4 Reasons Why The Mass Effect 3 Debate Refuses to Die

RevRaptor

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Yea mass effect was a beautiful dream but its execution was a total mess. So many disappointed fans, I really like the games but they could have been so much more.

For me the the moment that really signalled the third game might be in trouble was right at the start when you couldn't import your Shep because the character generators were not compatible from game to game. That's just sloppy and then to add insult to injury they removed the weapon holster and ready animations because they couldn?t fit them in with the new shiny graphics. Gods that was a shitty decision, totally broke immersion every damn time I put my weapon away.

Despite that I really did enjoy the game, I didn't have high hopes for it but I did enjoy it :)
 

AD-Stu

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LOL - that's true, the face import bug annoyed the hell out of me. I actually went as far as getting a screendump of my ME2 Shep up on a laptop next to the PC trying to make them match... couldn't.

There were all sorts of bugs (one assumes because things were rushed) that annoyed me about ME3. The quest log was beyond awful, which seems strange because it was something they'd done just fine in the first two games. And the animation bugged me too, made FemShep in particular look like she was trying to jog around with a nasty case of chaffing :p

Like the problems the first two games had though, I can forgive all that stuff. The ending, on the other hand...
 

JMac85

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I stopped playing as soon as Shepard got on the elevator, and accepted the indoctrination theory as the "real" ending.

Yeah, the striping of RPG elements was a bother, I like micro-managing equipment for my character and my squad, but I liked the Mass Effect series more for the story and universe building. The third game took a big steaming shit all over it. Mostly because the head writer of the first game (who was the co-writer for the second) wasn't involved with the third. Go figure.
 

The_Blue_Rider

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The ending to Mass Effect 3 would have been absoultely fine.... Had it been in a series that actually had themes relevant to that.

Organics vs Synthetics was never the main theme of Mass Effect, the main theme built up through Mass Effect was unity, being able to overcome anything should we work together. It ties in well with the squad you build throughout each game, 2 and 3 are all about coming together to defeat a threat that we could never defeat individually.

The Reapers destroyed countless civilizations through dividing and conquering them thanks to the Citidel. Our cycle was the first where we had the chance to stick together and take the fight to them as a united galaxy. Mass Effect 3's ending goes against everything the games had stood for before that
 

4173

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I agree with some of Shamus' points, but the thing that really bugs me is the game telling me that rather than fighting the Reapers because they are threatening the galaxy and everything living in it, what I should really care about is EARTH because I'm (the player) a HUMAN...
 

Therumancer

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theluckyjosh said:
Shamus Young said:
"Lots of people compared it to 2001: A Space Odyssey."
And the comparison usually goes something like ...
"Arthur C. Clarke can get away with a deus ex, star child ending ... but you, sir, are no Arthur C. Clarke."
Well, also Arthur C. Clarke was writing a different style of science fiction as well, and that ending fit with the rest of the movie, which was basically an atmospheric pot boiler/mind trip to begin with. In comparison "Mass Effect" was always high adventure, even in the first one, the bottom line is Shepard is an epic hero, and the whole idea has always been about him beating overwhelming odds, albeit he was never as much of a conceptual underdog as he was in the first game. The trippy, surrealistic, ending didn't fit the game, and the overall message and issues inherent in it directly contradicted events in the game. This is beyond the whole point that we were told there would not be a "pick A B or C" ending at the end.

Now in comparison something like "Dead Space" could have a series finale like this (and might already have it, I haven't beaten DS3), as a big part of the entire premise was things getting into your head, the Necromorphs are supposed to make people go crazy just by being present, the Markers get into people's head, and the hero winds up literally grappling with his own hallucinations when the forces he's up against try and mentally force him to kill himself and stuff. If Issac Clark was to say wind up in communion with the main marker and have it pretty much tell him "I am here to eradicate human life because it's for the best... choose which form of suck occurs from this point onward" it would blow chips but at least you could say it sort of fit with the series... which is a horror game. In such a case a lot of people would be disappointed, doubtlessly including me (I'm kind of a romantic, even when it comes to horror), but if it was done right it could still be awesome and I doubt you'd get the same kinds of mass complaints and years-long anger.

