4 Reasons Why The Mass Effect 3 Debate Refuses to Die

GloatingSwine

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We should all consider ourselves lucky really.

It's not often you get to witness the precise moment a videogame company disappears up its collective arsehole.

But that's what happened ten minutes from the end of Mass Effect 3.
 

hazydawn

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senordesol said:
My problem with ME3's ending is rather simple.

We were teased throughout the series with a reckoning.

There was no reckoning.

That's it. That's the long and short of it. Kill the Rachni Queen? Doesn't matter. Rescue the Council? Doesn't matter. Failed to gain all of the war assets? Doesn't (really) matter.

You can go through the entire game, making decisions at complete random, and not have it make a damn bit of difference to the outcome. That's where people get are getting pissed.
No, it's not that simple. That's one of the points certainly but like the article said people wished for different things. I didn't like that part either but the main problem for me was the damn starchild, the three retarded choices, and all in all it just went totally against the built up themes of the series. Other people only wanted a happier ending. I wouldn't have minded Shepard and the whole of the Normandy and Earth dying if it were better storytelling wise.
 
Dec 16, 2009
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Shamus Young said:
4 Reasons Why The Mass Effect 3 Debate Refuses to Die

More than two years later, people still argue over the ending of Mass Effect 3 and the series as a whole. Why are people so passionate about it?

Read Full Article
thank you for summing this up so articulately. I did always feel bad for saying I hate ME2 and ME3 because it sold out ME1.

Now I can say ME1 was niche and became something that is common place with ME2 and 3. which is still a douche move by BW, I got sold something in ME1 that they told me I could invest in for the trilogy, just for it to become a bait n switch.

Although another point would be series/plot inconsistencies, such as with the Arachni for example
 
Dec 16, 2009
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senordesol said:
My problem with ME3's ending is rather simple.

We were teased throughout the series with a reckoning.

There was no reckoning.

That's it. That's the long and short of it. Kill the Rachni Queen? Doesn't matter. Rescue the Council? Doesn't matter. Failed to gain all of the war assets? Doesn't (really) matter.

You can go through the entire game, making decisions at complete random, and not have it make a damn bit of difference to the outcome. That's where people get are getting pissed.
I'd go with that too.

When I completed ME1, I expected Shep to die in ME3. Although I thought all them decisions I made with Shep were gonna have repercussions on the galaxy I left behind, that everything I did would matter in the big picture. but it didnt. I fell in love with a Lovecraftian dream, and woke up with a generic hangover.
 

Kingjackl

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trunkage said:
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.
You've touched on an important point there, which is that there are limits to what can be done in a series like this. I have seen so many fan-proposed alternatives to the ending, and they never seem to realise that their whoop-de-doo space battle or Indoctrination Theory-style 'journey to the centre of the mind and punch your way out' idea just doesn't work. While the actual ending was hardly a success, it's pretty clear that it was an attempt to give Shepard some agency in a situation where s/he should have forfeited it long ago.

Perhaps you could argue that the premise was flawed from the very beginning. A game where your enemies are giant indestructible starships would make more sense as a space-flight simulator to be honest. Instead of running around fighting proxy battles with corrupted foot soldiers for 3 games, maybe the core gameplay should have been about flying around in the Normandy launching proton torpedoes at the Reapers' thermal exhaust ports.

I don't agree with Shamus' point of view that the changing of genre between ME1 & ME2 was in any way relevant to the ME3 controversy, especially not when ME3 actually had the best RPG elements of the three. Besides, Mass Effect 1 was an action shooter as well, it just wasn't a very good one. The rule with RPG fans these days seems to be that the quality of an RPG is directly proportional to the shittiness of its combat. I'm sorry, but it's no good having the deepest dialogue tree or the most obtuse loot tables if it's not fun to play.
 

SNCommand

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My impression was that people hated it for leaving things unexplained and not ending on their terms

But frankly I think leaving the ending ambiguous was in no way detrimental, in fact it would have made a sequel much easier to make

As for not ending on the player's terms, well, there's always people who don't appreciate such things, but there's not much one can do with that, except for that one guy who created his own little happy end modification, I think the fact that this [http://www.moddb.com/mods/mehem-the-mass-effect-3-happy-ending-mod] exists and has over 20 000 downloads with a 9.6 out of 10 rating tells you much

Personally I thought the bittersweet and otherworldly ending we initially got wasn't that bad, and I think the extended cut eliminated any questions people had
 

MirenBainesUSMC

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This is probably one of my favorite topics of gamedom only because I instantly swept into the store, lore, and the great writing from ME1... ME1 had everything you possibly wanted in an action story arch.

