Honestly, this whole business sounds kinda fishy to me. It is very much weird that they would actually do something, but maybe that's just me being jaded and used to the abuse, much like a battered husband to a 6'2" russian karate blackbelt drunkard.
Still, in the interest of fairness, this IS the most definite answer we had on this whole debacle, and it is, all in all, a confirmation that they're trying to fix it without losing their face in the process, which is to be expected.
If they just came out and said "We fucked up, sorry!" they'd never be able to make up for their lost reputation, at least in their PR department minds, and that's why he's covering their collective ass with the whole "artistic integrity" bullshit.
I'm sorry, if artistic integrity meant anything to you people, you wouldn't have tacked on a completely superfluous multiplayer mode to the end of a trilogy that has consistently been a strictly single player experience, you wouldn't have diverged funds from interactive dialogue trees to do it in a story heavy game whose crown jewels have always been the characters and you wouldn't have claimed that the multiplayer component was going to have no impact on the single player when you were going to make it impossible to earn the best ending without playing it or buyng DLC that is not even avaible yet. Bioware has clearly succumbed to EA's point of view on artistic integrity, also known as "Sorry, I don't know whtat that is"
I play single player games, because i like the experience and the story, and i don't want a bunch of hooting dickholes ruining my experience. I played the Mass Effect series because they are great single player games, despite the flaws in gameplay. I was betrayed by the deliberate intrusion of the multiplayer component, which i loathe. Doubly so by the fact that i was made to shut up about this when it was first revealed with false promises of distinctly separate experiences between multiplayer and single player.
Whatever the outcome of this, i will have serious reservations when buying a new Bioware product in the future, and will more than likely rent it before buying it, to ensure the experience is actually worth full retail price. Also, I will not trust Bioware's PR again on the content of a game, since they clearly have no remorse about straight up lying to their customers and plagiarizing other intellectual properties in the process, no less.
That said, i compiled a handy to do list of things to fix in the ending:
- Add a check to ensure that the characters that were on earth with you don't show up on the normandy during the final cutscene or explain how they're there unscathed while i'm dying on the citadel.
- Explain why Joker was running from the battle like a little *****, or better yet remove that part altogether.
- Flat out remove the whole relay explosion bullshit, it's not consistent with the extablished lore and fucks up the universe beyond repair, effectively nullifying all your efforts by locking everyone in the sol system. No ending is worth pursuing if it invariably ends with all the quarians and all the turian fleet starving to death or dying of infection and the rest killing eachother for a little room on a mostly-destroyed earth.
- Remove the whole "destroy all synthetic life" bullshit and replace it with "destroy the reapers". It makes no sense that the godkid would have such a generic power over things it has not had any part in creating. Tell me who exactly wouldn't have destroyed the reapers if it weren't for that absolutely bullshit clause.
(Also, can you tell me when synthetic vs organic became a major dilemma of the series? ME1 didn't have much in the way of that, it just so happened that the main enemies were synthetics. ME2 pitted you against organics modified by synthetics, while giving you insight on the Geth's motivations and behaviour. Nobody could have ended ME2 without realizing that the Geth were not as different from organics as they looked in ME1, so why is that an issue now? How can you put the Bicentennial Man's subtexts in a plot and then act like composition, rather than self-awareness, is what matters?)
- Give a sense to the godkid's motivation or remove it altogether. We don't need a motivation for an eldricth abomination from beyond the veil of space and time to come and destroy us all, that's just what they do. If you must work one in, make sure it is worth telling. If it would make Sephiroth piss himself in laughter, it's not worth expanding on.
- Actually give closure on the main characters from ME2 other than the three pathetic lines in the comm room.
- Actually give closure to the characters, period.