A better example would be sort of like if "2001 A Space Odyssey" suddenly had people dueling with light sabers and stuff well beyond the established tech level... perhaps after having the equivalent of Ming The Merciless step out of the Obelisk and go "Muhwahahaha foolish humans, I subverted your computer, and now I shall finish you... prepare to DIE". It wouldn't have fit the tone of the movie up until that point. If he had done that, it wouldn't have been a classic of science fiction, and would be widely mocked for being so dumb. Of course at the same time it still wouldn't have been reviled as much as ME3, because Mass Effect 3 capped a trilogy, and the ending was so bad that it pretty much undermined everything that had come before it, not just being a bad ending, but making everything else bad by association once you know where it all ends up. Sort of like if someone takes a shit into a gallon of ice cream, sure, you might be able to pull the turds off the top, and the rest of the ice cream might technically be fine and safe to eat, but your going to throw it away because you know someone plopped a giant turd right there on top of it, the turd ruined everything, even if one argues the rest of the ice cream is not tainted.
 

Karadalis

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Okay... where are all these people that wanted a "happy" ending that these game journalists claim allways exist and thus everyones argument about the bad ending is just entitlement?

When the whole thing blew up i never saw anyone claiming that they wanted to see shepard take his chosen fuckdoll and ride with him/her/it into the bloody sunset on the mako.

Never... people where pissed because the ending made no sense, because Bioware came out not 2 weeks before launch and claimed it wouldnt be A, B or C and that all choices would matter (2 weeks before launch, they actually directly lied to peoples faces knowing very well what the ending would be like) Not to mention that nothing in the original endings made any god damn sense.. like the normandy escaping and leaving everything and everyone behind without so much as a word of explanation... da fuck?

And then how they behaved after the whole thing blew up in their face and people called them out... claiming "artistic integrity" (while working for EA... HAH thats a laugh!) that people where simply feeling "entitled" and should get off their high horse (yeah how dare people to expect to get what they paid for and where promised... what world are those people living in?)

In short bioware reacting like an arrogant douchebag to the whole situation and placed the whole blame at the players feet. They even made a rather cynical additional fourth ending to the original three where when you reject the BSchilds options everyone simply dies.


And the reason the argument doesnt die is mostly how bioware conducted itself and how much disdain they showed for their customers and how little value they gave about peoples opinions and feedback. Simply put: Bioware looks down on their own customers and that is something that irks people till today.
 

Therumancer

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Charcharo said:
Eclectic Dreck said:
Charcharo said:
The reason I never finished the first game was the UI. Not the genre, not the difficulty not the gameplay (those I liked a lot).

Its UI was Dog Shit. Whoever made that (and the War Thunder UI) needs to change their line of work. They just suck epicly at it.
Mass Effect 1's UI was a mess and something I would expect from a newbie Half Life 1 modder. Not from a AAA developer...
At the time, one would not have considered Bioware to be AAA. Both Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect began their lives and spent most of their development before being acquired by EA. I suspect you'd find the budget for either game would be remarkably low if indeed it were possible to actually get such information.
Maybe. After all AAA means high budget, not good games (at least no anymire, and thank God, since quality cant be measured).

I do wonder whether Shamus will respond to Therumancer. Escapists staff never do respond to direct things though...
I've gotten responses from Escapist staff before, but it doesn't happen very often. I don't expect one here either because among other things I'm pretty unpopular due to my politics and stuff. I've directly addressed Shamus before. :)

No big deal though, I mean I made the point I wanted to for those reading, it's at least there for consideration. If Shamus is reading this, and he does something similar in the future, perhaps he'll think differently about it. At the end of the day it's his column though and as such a platform for his opinions, which I can respect, even if I strongly disagree with them.
 

Drago-Morph

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TopazFusion said:
If you played "The Arrival" DLC for Mass Effect 2, you might expect that each exploding relay is also destroying its host star system, thus wiping out the galaxy you just spent three games trying to set right.
I'm glad you brought this up.

That relay-exploding overview is the most sloppily put together animation you ever did see.



Each 'explosion' is MASSIVE, many many times bigger than a fucking supernova. And the 'explosion' that the Normandy is seen fleeing from, is actively damaging the Normandy.

To someone who's played every game and all the DLCs, this looked very much like the entire fucking galaxy was blowing up. And worse yet, the same thing happens no matter which 'color' you pick for the ending.

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.


The other stupid thing about this animation is the way the explosions originate from the very outer edge of the galaxy, at the bottom of the map.

Okay, umm, which relay is that supposed to be? It's certainly not the Sol Relay (aka: Charon Relay), because the Local Cluster is NOT on the outer rim of the galaxy:
It's obvious the game artists really screwed up here. There was clearly no collaboration between them and the writers.

