4 Reasons Why The Mass Effect 3 Debate Refuses to Die

Scorpid

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If they go back to ME1 and what made it great I'll probably dive back in. But I didn't buy ME3 because of ME2. ME2 felt like them narrowing their vision to practical tunnel vision on shepard and his/her "destiny" and not the cool universe they setup in ME1. After hearing the BS surrounding ME3 I knew my choice to hold off on getting it was justified so I'll just be happy that ME1 at least satisfied all my video gaming wants in a way that none have since then. I hope they don't go triple AAA balloning budget and make what ever next ME like the Halo series where they've gone beyond beating a dead and once oh so profitable horse, to the point of mockery. This entire article has actually drudged up all my old feelings on this series and how it should of been... now I'm sad again. Thanks EA, Thanks Shamus.
 

oldtaku

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They promised us consequences from our decisions.

ME2 delivered this really well. Among other things, depending on what you decided, the entire crew could be saved or lost.

With ME3, no matter what you did you got the same outcome. Your choices were all pointless except locally.

Without that promise of your choices making a difference, well, the ending would have been the ending (and a reasonable one). As it was, it just took your entire decision tree, choked it off, and discarded it. Obviously that happens sometimes in life, but it went against the promise of the series.
 

the_retro_gamer

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The way I look at it is that people had invested themselves so much into this series that for it to end on a sour note it hurt them beyond repair. Then you have the people that thought the ending was good and still have much enthusiasm for the ME. Now we have two polar opposite sides with a burning enthusiasm for the game and thus the debate doesn't die. Though most can be said with other works of fiction that people tend to over invest themselves in.
 

Smurf McSmurfington

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Zorg Machine said:
It's like staying in a five-star hotel and having a wonderful morning but when you get your breakfast it turns out they just shoved a bunch of eggs up a pigs arse rather than having me wait for my bacon and eggs. Sure they took the time to cook it up later but nothing will make me forget that image.
That is both the greatest and most amusing analogy I've ever heard in regards to this situation.
 

wswordsmen

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My problem with the ending was the ending was a rocks fall everybody dies ending. That the writers were convinced was actually happy. Forget that the Mass Relays should have wiped out every solar system they were in. The galaxy's economy depended on trade between worlds and without the Mass Relays that was impossible, so the entire fleet was going to starve to death.

The writers seemed to totally ignore the question of what came next.
 

Retsam19

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Therumancer said:
Shamus, I think your analysis of this is deeply flawed because it considers some fringe components to be serious "sides" of the discussion and omits perhaps the most important part of this entire thing:

The most important part of the ME3 fiasco is that Bioware made specific promises about the ending of the game and what it would include. Bioware made it clear with direct statements that Mass Effect 3 would both answer all the outstanding questions and would NOT include a simple "choose A B or C ending". Bioware proceeded to put in a "choose A B or C" ending anyway, what's more many of the biggest questions in the series were not answered. Bioware released an app that was "behind the scenes" of ME3 and in that app they had the devs saying "well, we decided not to answer a lot of the big questions because they work better as mysteries and give us material for later games in the franchise". Add to this some leaked information about how Bioware actually had no plans for the ending until late in the process, and how what they did was inspired by an adolescent fan whose fan-letter got taped to a director's door, and you can see why there was a riot.
Umm, do you have statistical analysis on hand to say which parts of the discussion are "fringe" and which ones are "serious"? Or are you just picking the parts that you think are "most important" and saying the article is flawed for not happening to mention the one issue you care most about?

And then you launch into how the most important problem is that they broke some promises that they made in some press statements? I'm going to make my own unfounded statistical statement and say that the VAST majority of players of Mass Effect 3 didn't read BioWares press statements or otherwise follow information about the development of the game, so, yeah, I find the idea that this is somehow the "most important part" a bit funny.
 

