All My Hard Work and I Get This Ending?

[Drathnoxis]

Snip

I haven't played Spec Ops yet, so I can't really comment on that, but I will concede that there might be a certain type of story where pointlessness may be a useful theme. However, I do think that the game would have to be very well written for this to work and should probably have some other draw such as comedy, mystery, etc; something that the player can walk away with rather than just reaffirming the pointlessness of life. If there is a place for a game where the characters accomplish nothing and the entire point is to show how much life sucks I think there would have to be two guidelines that it would have to follow.

1. Be upfront with the pointlessness of the whole game. I think this ties in with your point about expectation, but this kind of thing really has to be a running theme rather than a surprise twist that is heaped on the player at the very end. Hmmm, I've been sitting here for a while trying to think of how I can describe why this is so bad, but I've realized that there really is no way to explain an emotion like the disappointment that will be felt when expecting the events of the game to wrap up nicely only to find that everything you've just done was pointless. Suffice it to say that having running themes of inevitability and futility gives the player a chance to acclimatise to the outcome or to decide that they don't want to have the kind of experience the game offers.

Some examples of games that did not do this are Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, pretty much for the same reason. The series up to the ending point mainly had a theme of player choice having a heavy impact on the events of the game. So in the very end, when it turns out that none of the choices you've made matter for anything, it's almost like a bait and switch. In Dragon Age 2, we are constantly told how Hawke will have a major role to play in the upcoming conflict. This is constantly reaffirmed through game play (dialogue choices) and cut scenes. However, at the very end, all player input is ignored, all previous choices are negated, and by extension Hawke is made to be a mere bystander in the final events. I haven't played Mass Effect 3, but I believe Shepard is similarly built up and then made irrelevant in the final moments. Now, the pointlessness of all previous choices may make for a decent ending in a different game which has futility as a consistent theme, it's just very incongruous with a game that has a theme of the importance of one person. So, actually I will agree with you that having the wrong expectation is very much the reason that people didn't enjoy Mass Effect 3's (and DA2) ending; however, I would say that it is very much the fault of the games for engendering the wrong expectation.

(Shoot, on retrospect this is starting to seem a bit rambly because I started by still trying to address your hypothetical RPG but then realized that the point of the conversation was the difference in expectations. Doh well, I'm 500 words in and don't want to rewrite the whole thing from scratch so hopefully this is still understandable and relative to your points)

2. The character should actually be their own character, independent from the player. When you give a character appearance customization, dialogue choices, and class choices; then in conjunction with the act of controlling the character it's very easy to project onto the character (e.g. someone walks up and asks you which character you are, common response would be "that's me"). So if a game then invalidates everything you've done, it's easier to feel like the whole thing was a waste of time rather than if they were their own character making their own decisions which then got screwed over. Not to mention this stops the theme from digressing into any form of player control, which can lead to an inconsistent tone.

Also I don't think your Half life to Company of Heroes is that accurate of analogy for why people didn't like the ME3 ending. I think a better example would be Brutal Legends, where the game starts off an action adventure and then morphs into an RTS, because the rest of the Mass Effect series cultivated the expectations about the endings, rather than the expectations being brought by the players unprompted.

TLR Getting to the end of a game with differing expectations of what is to come can be a cause of dissatisfaction with the ending, but in many cases it is the game's fault for not engendering the proper expectations and having an ending that conflicts with the themes present throughout the rest of the game (e.g. ME3, DA2, SMB2)

 

[Mike Richards]

snippidy

First off, yeah, sometimes your choices didn't change everything. You aren't a god, you can't control everything. As singularly important as Shepard was the war didn't revolve around them, it's ridiculous to assume that everything that happens will be shaped by their decisions. Some things need to be out of their/our hands. All games will do this. Isn't it fascinating to take this hyper-competent, total badass who has always been in control of virtually every situation they've ever found themselves in and slowly strip that control away through the horrors of the worst conflict any living person in the galaxy has ever seen? That's amazing, I can't think of a better way one could tell a story like that then exactly what we got.