What we're left with, are images and animations on our screen, that absolutely fail to show what the writers are actually trying to get across.
Holy shit, really? I thought the relays were blowing up, too. I was really pissed at that, for two reasons: one, it meant that you were the bad guy, since at least the Reapers just killed the people and let new species rise up. You just blew up the whole galaxy, ain't nothing ever coming back from that. Two, it meant that the entire ending was nonsensical; every shot after that where everything wasn't very very dead was wrong. It made no sense. It was literally like I spent 5 years, 3 games, and countless hours having one of the best rides of my life only to have it end in some sort of strange fever dream.

I was pissed for a few days, but I just stopped caring entirely about the ME franchise before the Extended Cut. So it's news to me that I didn't genocide the entire galaxy that one time.
 

Briantb

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I'm one of those people who played ME for hundreds of hours even picked them up when the came to PlayStation and replayed them to have my choices in ME3 so yeah I'm a little annoyed that all those choices didn't mean a damn thing and all I got was three different colored endings. Even with the extra ending dlc content its still a poor excuse of an ending. Adding the multiply to increase your war assets for the final battle was just annoying. I don't mind there being a multiplier just don't force me to play it to get a better bad ending. In the end your right there's quite a few arguments as to why this topic will not die anytime soon. (Or at least in till everyone who's played it has died)

In the end I truly enjoyed the story and gameplay of ME3, which makes the ending so much more annoying for me.
 

Therumancer

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4173 said:
I agree with some of Shamus' points, but the thing that really bugs me is the game telling me that rather than fighting the Reapers because they are threatening the galaxy and everything living in it, what I should really care about is EARTH because I'm (the player) a HUMAN...
Well, understand that there are some themes about that in the game as well.

See, conceptually Humanity is the newest species entering into intergalactic society, but it's also a very powerful one comparatively speaking. First contact came in the form of a war fought against the Turians who are the strongest military force in the galaxy, and humanity did pretty well given the situation, so well in fact that it's scary, given that one would have expected humanity to be crushed outright (and it would have been had the full force of the Turian military entered into it, but as limited as the clash was the Turians were paying dearly for their successes). Humanity also successfully stood up to, and demolished, a couple of other minor space powers, the Batarians, the organized pirate clans. The result is that a lot of the elder races distrust humanity as newcomers, and don't listen to humanity when they should. A big part of the plot initially is that a lot of people don't want to see a Human Specter because they dislike and distrust humanity. What's more while humanity has largely been playing "good galactic citizen" including limiting it's number of Dreadnaughts and such, the Council has made a point out of not doing it's part in helping to protect human colonies and the like. A lot of the ethical questions that exist with the Batarians for example exist because The Council refused to intervene when the Batarians intruded on human territories, but of course conversely refused to intervene when humanity got a little... excessive, with it's retaliation. The second Mass Effect game has The Council refusing to honor it's general commitment to protect colonies, by pretty much leaving the Earth Military to it's own devices to protect it's own colonies when it asks for help. Furthermore when the council is presented with evidence in the first game, it refuses to do anything about the various problems that are mounting, and arguably the whole finale at the end was because The Council was dismissive towards humanity and it's warnings. This is why the final moral choice was "do we let the council die or not?" that's not purely a good or evil choice (Renegade isn't evil) because frankly The Council caused the entire mess with it's anti-human bigotry and refusing to accept evidence that was being plopped down right in front of it.

As they point out a few times, the whole Paragon/Renegade choice system isn't good or evil, Shepard is a good guy and trying to do the right things no matter what you select. If your renegade your a lot more ruthless and anti-alien, but in the scope of the game that isn't evil because it's not baseless bigotry, the council really has been screwing humanity and causing problems. As Renegade-Shep points out, why should he give a crap about aliens, when they are willing to just let human colonies die, and why should Earth Military help support their wars and police actions when The Council ignores earth when it has asked for support against groups like The Batarians and Pirate clans? Paragon Shep takes the attitude that he can change things by being nice to everyone, Renegade Shep takes the attitude that earth is on it's own no matter what nice words are thrown around. Who is right? Well that depends on player choice. I prefer the attitudes of Paragon shep, but I do notice that even if you play Paragon through the first game, The Council is pretty much saying "we don't care about human colonies" in the second game, which according to the database if I remember is exactly the same attitude they have been having all along.