Joabbuac

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wastaz said:
My main problem with ME1 was the atrocious Mako. I love that game, but every time it makes me go into the Mako I want to throw my controller out of the window and kill small furry woodland creatures (won't anyone think of the small woodland creatures?!)

I know this is strange, but i actually really liked the Mako, with his bumpy random physics and suspension. When i got to the point of being able to control it well, i found all the mako sections a joy, my favorite is the one on noveria.
 

R Man

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I think that this article was a little shallow for such a big topic. Note that it ignores Biowares conduct, both before the game was released and afterwards, which infuriated many fans. The last point is a good example. It is true that there are many different arguments about the ending and disagreements about why the ending was bad, or how bad it was. However, these arguments, though different, are not separate. They all come from a single source, the poor quality of writing in the ending.

To be honest I think that the reason this argument has refused to die is that no one at Bioware, either as individuals or representing the company, has come out and revealed definitively what actually happened and explained it, even if they did so to defend the ending. The closest we got was a quote from the Penny Arcade forum, which was quickly hushed up. As a result the issue has had no resolution or closure. There has been no dialogue, and fans are still in the dark about what actually happened and why.
 

UberPubert

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I don't think I ever actually voiced my opinion on ME3's ending before, at least not in great detail, because I felt like other people had done it more justice than I could, but this particular bit reminded me of one of my larger hang-ups on player criticisms of the ending:

Some people really thought that after three games and hundreds of hours of gameplay, they were entitled to a happy (or at least non-nihilistic) ending. Others didn't need a happy ending, they just wanted the main character (and maybe their love interest) to survive. Other people didn't care about Shepard, they just wanted to know how things turned out for the rest of the galaxy after making all those supposedly important choices. Everybody wanted something different and almost nobody got what they wanted, so we have this huge angry crowd all asking for different things.
I am seated firmly in that third camp where I did not care about Shepard at all. I think caring about a blank slate players are meant to project onto as a vehicle to explore the game is absurd when so many more interesting and fleshed-out characters exist. Shepard may have been the center of attention in the game's universe, but that was only to provide players with a front row seat to every important event, and a personal audience with the most significant characters - that's just how protagonists in these kinds of games are.

Seeing a character like that die at the conclusion of the trilogy felt very natural and I wasn't upset by it in the slightest. Once they'd released the free extended cut DLCs I was perfectly satisfied with seeing how the rest of the universe turned out and I moved on.
 

webkilla

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One of the things that bugged me the most about the ME3 ending wasn't just the "choose what instagram filter gets put over the final cinematic", or "your choise in romantic interest ultimately has no effect on the game's ending" - no...

It was that for what it sort of tried to do - it didn't.

IIRC one of the writers for the game leaked that the head writer wrote the entire ending himself - not letting the team vet or re-work he'd written, as was otherwise the norm to ensure that everything fit together. Supposedly the head writer was big on morally grey endings, endings that weren't all black/white or good/evil. Ok, so he wanted some endings that presented something like that...

And we sure got that, right?

Blue ending: Shepard takes control of the reapers. humanity gains a massive new resources, lots of ancient knowledge and tech... but do we get to see the effects of that in the epilogue? What if Tali was your love interest, could male-Shep use a Geth as a kind of proxy to still be with her... or any other love interest? Or not, if Shepard completely looses his/her humanity from the process? This ending raises all these questions, but answers none of them.

Green ending: Like the above - so many questions, hardly any answers. How would the Quarians respond to suddenly merging with the geth? There should definetely be two VERY different reactions depending on whether they made friends or wiped out most of the geth. Again what about the love interest?

Red ending: if anything, this ones raises the least amount of questions - and yet... what if you'd had the Geth and Quarians make friends? How would they respond to gaining such allies, then losing them again? What about EDI and Joker? How does Joker react to EDI getting killed?

I could, in all honesty, have fully accepted the game's ending - if these questions had been answered. But they were not.

I get that the lead writer wanted an ending that said "in war you can't always win 100%" - fine - but the god damn show me what is lost and what is won, don't leave me wondering what happened.