More importantly I think one of the bigger issues the ME3 situation highlights is that there isn't really single overarching definition for what it means for choices to have consequences. If some of your party didn't survive the suicide mission in 2, even though the final scene of 3 wasn't effected they still weren't alive in 3. Isn't that a consequence? Isn't the story different because of that? Pretty much the whole of of 3 is an ending, saying goodbye and tying things up. The final scene is about resolving the theme of the story, and that theme isn't choice.

I've never really understood exactly what people were expecting in that regard. How many endings was it supposed to have? Exactly what choices were important enough that they were supposed to effect the last fifteen minutes of the game? You want to talk about consequences, the last scene is literally Shepard deciding the fate of every single being in the galaxy.

Sure there were only four ways that choice could play out and always only those four (assuming your GR wasn't low enough that it started locking things out), but they were thematically the right ways to resolve it. I'd much rather have a game with only a handful of endings that that really feel like they were the /right/ endings for it's story, rather then a game with 30 endings that were all "..and then this happened, I guess." If you can make 30 distinct endings that all feel thematically appropriate more power to you but good fucking luck.

This is why so many games end up having the good ending and the other ending. Resolution is unimaginably important in defining exactly what your story is about and it's incredibly hard to build up multiple resolutions that all feel equally justified. So you get Bioshock's good ending, which may be a bit on the happy side but adequately feels like it resolves the character and the situation in a whole and relevant way, and the bad ending, which just feels kind of silly and thrown in because you had to have another option. It's no coincidence that the good ending is a montage of re-framing the iconic image of the Little Sister taking the Big Daddy's hand, calling back to their complicated and fascinating dynamic and recontextualizing it an a new and positive way, and the other ending randomly tosses a nuclear submarine and splicer invasion at you, then throws up its hands and says "Nice knowing you!" This is also why so many games end up making their theme choice itself, because it becomes much easier to make diverging paths relevant when the fact that they diverge is your point. Mass Effect was not one of those stories.

Every conflict in the series, of which there were many, was based to some form of essentially misunderstandings, on assumptions made about the enemy because they were the enemy. Some times they were to a degree justified, the krogan would have posed a serious threat if some action hadn't been taken, same with the rachni. But the actions taken were extreme, and little thought apparently given to trying to find a better way. If krogan culture had been better understood and their relationship to the council strengthened, maybe they wouldn't have needed the genophage. Maybe if the rachni hive mind had been understood and some serious attempt at communication made they wouldn't have needed to nearly exterminate them. It's hard to say for sure either way, but it's unfortunate that they didn't try and find out.

Some of these conflicts were entirely based in fear. The quarians were terrified of the geth when they started to evolve of their own accord and attempted to wipe them out for fear of the geth turning on them. Out of fear for their own new-found existence the geth subsequently turn on their creators to protect themselves. It's easy to see how that could have gone better.

There are more smaller examples but this idea of acting solely on what you think you know rather then making a real attempt to understand and find a better way is reflected a lot over the course of all three games. And it reaches its apex when you understand the Reapers motivations. Their actions are horrific from our perspective but sensible, even altruistic from theirs, and we are such profoundly different beings that it's challenging for either of us to understand the viewpoint of the other.

Each of the choices Shepard is presented with is based around resolving that divide in one way or another, eliminating all voices besides your own, refusing to acknowledge or understand the situation and allowing that to destroy you, everyone uniting under a single hopefully benevolent voice, and attempting to reach an unprecedented level of genuine understanding and communication across different groups of beings.

This is what the story was about, it just wanted to take its time getting there and not hit you over the head with it. But if all you want to do is be Commander Awesome Shepard and kill the evil Reapers because evil you're going to miss things. Of course there's nothing wrong with wanting to be Commander Awesome and kill evil, but we have a /lot/ of other games that do that. This isn't one of them. That was the different expectation. And it can't start that way because /reaching/ understanding over fearful and easy assumptions is the point. It needs to play off that instinct, and we have to move past it. If we can't, we're almost proving its point.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Snip

I'd really like to make a response to this, but It's become obvious to me that my second hand knowledge of Mass Effect 3 is not nearly enough to make any sort of reasonable argument on the strength of the ending. I haven't actually played past the first Mass Effect, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to bow out of this discussion.