Now yes, it is a bit of humanity-horn blowing that the most important artifact in the universe came from Earth-Space and as such earth becomes the flashpoint of the storyline, but that's not a huge deal. It is important to note though that the Alien races have been telling humanity "play by our rules, but we won't help you" since the very beginning. Not being willing to help defend earth is nothing new, and they ALWAYS have an excuse, every single time. This is a big part of why you can walk around with the whole "recruiting to defend earth" agenda even without some of the final reveals which get everyone involved. Basically the elder races take the attitude that humanity is a race of brutish children who have to be handled with care because of our power and technology (they could wipe us out, but it would hurt to do it, and genocide isn't something they do casually, as they are still grappling with the moral implications of the Krogan plague... besides we aren't that directly hostile or malevolent) they actually think things that hurt and slow down humanity are good as they help keep us in our place since we're not really ready to be involved in galactic affairs like the big three (hence why there is no Human council member to begin with). At the same time the minor species are envious that the council actually deals with humanity and takes them seriously to any degree, given that humans are a relatively new discovery. The basic point there being that military force is trumping say economic contributions, with a new military power getting it's reps face time with the council regularly, where the guys who spent 5000 years building the galactic economy (the Volus) don't even get their own embassy office, meaning the "minor" races aren't exactly part of the humanity fan club either.

Basically the point to begin with is pretty much "Humans are having trouble again, we ask the council for help, and they do nothing and leave us to our own devices". Remember refusing to seriously help defend earth comes after the mess they caused by not listening to humanity's reps during the first game, and refusing to help human colonies in the second game even when a bigger threat is discovered, sure they always have a good sounding excuse, but the point is they always have an excuse. This is also why Cerberus as a group can be fairly heroic in concept, the leadership might be pretty evil in it's endgame plans (or turns that way) but their whole "protectors of humanity" thing is not without merit because after all... humanity really can't rely on anyone else. Also while they never explored it other than mentioning it, they made it clear Cerberus did sort of have it's opposite numbers among the other species. If anything it could be argued the major difference between Cerberus and The Council was that Cerberus was honest about not liking aliens and putting earth first, The Council tended to lie about it and come up with excuses, but it all came down to the same
basic thing. The Elusive Man was a piece of work, but the rank and file Cerberus guys? As you saw in ME2 a lot of them were good guys, doing the hard things that needed to be done in a truly hostile universe... and without Cerberus humanity actually would have been destroyed, along with the rest of the galaxy eventually.

That's my thoughts at any rate.
 

one squirrel

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ME3s ending caused the fans to go "Heeeey waaiit a minute, there is something seriously fishy going on. I better step back and have better look on the whole thing!" And what they found wasn't pretty. Fans (including myself) finally realized, that the whole plot had more holes than a swiss cheese. It had been hold together the entire time by nothing more than a few beloved characters and an atmospheric universe.
For me, playing the ME series was like eating a cheap cake: it tastes really good, but afterwards you feel a litte sick because the thing was way too sweet and the nuturitive value was close to zero.
 

Therumancer

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Briantb said:
I'm one of those people who played ME for hundreds of hours even picked them up when the came to PlayStation and replayed them to have my choices in ME3 so yeah I'm a little annoyed that all those choices didn't mean a damn thing and all I got was three different colored endings. Even with the extra ending dlc content its still a poor excuse of an ending. Adding the multiply to increase your war assets for the final battle was just annoying. I don't mind there being a multiplier just don't force me to play it to get a better bad ending. In the end your right there's quite a few arguments as to why this topic will not die anytime soon. (Or at least in till everyone who's played it has died)

In the end I truly enjoyed the story and gameplay of ME3, which makes the ending so much more annoying for me.
Actually I think the issue would die if they actually did create a proper ending for the game. No ending will of course make everyone happy, but they can achieve creating an ending that everyone does not hate, and which fits in with the rest of the series and it's tone. The effort would also mean something, and would probably not go unnoticed. The "clarification" DLC was kind of an insult because it really didn't change anything.

At it's core though I think a big part of the problem is that EA/Bioware (probably mostly the former) doesn't want to change things because in doing so, and acknowledging the fans being right, they will be giving the consumers power, and that's one thing the game industry does not want to see happen. EA would doubtlessly rather let Bioware and all of it's IPs like Mass Effect die, than concede to fans over something like this and change something.

Right now the best case scenario would be to change the ending somewhat with the intro to the new Mass Effect game, that way they can sort of concede the point without surrender, and consider it under "inconsistincies" common to sequels. Of course I'm not holding my breath for that either.
 

Therumancer

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one squirrel said:
ME3s ending caused the fans to go "Heeeey waaiit a minute, there is something seriously fishy going on. I better step back and have better look on the whole thing!" And what they found wasn't pretty. Fans (including myself) finally realized, that the whole plot had more holes than a swiss cheese. It had been hold together the entire time by nothing more than a few beloved characters and an atmospheric universe.
For me, playing the ME series was like eating a cheap cake: it tastes really good, but afterwards you feel a litte sick because the thing was way too sweet and the nuturitive value was close to zero.
Actually people were well aware of those holes, as was EA/Bioware which is why so many people were irritated when they did not do what was promised and answer the outstanding questions. Indeed a lot of the riot happened when it was revealed that they never planned to plug those holes and give answers, because they wanted to retain the mysteries to answer in future games. This is something that goes along with the whole "we were promised no choose A B or C ending".

