3181

Not to digress but what was wrong with KOTOR? KOTOR2 yes but the first had a great almost epic moving like ending. Assault on the enemy base, fight through hordes of bad guys, show down with the companion turned evil (Bastilla) and final confrontation with the bad guy.

I think it has more to do with people buying into the smoke and mirrors that they were making their own story, and deciding how everything was going to turn out. They had been catered to for literally years with the promise that every decision would have some repercussion or personalized consequence. I suspect a lot of the furor is that even though Mass Effect 3 played to that beautifully as an overall game, the final fifteen minutes had no interest in that approach. At that point, after coming so far, I suspect a lot of people had been so thoroughly conditioned by the narrative framework that they didn’t want Bioware to tell them an ending. And my gut instinct is that it has less to do with any quality issue than it has to do with the loss of control. I don’t mean to insult anyone, but my guess is that the average Mass Effect player – like the average videogame player – wouldn’t know good writing if it bit him in the ass. -Tom

Tom, you’re really just totally wrong here and even unfair in your assessment. I can summarize from my own reading of the Bioware forums (which wouldn’t be hard for you if you really wanted to know, rather than guessing) the general feeling about the ending of the game so that you don’t need to guess or psycho-analyze anyone:

  1. People spent all this time amassing these war assets - much of the game centered around this effort. They thought they would be more than a number, they thought they’d see them in action at the end.
  2. The star child come from nowhere, a total deus ex machina. It and the conversation with it was a weak attempt having some sort pseudo intellectual cool ending, rather than the climactic battle that everyone was expected and had been led to expect up that point.
  3. The “select one of three choices” is an old PC game trope and people expected much more for an epic game arch such as this. The three choices almost came down to pick the color of your ending. The war assets did subtly affect more than the color of the ending video but unless you paid very close attention, that was very easy to miss. People expected more than choose your own color.
  4. Much of what we saw in the ending made no sense. Crew members on earth (and possibley dead) magically appearing on the Normandy, the crew apparently abandoning Shepard, the Normandy racing to somewhere for no apparent reason, the fact that though Shepard had forged a peace, even an alliance with the Geth, and had made an AI an integral member of his crew, that he could not reason with the star child that synthetic and organic life could live together in peace as proof the Reaper plan was flawed and no longer needed. How did Bioware ignore this from their own story?!
  5. The fact that it had been established that exploding mass relays destroyed the systems they were in, resulting in Shepard in winning, still ended up doing the Reapers work for them.
  6. Lastly, there was a group, a minority, it appeared to me, that wanted a “happily ever after ending” where Shepard and Liara go off and make blue babies. I won’t deny that group existed. But I do believe a lot people would not have been surprised or upset with Shepard making the ultimate sacrifice.

There, no further need for guessing on your part needed.

3182

The fact that they released the Extended Cut is admission in an of itself. Why release if the ending wasn’t flawed in some way? What other reason is there?

3183

That seems obvious to me. They’re afraid they are losing customers and potential customers due to the huge backlash against the ending. This is a business decision and as such makes sense.

3184

You might have more success with your argument if you stopped calling people idiots or telling them that they wouldn’t know good writing if it bit them in the ass.

3185

Which would actually make it Bioware’s fault. They had a long time to correct the statements they made about how much control players could expect in guiding their story, but instead they reacted with shock that people actually believed what they said. The gaming industry should not just get a blanket pass for bullshit claims they make during the hype of games.

3186

So, after a marathon playthrough of ME3 this week, I finished the game last night, with the Extended Cut, Leviathan, and From Ashes.

First off, all I can say is that 95% of the game was excellent, and I can understand why someone would pick it as a game of the year for last year, though I don’t know that I’d agree. I felt like almost everything was a step up from ME2 in terms of gameplay, and there were some very memorable story moments and missions in there with some real surprises. I felt like there was real payoff for a lot of the series-running subplots like the genophage, the quarian/geth conflict, and even my romance with Liara.