And whoever came up with the idea of the starchild should just crawl up his rear and stay there - because I'm revoking his license to do anything creative, permanently.
 

Sniper Team 4

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Zombie Badger said:
I think the real reason that ME3's ending is still such an open wound is that the preceding series had spent five years building up to it. Everything was leading to this moment and when five years of emotional investment is met with disappointment it's not going to be forgotten quickly.
That sums it up for me. I was really invested in my Shepard, her choices, her love life, and basically everything that I did in those games. To find out that none of it mattered, that my Shepard ended up the same as all the others, and that nothing I did actually mattered, was a real kick to the face. All that investment, time, and energy, gone.

That, and the fact that BioWare promised this exact thing would not happen. No A,B, or C ending, and yet that's exactly what we got.
 

RealRT

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Anticlimactic, stupid, tries to fool you into thinking it's deeper than it is, emotionally manipulative - any of these describe the ending perfectly. I didn't like ME1 that much - the story didn't do it for me, I already played it in a little game called KotOR. ME2 I adored and it retroactively made me like ME1 all the more. Some build ups from 1 were nicely paid off and there were new build ups for 3... that didn't pay off. The ending was just the icing on a cake. The Extended Cut made it just underwhelming instead of offensively horrible, which I'll take. Still, no Mass Effect 4 for me, no sirree.
 

BareHope

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Shamus Young said:
The first Mass Effect was a slow-paced, high-concept sci-fi opera. ... The humans seemed kind of small and unimportant in comparison. ... By the third game, all of that had changed.
I'm not sure what game you played, but by the end of ME1 Shepard leads a human army against Souvereign and his Geth, and is victorious. So humanity stopped being small and unimportant by the very end of the first game, and Shepard arguably became one of the most important (though not yet THE most important) persons in the galaxy.

In the same vein the game(s) stop being episodic, slow-paced and high-concept (whatever you mean by that) in the Virmire mission, even before the end of ME1. It's half story-driven, with the reapers first taking note of Shepard, and half driven by conflicts in the relationship of the main character with the crew, notably Wrex and Ashley/Kaidan.

So most of the 'changes between games' were completed by the end of the first game.

Which is simply good storytelling. The nearer you get to the climax, the more the worldbuilding needs to be phased out into the background, or at least relate to the struggle of the main characters. And so I fail to see a conflict between 'old guard' ME1 and 'new bunch' ME2+ players in that regard.
 

MiracleOfSound

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TopazFusion said:
[
As it turns out, the 'explosions' aren't explosions at all. They're just 'energy waves' that spread the Synthesis DNA code / Reaper control code / Reaper kill signal, everywhere in the galaxy.
But in the original ending, we're not told this. In the original, pre- extended cut ending, it just looks like everything is blowing the fuck up.
Not to mention we see the Citadel actually blowing up.
 

Trunkage

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Mass Effect's problem, as a series, was: I am a person on the ground with very little firepower. The Reapers are super intelligent, powerful god like creatures. And in no way was there an appropriate way to conflict with them. Soveriegn was destroyed with only a small little help from Shep. ME2 stopped agents of the Reapers but didn't help repel them. All the Reapers taken down by Shep before the ending of ME3 was not by Shep her(him)self. It required a worm and a fleet of ships, with marginal input from Shep.

It never dealt with Shep's inability to do anything when (from what I've read from the forums) most people wanted a fight to end it.
 

balladbird

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wastaz said:
My main problem with ME1 was the atrocious Mako. I love that game, but every time it makes me go into the Mako I want to throw my controller out of the window and kill small furry woodland creatures (won't anyone think of the small woodland creatures?!)
KILL THE MAKO!
The mako was my only real qualm with the first mass effect, as well.

