zinho73 said:
Other bad endings on other titles (like Fallout 3, Half-life 2 and others) are just poor ideas.
What's the issue with Fallout 3 and HL2? Both endings made perfect dramatic and narrative sense:
F3's core storyline was basically a series of parables about the necessity of sacrifice (of yourself or others, depending on your alignment) for the greater good, and how the selfishness of a few in the scramble for survival had screwed things up for everyone and was likely to make it worse. What happens to your character was the narratively necessary closing of either a variant of the hero's journey or a redemption arc... the bit where you usually have a party-member that's ostensibly immune to radiation there is less a plot hole than a mechanical bug that they didn't realize didn't quite fit.
HL2's was a simpler loop-arc, and again made perfect sense. In HL1 you start by opening pandora's box, then you blow something up and close the box. In the second game YOU come out of the box, a god-being releases you with the intent of doing what you're good at, and, despite your struggles... you do, and something blows up, driving out the outsiders again... then you go back in the box. Where Fallout was about choice, Half-Life was about inevitability, plus a bit of meta-commentary on shooters that's a bit dated since it references mostly a genre that died out 5 years into a 15-year development cycle.
Sure, the dialogue wasn't brilliant in either case, but it's clear that they actually had a writer and she actually knew her stuff. So I wouldn't call either 'bad'.
... this sort of loops around to the central discussion of exactly why ME3's ending was OBJECTIVELY bad rather than just people not liking it: it was literally bad writing, a deus ex machina. God appears, he exposits some stuff that's mostly unrelated to the plot to this point, then he offers you a set of choices that are mostly de facto equivalent.
The Deus ex machina ending has worked in exactly one video game, and conveniently it was called Deus Ex (yes, I'm aware that they repeated it in the sequels, but there it didn't work, generally). However, it only worked for two reasons: (1) It was a shaggy dog joke consistent with the game's references to Illuminatus!, a brick joke regarding the title, and a pun, acknowledging the fundamental silliness of game and setting that had to that point gone unacknowledged. (2) The choices you were given were informed, not by exposition, but by the rest of the plot and (3) largely you had the choice because you'd put a lot of work into SEIZING the choice, it wasn't just handed to you by fate. Casting the player as the god that created the deus ex machina actually sort of makes it not one, in a way.
ME3 had none of those redeeming qualities. Stage just rotates, Zeus says well done, Heracles, and offers you a seat on the throne or to keep adventuring. Wasn't even a respected dramatic device in the time period the practice originated, it was the equivalent of writing a romance novel about a shirtless werewolf and a sparkling vampire falling for a boring mary sue.