A main villain you could focus on whom may or may have not been totally in control of himself ( Saren)

Picking up a few characters a long the way, each from a different culture with visible signs of a loose but forming bond as they traveled the known universe.

Romance. Death. And of course Shepard whom had a knack for that Indiana Jones-esque " Oh No is he....." and then he arises from the ashes to get back into the fight. It was the best and most complete games of the two.

I would argue the problems of ME3 started with ME2 when we had to totally diss-associate ourselves from the main characters of the 1st game and were teased by their cameo appearance although some altercations ( Such as when you save Ashely Williams and she tells Shepard that he was a Cerberus Hack) were pretty tough to swallow, especially if you chose to romance them. Liara acted like you were a ghost whom she didn't want to have anything to do with you... and you were left going... What the -----? They basically did a Re-boot between the series in which the 2nd game should have been a bridge between what they started and how they were going to finish it...and that never ends well. A new ship. New characters. New everything.

So when people grumbled and said " Ok...ok...so you killed the man. Brought him back to life. That is your one SF rule used by Issac Asimov to suggest something happened of which you didn't have to explain how. Fine. We got very detailed character bios, their own lives, own stories, and it was more of a piece of electronic literature than a game. People got very, very, very, attached to their favorites and depending upon how you played the game would theoretically give you YOUR experience in ME3. I stress YOUR because I know some people ( like myself) Who actually replayed the game 110x just to have separate saves in order to play different time-lines that ME3 would promise.

When ME3 came along.... it was character butchery. In fact once again, if someone was a lazy gamer whom didn't feel like playing the last two, there were things set up to where they didn't have to play it because they could re-set the course of the past through annoying gimmicks and chosen answers. They had all the characters they needed but they somehow figured adding a lesbian yomen Traynor , a news reporter Allers, and James Vega. Um hello. We had over 8+ characters people really wanted to continue but you gave us these cookie cutter add ons PLUS you diminished many roles of other ME2 characters like everyone's favorite Merc Zaheed Misani, Jackob Taylor, Grunt and Jack... Miranda Lawson. News Flash. You don't take characters that you wrote immense story lines for in your 2nd episode only to make them temporary squad members for linear " levels" in your next big finally game. That was an awful and damning choice.

Lasty --- yes. The ending was probably the last straw. You put up with the massacred characters...were Irked by the seemingly DA2 style run and fetch " Quests", so why not just be happy with......and....ending...that....gave...you....the star child.

Wow Bioware. Simply Wow.
 

Vault101

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I thourght it did die

in that it happned and as bad as the ending was we're over it...or at least I am

of coarse should anyone defend it I do feel my blood preausre rise...

SNCommand said:
My impression was that people hated it for leaving things unexplained and not ending on their terms
being ambiguous is all good and well

IF IT WORKS

in this case it didn't work, leaving us without (desperatly needed) answer did not do anything good, it didn't do what it was suposed to do

compare it to Portal 2....which gave us exactly as much info as we needed
 

MirenBainesUSMC

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And may I add..

Most of the pain and damage was done before the Citadel DLC, Leviathan, and et al. Bioware was always a day late and a dollar short with their bad PR --- literally thumbing their nose at the fan base.... Hense when someone mentions Casey Hudson, you'll literally get rotten tomatoes thrown.
 

zinho73

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Don't forget the lies, man. That's what bothers me the most.
Not the hype, not the sub-par writing (although it hurts and is very present in the first scene of the game too). Interview after interview Hudson and the other writer promised things that simply did not happen.
 

ExtraDebit

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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.
Exactly! I would forever remember mass effect series with disappointment precisely because I cared and love the series. If I had to nitpick there are a ton wrong with it as well:

1) Tekken 6, a fighting game, got more character customization that mass effect 3 which was supposed to be a RPG hybrid.

