3421

My guess is no.

3422

Funny how polarizing the ending is. The two friends of mine who are day one RPG guys like me both thought the ending was fine and fitting. I did as well since I didn’t think the whole fistpump brofist ending was appropriate, but maybe it is just a philosophical difference. At any rate I don’t discuss it much because of the hilarious amounts of rage it seems to have engendered. (I am thankful for the music that the extended cut produced, so the internet brouhaha wasn’t completely useless)

3423

I would say the ending is uniting rather than polarizing…

3424

Yes, Murbella, we’re well aware that you hate every game you’ve ever played. Tell us something we don’t know.

3425

Can you support this in any way?

3426

Joe M: Oh, I was 100% ready for the game to end in tragedy. The game had been prepping my character for hours to expect a bad finale, but that I’d go down fighting at least. I was ready for a fitting tragic end. What I wasn’t ready for was my dead companions to show up on a ship, running away, and for a plot twist where apparently machines and organics can never ever get along, even though I had proven otherwise earlier in the game.

They did address the first point really well in the revised ending, and part of the second point as well. But like I said, my emotional reaction to the ending was already set based on the original ending.

Also, I can totally see the second point not being incongruous for certain characters. If I’d been playing a Renegade Shepard, or if I hadn’t been able to get machines and their former masters to find peace earlier in the game, then I could see the ending being totally appropriate in tone with those choices and their consequences from earlier in the game. But they just weren’t with mine.

Something similar happened to me at the end of Dragon Age too. I ran into some commonly known bug where I couldn’t build my relationship with the NPC I liked and kept getting the same old conversation choices over and over, and I found the courtroom scene not nearly as satisfying or well done as the one in Never winter Nights 2, and so the ending kind of sucked for me in that game too. I suspect I would have felt differently if I hadn’t hit that bug and actually still cared about the characters by the time the ending rolled around.

3427

You would dispute the fact you come here primarily to complain about games?

I mean, it’s ok. Just expect as brief and considered a response as your posts in virtually every RPG thread merits.

Fair enough, I wasn’t aware there was a bug of that magnitude in either game. That would put me right off, too, holy shit.

As I recall, I wasn’t quite certain what happened beyond the fact my Shep lay dying on the floor and a whole lot of ambiguous scenes followed. I was happy a handful of my friends escaped but I wasn’t sure if it was even meaningful, whether the universe would pull itself together or they’d just be stranded and slowly fade away. I honestly liked that. So many games wrap things up tidily and pat you on the back but this was different. Not perfect, but different.

I’m impressed you managed to unite the machines on your first go. I flubbed that one something fierce on my rather cruelly efficient FemShep (decisions boiled down to who has bigger guns?)

I really need to play NWN2 one of these days. I’ve heard so many good things about Mask of the Betrayer but I’m not sure where to find the time…

3428

I felt almost exactly the same as you when I finished it the first time. While playing I had all these great visions as playing the trilogy through again with a different character and class. Then that ending. I was put off enough that, as soon as it was over I actually packed all three games away and ignored them for about 18 months. Once the Citadel DLC came out I decided to give it a try again.

Interestingly, playing through ME3 with all the DLC including the extended cut ending, I didn’t find it nearly so disappointing. There were still some problems I had with it all sort of boiling down to one choice, rather than reflecting the culmination of choices made along the way. But it was an extremely enjoyable experience and I finished it with a renewed love of the series. Everyone may not feel the same, but I did find it a satisfying experience once time had passed.

3429

I can’t believe there’s no still way to get this or ME2 in versions with all the DLC.

3430

BG2 is their best single game effort, IMO, hands down. Mass Effect as a whole though, wow, what an experience. I bought a 360 to play the first one and it was money well spent even if I had never played another 360 title. I liked ME2 a lot. ME3, I thought they dropped the ball. They just didn’t do a good job of making all those choices I had made, and they had tracked, across 100+ hours and two previous titles, meaningfully differentiate my experience of ME3 from someone that had just started the series at 3. Also the galactic war score bullshit was a complete disservice to the single player history of the franchise. I literally had every positive score choice possible across all 3 games and it was not enough to get the ‘good’ ending. They wanted me to play the MP shit or the fucking iphone app. That has EA written all over it.

3431

Really, I have to say, I don’t even play the SP Mass Effect (at least not until I get all the DLCs for Mass Effect 2 and 3), but the mp is the one redeeming feature of the game.

3432

ME3 MP was pretty nice. Really think they missed an opportunity/could have done more with that one.

Still have ME3 installed to play some MP once in a while.

3433

But it was a single player franchise. I don’t play MP games at all, really, especially not on a console and I was not about to start with ME3. I don’t even have Xbox Gold.

So tying SP success to MP participation? Shitty.

3434

I think one of the things they did with the updated ending DLC was lower the requirements for getting the “best” ending, basically no longer requiring you to play multiplayer. I could be wrong though, that’s just from memory. Still, I agree with legowarrior, the multiplayer is much better than it has any right to be.

3435

Playing Destiny, I find myself wishing that someone would have made a similar style game series out of Mass Effect Franchise. Set it between ME2 and 3, with the multiplayer from ME3 in an semi-MMO explore-able/mission-based overworld? Man, I want to play that game.

Also, much like Macho Grande, I am never going to be over the ME3 ending fiasco. This is a grudge that will be held.

3436

Turning mass effect, a single player story based rpg, in to an online only, repetitive loot grinder would probably not be seen as positive by many fans of the series.

3437

Well, their loss. I am enjoying it. It replaced tribes ascend and tf2 on my go to mp fps.fix.

3438

The ending wasn’t that bad. It certainly doesn’t compare to the loss of an entire flight squadron.

3439

You didn’t need to play the multi-player part to get the score needed for the best ending. You could also play that iOS ‘game’ to get the same effect by increasing the percentage of points that ‘counted’. Which was still BS, but was better than forcing MP on a SP game.

All that being said, I still think ME3 is a fantastic game - right up until the last five minutes. Had the game ended with Sheppard on the light elevator, and a path had been chosen for you based on how you played the game to that point - even if it was one of the three crappy original endings - it would have been far, far better than it was. But that doesn’t take away from the 99.9% of the game to get to that point, IMO.

Well, maybe a little bit. But you can ignore the ending. Or download the ‘happy’ ending mod if you’re on a PC (so I hear) - which isn’t awesome either, but better than the last five minutes as they are.

3440

I still think there was so little difference between those endings that it really didn’t matter. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t force people into multiplayer for singleplayer progress, but if the difference is five seconds worth of cutscene with no intelligible narrative distinction, who the fuck cares?