It looks to me like EA doesn’t want to be in the AAA RPG business anymore so they’re transitioning Bioware into making multiplayer shooters.
Hey before people pile on Bioware for “losing their way”, just remember that they got so much unwarranted criticisms fo ME3 ending most of the developers there are probably scared for life. I don’t like the ending, but I never feel any sense of entitlement that the developers should make the game EXACTLY the way I wanted it to be. If I want a game that caters to my every whims, I will make that game myself. When I can’t, I accept the creative license of developers.
And to follow that ME3 with ME:A, aren’t they always going to play it safe?
No, the criticism for the end of ME3 was totally warranted. It’s on the record that, unlike virtually everything else about the universe, the two leads ignored the peer review process that was used for the entire series.
Not to relitigate the whole ending squabble again, but I completely support developers making the game they want to. And then I also completely support them coming to the realization that they super fucked up part of it and fixing that fuckup. Because I like games to be their best selves.
I don’t even remember Mass Effect 3’s ending. Something about a star child? In my mind, the game ends when you’re sitting next to the commander guy (Keith David, I think) as he dies watching the space battle that your side was winning. In any event, I didn’t take umbrage with it. Although I did hate all those bits where you would have to chase a ghost kid around a forest in slow motion.
Edit: added spoiler tag just in case.
Oh, man. This is a great point. I’m sitting here struggling to remember the big bad in DAI and I can’t do it. I just remember the demons or whatever.
Before alt right, there was gamergate. Before gamergate, there was ME3 ending pile on. Before ME3 pile on, there was SW prequels Lucas-ruined-my-childhood rage. I bet there is a real hardcore of people that fit the quadfecta, and they are the neonazis marching on the street.
There is a common streak running through them. People say things they dislike, but also feel their dislike is somehow more important. So they cry and moan a lot, but never bother to apply themselves on more than just moaning and crying. Well get fucked, mate, other people have as much right telling their story/expressing their opinion in their own way as these self-entitled twats.
So even if the two leads didn’t follow procedures (I thought the “evidence” of misbehaviour is no more than disguntled empolyees sticking the knife in when they didn’t get their way), did Bioware deserve the amount of vitirol they got? No I do not think so. That is why criticism is unjustified. They didn’t run a child porn ring. They just ended ME3 in a whimper. It is not the end of the world.
Damn dude. You sound like the guys on RPG Codex who screech about how Mass Effect was bad because of SJWs. Not everything is about culture wars. I’m perfectly capable of hating the ending of ME3 for non-political reasons.
Wow. Rude.
I played through it last month. Something, something, dead people, gate, god …?
It usually takes me a lot longer than a month to forget one of the most important story bits of a 50 hour rpg.
I’m talking about the quadfacta people. Most people are perfectly capable of disliking, e.g. Star War prequels, without saying seriously that Lucas ruined their childhood. There is a similar sense of entitlement that will make someone react so adversely to all four of those issues I mentioned.
Yes I am rude to alt right + gamergater + Enders (is that the term Tom used on those ME3 ending haters?) + Prequel haters. The quadfecta is more common than most people suspect IMO.
True story - I still haven’t told my 5 year old that the Star Wars Prequels are a thing. I don’t know how to break it to him that there are 3 movies whose only positive contribution is memes about hating sand and having the high ground.
Lucas didn’t ruin my childhood, but there’s no way to sugarcoat it, those movies are… unfortunate. However, a great example to us all that unlimited artistic license surrounded only by yes-men and no critically constructive editor very rarely works out.
In a single thread you…
- Accuse people who didn’t like ME3 of thinking their opinions are more important than others
- Say that people who don’t like ME3 are wrong because your opinion is more important than theirs
I recommend that WE ALL take your advice. Nobody is trying to tell you that your opinion is wrong and if you go back to the the old Mass Effect 3 spoilers thread you will find that is much like this one, with the only people going crazy over the ending being the people who are mad that others didn’t like it.
This is why the ME3 spoilers thead was so insanely toxic. It always came down to the following exchange:
Random Person: I don’t like the ending of ME3 because X Y Z
Bioware Defender 1: You just didn’t like it because it wasn’t a “happy ending” (eventually people started specifically saying this was not the reason for their dislike of the ending, but they still got this response)
Bioware Defender 2: Respect the artistic freedom of the authors moron!
How can we ever rate a story in any game/movie/book/etc if the counter is always “respect the author’s artistic freedom!” For me, I feel that an author is free to do whatever they want with their story and I am free to tell them that it it is terrible (or good, or average, etc etc).
It was so great right up to that point. Should have just gone to cutscene after that.
It’s unfortunate that this thread has taken the turn that every other ME thread has taken. Happy N7 day.
My criticism against the haters is never “you aren’t supposed to criticise them because they own the story”. The criticism against the haters is “if you want the ending to be exactly what you want, write a fanfic/DIY with a mod/whatever. Don’t feel like they owe you a good ending or anything.” What the haters did was throwing a giant tantrum until Bioware gave them what they want. And what bland crap that extended cut is, compared to say ME2 ending. Montage. Again. That’s what you get when the customer dictated the product.
A Bioware with more backbone would have said “we respect the reactions of our fans, but we think this is an interesting way to end a story people cared so much. btw we have more DLCs with a lot more interesting things going on so the journey isn’t ending just yet!”, or something like that.
There is also the problem of not taking ME3 as a whole. The ending may be bad, but the journey leading to the ending is some journey. There is using the pew pew gun to take down a Reaper. There is fighting a Reaper with a giant worm. And so on. All the previous 30-40 hours leading to the ending means NOTHING? And because of the ending they are giving it, what one star out of ten? Review bombing because of just one thing almost always makes no sense.
And you can’t look at ME:A without looking at ME3. Because the storm over the ending is toxic. The sequel cannot possibly be above the storm. And because they don’t take risk in the narrative in order to avoid a repeat of ME3, ME:A just ended up bland. Oh mysterious alien tech! Again! (“My face looks tired” doesn’t help either.)
You know, let’s just drop it. I’m not bring ME3 ending in here again.
That is bonkers. I mean seriously off the deep end.
Or even Casey Hudson
@MisterMourning @Telefrog @Gigglemoo
DA:I from the top of my head: There’s been an explosion at the conclave where templar and mages were going to have a peace discussion, there’s a great rift in the sky where deamons are pouring through. You play as the sole survivor of the explosion and your hand is glowing green, and is the only thing that can close the rifts. You (or rather Cassandra and her gang) declare an inquisition to save everyone from the demon inferno, since the mages and templars are too busy fighting each other, the “Divine” is dead and the Chantry is too busy blaming you for everything to bother about the rifts.
You then have to pick a side - to get the templars support or the mages.
And lots of other glorious stuff - until the major Plot Twist:
One of your companions from the start - Solas - is an evil elven GOD and is behind both the explosion (unintentionally) because he wants some kind of orb that Corypheus has (or had, you destroy that in the final battle against him) that will destroy the world for humans, and bring forth the elven imperium.
I love how they put the actual ending of the game in a DLC (Trespasser).
Damn - are there really no other DA:I lovers in here? =)
Edit: I didn’t know I was a nerd up until this point.
DA:I is…fine? I’ve cooled on it a bit since I first played it. The characters are a ton of fun, but the main game limps to an underwhelming finale, and like Andromeda it suffers from Ubistuff-itis. (I do think the open world encounters work better with its combat loop than Andromeda’s though.)
If they’d had left out the filler regions and quests and icon hunts and folded Trespasser into the main game, it could have been great.