2) The challenge of the enemies didn't evolved, they just rush and shoot at you, they never give us any enemies that need us to think and use our skills.

3) Too linear, most of ME3 is get from point A to point B and shoot everything in between.

4) Doesn't have enough potential to fuck up. In GTA games, we can have a car chase and then suddenly we are forced into a gun fight on the highway because we crash our car and fly out the window then we spotted a boat near by so it's now a gun fight to the docks which then turned into a boat chase, all this mutated from a simple mission of getting from point A to point B, the mission could very well be just a car chase or any number of permutations because the game was dynamic. This is not so with Mass Effect in story or gameplay.
 

Therumancer

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Retsam19 said:
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.
No, and I really don't need one having followed the issue and that's something that comes up more often than just about anything else involving the ending, and has also inspired stunts like a bunch of cupcakes with "A B C" (otherwise all the same) being mailed to their offices. It's also apparently a big part of why a lot of people who started out defending Bioware, like Jim Sterling, seem to have taken the other side, the whole thing basically being a generally shitty thing to do when you consider everything. Or at least I'm guessing that's a big part of why he did given that he spends tons of time railing against this kind of behavior in the games industry.

But yes, game developer promises are a big deal when people buy a game because of what they have been told was in the game, especially when they find out later, that the company never had any intention of keeping those promises.

I mean it's fine that you don't like my point, but you should really leave it at that. As I've been following this pretty much since day #1 and watched how much things exploded when Bioware's statements in their behind the scenes app were revealed, and have been listening to the arguments, this is ultimately a big factor in just about everything. Unless of course your defending Bioware at which point the defense usually comes down to "Well, they lied in press statements and you should just accept that because it's the way it is. It's your fault for believing what they said."

The thing that makes "the line" fairly unique is that it's being held against Bioware, and isn't a few different viewpoints all pretty much taking at each other. Sure that DOES happen, but at the end of the day even after years everyone is united against Bioware, and there are some points on which pretty much everyone agrees.

The true test of "the line" however will be when ME4 comes out, and whether or not it maintains enough "membership" and fire to tank the game through not buying it if Bioware doesn't change the ME3 ending, via the intro of ME4 if nothing else. This being done even if it's a great game, since really the gameplay and such has always been secondary to the central point.

Now the fringes within this are people who say go after ME3 in it's entirety as opposed to saying "it was a great game except for the ending which must change and better conform to the promises made" which is where "The Line" stands. That crowd are those who for example attack the writing because of the space ninja, or how ME3 took that character which didn't fit into the plot and had him kick Shepard's butt to escape in direct defiance of the outcome of a fight you just had with him (which is something a lot of games have done the equivalent of, but was new, and kind of annoying for ME3). People are far more divided on things like that. Then you of course go back to the whole Prothean thing and the day #1 DLC to get that story-centric squadmate. Some people have been pushing to force EA to refund the cost of DLC that should have been part of the game to begin with, that's another fringe position even if lots of people have been upset about that one.

Your of course free to disagree with me, but I still maintain that the issue of ME3 cannot be fairly raised or analyzed without the promises made by Bioware, and the direct statement that they game would not have a "choose A B or C" type ending when that is exactly what they decided to put into the game. The fact that none of the endings are satisfying to fans simply compounds the basic problem, along with the fact that for a game where "decisions matter" nothing you did up until that point, including things that directly undermine the whole point of what happened, mattered one way or another, which of course was again counter to what was said about the game and it's ending.

