for a product, we’re entitled to certain things (which things our $60 entitles us to are open to opinion) in a fair world, but this doesn’t mean we get them. This isn’t a charity, we’re buying a product, or service depending on where you live.
Then there was the whole “you don’t like the ending, it must be because you wanted a happy ending” redirection.
You seriously expect a major company to admit that they were wrong and knowingly took shortcuts that hurt the product their customers received? What next, a politician admitting they were wrong?
Not to mention that this is the modern age of gaming where it is pretty common to release with tons of bugs/features missing and patch them in later. Maybe they thought they could have the ending done by the time people reached it.
In this world i’m surprised that an obvious troll release like War Z is apologized for and refunded by steam. Speaking of which, should people who fell in to this trap be called entitled children if they complain about being screwed?