As far as the ending goes…I think I agree with people who said if the game had ended ten minutes earlier with you and Anderson lying there on the floor, they’d have been much happier. The “pick one of three” endings felt…cheap. And by that, I don’t mean that there was only three endings, or that they were so similar, I mean that it was literally “here are the three (or four) possible endings – now make your choice right now which one you want.” It’s very similar to how I feel looking back at the part in KotOR where you can switch to going Dark Side one mission before the end even if you’ve been Light Side up until that point.

Imagine an ending where that confrontation was done this way. You go up to the Citadel and confront the Reapers (I’d have just made it Harbinger instead of the silly starchild thing – the confrontation with Sovereign is one of the most memorable moments in ME1, and a callback would have been welcome). Instead of just being presented with an arbitrary choice, you have a an actual conversation where your options are changed based on the things you’ve managed to do during the game. For instance, if the Reapers claim that synthetics and organics will always be at each other’s throats, if you managed to patch up the quarian/geth conflict, you can refute that, opening up a coexistence ending. If you had managed to get the krogan to help the turians, maybe they were able to actually beat the Reapers on Palaven – giving you the ability to tell the Reapers that they were not as invulnerable as they thought they were. Make the default solution – if you weren’t able to get these extra options – the “I’m blowing everything the fuck up” solution:

That’s just what I came up with off the top of my head, but I would have found that ending perfectly acceptable as the “worst case” solution – the same as if you have no one’s loyalty missions done in ME2, and everyone dies.

However, if you’ve done that other stuff, you can open up some other options. Maybe if you’ve done everything right, you can convince the Reapers that the cycle has to stop – that there is a way to have peace (similar to the “synthesis” ending). Maybe you can merge your consciousness with the Reapers (similar to the “control” ending). But I’d rather have it done through a conversation, or some actual gameplay instead of “here’s your three options, pick one.”

I think the “synthesis” ending was supposed to be the “have your cake and eat it too” ending, but for me it just seemed creepy and didn’t make much sense (How does your magic wave make everyone a cyborg? Does that mean every other type of organic life is now cybernetic too? How does that work?). I would much rather it had been synthetics and organics living side by side like the quarians and the geth. The destroy ending kind of sucks if you’ve spent the whole time trying to save the geth and watching EDI evolve, but hey, maybe thems the breaks. And the control ending…honestly after watching that on youtube it almost seems like the “best” one in that it keeps everyone you care about alive, but it also kind of goes against the theme that everyone in the galaxy should have a right to be free – even the Reapers.

Having three endings with no “perfect” win is not necessarily a bad thing – it wouldn’t be out of place with Deus Ex or Alpha Protocol or something that had a lot more shades of gray in its world to begin with. However, I kind of feel like it clashes with the rest of the Mass Effect series which was always more of your classic space opera with triumph over impossible odds and the idea that if you did everything right, you could save the world.

I will say that I think the stuff after the landing on the planet almost went too far…that much exposition just seemed clumsy. I’d rather have left more ambiguity there. Especially since a lot of it just seemed done to make you better about your choice – I’d rather the choices had just been less arbitrary in the first place.

I will say that after watching the Angry Joe video about the Indoctrination Theory, that actually would have been a really interesting way to go, but if that was what they originally intended, they should have dropped more hints about it through the game.

All that being said, the ending did not fall short on the level of KotOR2 – the only place where it felt unfinished really was that last bit with the starchild, which felt like it was coming out of left field, whereas with KotOR2 you could tell that 20 minutes of fighting mook after mook was probably not the way Obsidian should have ended a more thoughtful RPG. And the rest of the game was very good; but the very end did seem very off key for me. I don’t think I would have stormed the gates of Bioware headquarters over it, but it kept ME3 from being the hit out of the park ME2 was for me.

3187

Disagree, I and I think many others would have preferred a single ending over the pick-your-color ending.

Agree with Isis on synthesis. That’s what I picked during my first time in this game and the whole situation was silly. Here I am, Shepard, deciding the fate of the universe, and it had no impact. They may as well asked me to pick a color instead, because I had sense of what was being decided and as it turns out I made everyone’s eyes glow. I guess that’s a good thing?

3188

You think I set guidelines saying that you have to ignore the stupid things Murbella writes at you? I don’t see those guidelines anywhere. Furthermore, you know Murbella is an idiot. You’ve read his posts.