Of course along with that comes the simple point that Bioware by it's own admission apparently rushed the whole ending of the game out. While it's a point you hear less frequently, a lot of people point out that the whole ending sequence of the game is a joke, not just the star child part. This is of course starting with the fact that a lot of what you do during the game is to obtain, develop, and prepare resources for the inevitable final battle. A number of the key choices in the game also directly involve Citadel security. This has lead to comments that it was messed up that The Citadel is magically overrun at the end of the game no matter what defenses it had, and the resources you gathered mean nothing in the end except perhaps one mild scene showing Shepard breathing on a pile of rubble. Reading the flavor text, background, etc.. as a lot of people pointed out by the time of the final battle the good guys are supposed to be using technology equal to that of the Reapers, indeed a lot of it is Reaper tech, something they have not faced before. What's more knowing what's coming they have developed things that no other species has ever used on them before, meaning that by definition the Reapers should not in control of the battlefield due to not having been able to predict what they would be facing. If you read the flavor text of some things you recover, by the time of the final battle ships should be carrying things like singularity missiles (ie missiles that create a black hole at the point of impact). If you did your job well, the Reapers should not have ever been able to just sweep in and take The Citadel, and the entire space battle should have been very different, as opposed to more or less seeing the Reapers ignoring stuff thrown at them and ripping alliance ships to pieces... as the good guys would have been firing back with a lot of their own guns, and missiles dragging them into special anomalies and stuff. It should have been god awful nasty in both directions, and of course the whole point was that if you gathered up/developed enough of this stuff it probably should have been a reaper massacre.... while brought up less often, the point here being that it's not just the final ending selection, the entire climax of the game pretty much disregards everything else you've done up until that point. Your sitting here going "oh hey wow, our ships are now carrying singularity warheads, that's going to be bad news for the reapers" or whatever and feel like you've accomplished something... and nope... the good guys get massacred, Shepard gets sucked up in a beam, and meets Star Child. Less people complain about the whole sequence of events being garbage, but that's another point that's out there.
 

AD-Stu

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Some interesting points in the article - I agree the "lots of factions wanting different things" thing is definitely a factor in why it won't die.

The big picture for me though is this is perhaps one of the ultimate examples of what can go wrong when you don't start with the end in mind. Even Drew Karpyshyn admits he only had a vague idea of how the series was going to end if he had've been at the helm the whole time (spoiler alert: the vague ideas he did have were even more bleak than the ending we got - though good execution could at least have made it satisfying). But throw in writer changes, lore changes to suit gameplay tweaks (LOL thermal clips) and innumerable changes made purely for fanservice and it's easy to see how it became a big mess by the end.

Casey Hudson saying over and over again "it's all about the fans, the fans are like our cowriters, blah blah blah" then turning around and trying to play the "artistic integrity" card definitely didn't help either.
 

MirenBainesUSMC

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Therumancer --- Yeah you brought up other good points. The tech. What happened to the new and improved armor and laser cannons that were learned from the Collector Tech? You would have thought that the war like Turians would have had multiple cannons of such nature on their battle cruisers.

It was and still is a mess. You can tell the people running the show suddenly began to wing-it in terms of the details to the ME universe.
 

MirenBainesUSMC

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But throw in writer changes said:
then[/b] turning around and trying to play the "artistic integrity" card definitely didn't help either.

I believe the 3rd Installment was reaching for the casual of casual players. I remember watching the partying for the open-day release and the commentator they were using said " I've never played Mass Effect but I'm sure to buy this one!". Why? Because there's more button mashing and shooting?

I suppose I am also expected to apologize for wanting such crazy and scary things like dialogue, an actual working story, and RPG elements.
 

The Great JT

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I thought the ending was just confusing at first and the DLC fixed it (though fixing shouldn't have been needed if they just made it right the first time), but I was more in the camp of "what happened to the galaxy as a whole?" I fully expected one, some or all of the squadmates would live, I got a larger squad through ME2 with no problems, I was banking on Shepard dying/sacrificing him or herself/taking the Reapers with him, so I was mostly wondering what's going to happen to everyone else.

I will say this, I hate the ending for one reason: the endless debates basically make everyone forget the entire rest of the game. It' really unfortunate since the game is so fun and has lots of great character moments. NEVER FORGET MORDIN.
 

AD-Stu

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MirenBainesUSMC said:
I believe the 3rd Installment was reaching for the casual of casual players. I remember watching the partying for the open-day release and the commentator they were using said " I've never played Mass Effect but I'm sure to buy this one!". Why? Because there's more button mashing and shooting?

I suppose I am also expected to apologize for wanting such crazy and scary things like dialogue, an actual working story, and RPG elements.
I dunno if it was reaching specifically for casuals (they may have dumbed some stuff down from ME1, but it's still a long way from Flappy Birds too), but I think they definitely hurt themselves by trying to cater for players who were new to the series. If you've got new players super-excited about the third installment of your epic trilogy, you use it as an opportunity to sell them the first two games, not to mess with the third game just to cater to them...