Now granted, chances are it wouldn't have been possible to answer all those questions with any kind of finesse in one game, but no real effort was made.

I'll also say that there are less holes than many people might think, a lot of details are actually present in the encyclopedia thing than answer some of the questions.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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I am surprised Young didn't bring up the tonal whiplash in the ending, because that is what I see a lot of people pissed off about. The fact that ME3 up until the end is a typical heroes journey about rallying the troops and doing a last stand in the face of massive odds. It is tonally quite similar to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica but as soon as the ending starts we get an ending that discards the tone of the previous 20+ hours of gameplay in favor of something that feels like 2001. The tone changes, the theme changes and the premise gets thrown on its' head in an ending that's a literal deus ex machina.

That, along with the broken promise of no "Choice A, B or C ending" is what I mostly see people reacting to. It also seems rather legit to me, because Bioware broke the trust between developer and player, in that their final product was not what they promised nor what could reasonably have been expected based on hype or previous games.
 

Autumnflame

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People loved the series that much.

The fan fic, fan art, theories, the community that developed .

Mass effect was the modern day Epic. Something we hadnt seen in our generation and unlikley to see again

People pored millions into Dlc, merchandise, The games, comics Ect Ect.

Overall themes ran through the games core ideals and mechanics. and it was all thrown out at the last minute.

Bioware till that point was seen as the company that could do no wrong

They ALWAYS delivered and gave the people what they wanted even if the didnt know it

The ending to ME3 however was a spit in the face to every fan of the series.

Even though it was a huge mistake by Bioware.

The fact that people were so passionate and loved their work previous to that is something any other developer has to envy
 

ajr209

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Mr. Young couldn't be more wrong in this article, both in explaining "Why The Mass Effect 3 Debate Refuses to Die" and in using a tone that for the most part shoves the blame onto the consumers who were wronged rather than the company who was wronging them.

Lets start at the beginning- in interviews during the early stages of development bioware employees stated that while he ending hadn't yet been written it would change based on decisions the player made throughout the course of the series and as already pointed out by others specifically would NOT be an a b or c type ending.
When it came time to actually write the ending EA took it away from the main team and gave it to a couple of other guys, cutting the people who were writing the damn rest of the game and had put their reps on the line by saying it would not be an abc ending and choices would matter out of the loop. This is largely to blame for the ending seeming so disconnected from the rest of the game. These new writers gave it an abc type ending that stayed the same no matter what the player had previously done thus blatantly breaking the word of people who actually cared about the project and weren't total hacks.
But why would EA knowingly and willfully piss away every ounce of good will bioware had built with their space opera? Money. Well short term quick money anyway, a little bit of thought might have led them to the conclusion that in the long term they'd lose customers for future games and with them lose more money than they stood to gain with their plan. EA wanted to see if they could get away with withholding the "good" ending, and some other content that led up to it, from a multiple ending game and selling it to the consumer as DLC. I hope anyone reading this can appreciate what a dangerous precedent this succeeding would be. This coupled with a comparatively rushed production schedule, two years instead of three, makes what was made out to be the grand finale to an epic journey turn into a cynical cash grab.
Some people like to paint the situation as fans bullying EA into sacrificing artistic integrity by going back and reworking the ending to please them, not saying that's what mr. Young did I'm just saying I've seen it a lot. That wasn't the case. They already had the shit and only released it for free when the massive backlash forced them to abandon trying to wring whatever they were planning on charging out of the consumer, people were supposedly already getting death threats so one can imagine the kind of clusterfuck it would have been if it wasn't free. Artistic integrity went flying write out the window long before the game was ever released.

To sum it all up the reason the mass effect debate refuses to die is because the issue isn't just the tale of a story concluded badly, it's the embodiment of much of what's wrong with the AAA gaming scene: Promises wantonly broken, a project rushed beyond necessity, multiple teams not communicating with each other, vital things that should have been on the disc being withheld for aftermarket sales, consumers getting treated to the old bait and switch, a sequel becoming a cynical cash grab, an attempt to implement yet another industry damaging business practice, and a greedy corporation who shortsightedly tried to squeeze their loyal customers for more than the sixty bucks they were entitled to completely ignoring that thanks to repeat customers you make more money in the long term pleasing your fans rather than screwing them.