I find it telling that you think that comment about good writing was directed at anyone in this thread. You’re welcome to take that upon yourself if you like, but I tend to give the sorts of folks on this forum and in these discussions more credit than that.

 -Tom
3189

That’s one way to look at it. I tend to think it has more to do with understanding the limits of your medium.

Furthermore, Bioware did an excellent job making your decisions pay off for most of Mass Effect 3. Not applying that to the final fifteen minutes is hardly a significant failing considering how well it worked for the preceding 30 hours.

 -Tom
3190

None of what you’ve suggested contradicts what I’ve suggested. I’m not sure why you think it does.

And I have read Bioware’s forums. They’re often a toxic soup of angry confused people, no better than Blizzard’s forums. Worse, in fact. If you take some of their comments at face value, as you have, Mass Effect 3 is the worst thing to happen since the Holocaust.

-Tom

3191

By your own admission, they were able to make your decisions pay off for much of the game. So why should they be excused for entirely abandoning that concept just when any rational gamer would expect those decisions to count the most? It’s entirely inconsistent with the rest of the game.

3192

They don’t abandon the concept. They give you one last decision to make. With options governed by the cumulative effect of all your other choices.

3193

Except that there’s no visible connection between your choices previously and the three options. I know that in the game, you need to have a higher war readiness to get control and synthesis, but how are those connected? I can’t see why the synthesis ending is missing if you don’t have enough war readiness, for instance. How does having more war assets contribute to that?

That’s why I say you shouldn’t choose your ending based on three arbitrary choices, it should have been presented in a conversation where you could see how what you did contributed to the ending you pick. Not making that connection more clear is a lot of what leads to the disappointment.

3194

At best, you’re being REALLY REALLY REALLY generous here.

3195

I wonder how much they needed to have some “payoff” for the war readiness collectible/multiplayer-grind aspect of the game. In other words, was Mass Effect 3 supposed to end with a single finale after all the choices you’d made over the course of the game, but somewhere along the line, they decided there had to be someplace to fit war readiness? And if there had been a single finale, would that have been better or worse than the limited choices derided as colored beams?

Personally, I view Mass Effect 3 as having only a single ending, much as I viewed Mass Effect 2 as being a game where a lot of people died. My own take on these sorts of games is that the ending I got is the only ending that mattered. It’s the same with The Witcher 2, Bioshock 2, and Saints Row 3, for instance, all games where I was heavily invested in the story and I had to make mutually exclusive choices about how it turned out. To me, each of those games and Mass Effect 3 had one ending. I wonder how much this sets me apart from people upset about how it all turned out.

-Tom
3196

“Rational” huh? Nice try. I disagree with your premise.

I’ve played plenty of games that assembled a convenient montage of screens acknowledging each of my choices (Fallout 3 and Dragon Age come to mind). I don’t necessarily expect that sort of “where are they now?” denouement from a game. It’s fine, but you have to make serious narrative sacrifices when everything comes to “Congratulations, <insert name here>! You have saved the <insert choice A>, you have vanquished the <insert choice B>, and now you are the hero of <insert choice C>!”

There are other ways to conclude a story, including allowing the storytellers to tell me what happens. I get that some people who wanted to be the ultimate (literally!) storytellers in Mass Effect felt betrayed after hours of choosing who to romance, whose daddy issues to resolve, and which race to genocide. But some of us are okay with the concept that Bioware is going to show us the ending they have in mind.

-Tom
3197

In lieu of a point, use the bolded and underlined tags. But save the italics for when you’re really serious!

-Tom
3198

What you played was the synthesis ending, but with the plot holes taken out of the original ending. And the DLC dialog added for the Leviathan DLC, since you said you bought all DLC. Upthread you’ll find that davidf, who was really unsatisfied with the original ending, thought the cleaned up ending with the DLC dialog added was much better. So there you go, what you experienced was much improved over the original ending.

3199

The way it works, you start with italic, but in the default forum font, that doesn’t give much emphasis, so you add the others.

3200

I love when people new to the forum try to change the font size and color. Their attempt to scream is muffled in a pillow of non-working tags.

-Tom