Not so much the exploration with it, mind. That was time needlessly time consuming, but not actively annoying. Any time you were forced to do combat with the mako, though? Yeah, to hell with the mako. >.< Forget hitting a target while in motion, and you'd best be sitting in juuuust the right distance if you want your chain gun to do anything. Couple the need to sit still and eat fire to hit your enemy with a shield that takes all of thirty seconds for the enemy to destroy, and around 5 minutes of inactivity to restore, and you have all the ingredients for a godawful experience.

Half an hour of my time on any mission that involved mako combat could be explained as follows:
-drive up to the sweetspot so that my gun can hit one of the missile turrets,
-knock down its shields with the machine gun, then finish it with the grenade launcher.
-By now my shield is gone and I'm taking damage! Retreat behind the nearest rock
-get up from console, make a sandwich, check on the weather, eat sandwich, return, shield is alllllmost done charging, let it finish
-get into the sweet spot of the next turret
-repeat all above steps until mako combat is done, ponder if the remainder of the game will be worth it, realize it totally is, and continue.


As to the genre shift... I'm a long time fan of RPGs and have never been much for action games, though the last console generation warmed me up to the latter considerably with gems like Uncharted or TLoU. Thus, ME2's change of pace didn't bug me too much. The narrative focus changed, but as a result of this change the characters felt more integral to the plot, and I found myself more attached to them and their struggles, so I felt it was a change I could get behind.

ME3 dialed up the "Humanity, fuck yeah!" themes a bit more than I would have cared for, and the ending was an anticlimax, but it had enough of the strengths from its predecessors to make it worth playing... though to date it's the only game in the series I haven't replayed.
 

Nimcha

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I think people were just expecting completely different things for a lot of reasons. They were expecting a somewhat fixed cutscene where everything played out according to every choice they made. In stead, there was one final big choice that made a lot of difference. Also, I think in general people are not familiar with science fiction storytelling where open ended endings are very common.

I actually liked the ending and there's nothing wrong with it in thematic or story terms. Silly things like the relays can be explained easily, but that's also a problem. People channel their disappointment into endless quibbles over small details that either don't matter or are already explained in the actual story.
 

Trunkage

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Notshauna said:
I really wish people will stop saying some found the ending amazing, it's a cop out and is full of the usual mass media "fair and balanced" bullshit where they always find someone "on the otherside" no matter how wrong it is. The ending is terrible it's indisputable, it's not surprising that people like the ending, I like the Super Mario Bros. movie but it's still terrible. Mass Effects ending is still an illogical convoluted mess that tried to staple reasoning on to mad gods, offer a "big" decision when one wasn't needed and ended up with a hook to the next game that is more poorly written than some of the stuff I wrote in diapers.

It's plain and simple what it should of been, no fancy crucible rewriting the directive of reapers, it's a weapon plain and simple, you don't know what you do until the AI informs you. No more magical star child informing you of everything about the reapers and they're stupid directive, just a simple AI saying hey what you built will do this. And this weapon is a super nova bomb, there is a simple binary choice set it off at full power destroying all of the reapers and everyone in the Sol system as well, or set it off at lower power, potentially escaping, and causing the people in Sol to survive but failing destroy all of the reapers (but, they'd retreat to recuperate their numbers). And after that there'd be a Dragon Age Origins style reveal of the victory celebration revealing if Shepard survived (if you have to include galactic readiness make that be the factor that decides it).
Wait... so are you saying that you wish to impose your dislike of the ending on everyone else. I hate bands like Nickelback, that hasn't stopped them from earning a crust (and a golden crust at that.) My hatred of them doesn't make people like them less. You saying it was a terrible ending doesn't make 'them' think they same as you. They are allowed to think its awesome all they want. And people are allowed to report on that.

Personally I found it an average ending. One the same level as all Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Arkham Batman, Far Cry, Dragonage series. And no where near as stupid as GOW, especially number 2. I don't think we've actually ever had a really good ending to any game.

And, like you said, an end credits like Dragonage or New Vegas would have made all your decision worth a lot more