Bioware vs. their Fans
- Thread starter CaptOfSerenity
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Well as vALVE has stated "games are delayed for a while but they will suck forever" they do not care if they do not push out a game fact or how many games they put out they tend to care more about them simply being good.
It is the principle. I don't like that if I buy something (not rent), it can be taken away from me for whatever reason. I could understand being blocked from buying things in the future, or blocked from continuing to play an MMO in the future...but I don't like the idea that I pay $20 for a product and then that product can be take away from me bam, just like that. I have only bought one thing from Steam, before I found out about how Steam works. Now, if there is a game on Steam I'm interested in, I'll see if I can buy it from the makers themselves rather than through Steam. For example, Trauma. I could have gotten it cheaper from Steam...but then it wouldn't really be mine. So instead I spend a bit more money and bought it from the artist. Now the game is mine forever and it can't be taken from me. Additionally, the creator gets to have more of my money than if I had gone through Steam.Folji said:
That they might only do it rarely, doesn't change the fact that they are presenting themselves as selling you a product, but reserve the right to repossess that product at any time. That is not a business model I want to encourage.
One of the reasons why people think some of the detractors want the happy ever after ending, is because even Angry Joe, in point 7, says he wants the option of the Disney happy ever after.Kevlar Eater said:
As for your 3 points. You state Bioware failed all three criteria as if it were objectively true. It isn't. It is opinion.
I think the ending:
1. Has no massive plot hole (it has one minor plot hole--how some of your crew got on the Normandy--that can be convincingly explained away. Further I see why it was done and doesn't detract from the ending for me)
2. Has closure. Further I saw my ending as a positive one...bittersweet, but ultimately positive. But then I don't jump to overly negative unsupported conclusions like--"If you choose the synthesis ending you turn everyone into Husks! EDI and Joker are clearly not husks. Stop being melodramatic"
3. Makes sense. It was pretty clear to me. In no way obscure or even that difficult. I mean, it wasn't David Lynch. It was pretty straight forward. But then I have experienced a lot of 1970s scifi, so I've see these sorts of themes before.
I think the ending does all the things people say they want it to--and I say this as a person who does not at all buy the cop-out of the indoctrination theory.
I have watched Angry Joe and read the Google Doc. I've heard all the complaints. I think most of those complaints are invalid and more than a little ridiculous and disingenuous. That is my view.
Detractors can have their view. That's fine, what do I care? I mean, lots of people didn't like the ending of Battlestar Galactica though I did. Yet those BSG fans didn't try to force the creators to redo the ending (which is the worst kind of entitlement), thus depriving me from the ending I enjoyed as well as the ending the creators wanted to make. And here is where one of the problems come in. The detractors don't want "extra clarification" they want a completely different ending...one that would negate the ending we were given. They feel entitled to demand a new ending that fits what they want, as if Bioware were their bitches (to reference the Niel Gaiman commentary on fan entitlement, which you can find here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/02/catch-up-and-entitlement-issues-once.html)
This is the ending we have and one that the creators wanted to do as well as one that fans like. If you want your own ending, write fanfic. That is your right.
But I wish the detractors would stop acting like Anne Wilkes from Misery and I wish they'd stop presenting their personal preferences as objective fact and lastly I wish they'd stop making such vicious attacks on people who did like the ending.
I never heard a single bad thing about Mass Effect 2 and is honestly one of the best works they have put out. Yeah the upgrade system might be a bit mindless, but who cares the gameplay is a HUGE step up from ME1 and the story is really engaging.
As for Bioware caving into making another ending, that is totally called for. Yes it's their game and it's their choice if they don't want to remake it, but not doing so would be a huge mistake. The ending spits on everything that Mass Effect stands for and not to mention the RIDICULOUS amount of plot holes. For some reason people seem not to want remake the ending to change ME3 just because the fanboys are complaining. Even though the ending could ruin the entire series, has plot holes which make no sense, and doesn't support what mass effect has been known so much for, choice.
As for Bioware caving into making another ending, that is totally called for. Yes it's their game and it's their choice if they don't want to remake it, but not doing so would be a huge mistake. The ending spits on everything that Mass Effect stands for and not to mention the RIDICULOUS amount of plot holes. For some reason people seem not to want remake the ending to change ME3 just because the fanboys are complaining. Even though the ending could ruin the entire series, has plot holes which make no sense, and doesn't support what mass effect has been known so much for, choice.
I can imagine the scorn because I was alive and gaming in 2004. But you know what? I liked KotOR2 back then as well. But that scorn was not universal. KotOR2, if you check metacritic, has an 85 rating. Lots of the industry gave KotOR2 praise. If over time the grumpy people gain some critical distance and realize they were being a bit ridiculous, that isn't revisionist history...that is people calming down a bit and when not caught in the throes of nerd rage realizing that the game is actually really good.ckriley said:
And DA2 (which got a 79 metacritic rating)? I loved it then and think it is a great work of art--as did many others. I'm pretty sure people will come around over time and come to see its great value, just as they did with KotOR2.
I certainly am sure the people will come to appreciate Mass Effect 3 in the future...at game that has a 93 metacritic rating, by the way.
Like trooper6 says, that's really just your perception of it. I personally see the largest plot hole as being the Normandy flying away, but that can easily be explained as we have no idea how long Shepard was unconscious for. Otherwise it makes complete sense (the purpose of the Reapers is completely logical) and any of the three options that you choose give complete closure. You don't see the long term effects of your choices, sure, but you know what your choice was. Closure with all the supporting characters is achieved moments before you undertake the last mission, when you get to either call everyone or see everyone in person and say goodbye to them. If you want to know more about them go write a fanfic.Kevlar Eater said:
The ending works. I think a lot of this outrage is grieving over a character that players have spent around 100 hours building and developing. That's understandable, but it doesn't change the fact that the ending makes dramatic sense.
I still consider them my favorite game studio and with the exception of Jade Empire and their Star Wars games have yet to find something they made that I haven't enjoyed
4. Make the choices you made before the ending actually influence it, like it was promised in multiple interviews before. Most of the choices you make in ME3 are rendered irrelevant with the current ending, especially true for the Geth/Quarian conflict.Kevlar Eater said:
I lost a lot of faith in Bioware after how they handled the ending of Mass Effect 3. I thought it showed not only poor design choices, but complete disregard for the fan base. However it's obvious that the ending was the best Bioware could do. They hadn't quite finished and couldn't have pushed the release back any further due to EA's financial year projections.
So they scrambled and came up with what they could.
I'd still buy a Bioware game - but probably not as blindly as I used to.
So they scrambled and came up with what they could.
I'd still buy a Bioware game - but probably not as blindly as I used to.
Honestly, what i dislike is the blatant abuse of their PR department. The games can suck all they want for Bioware's standards, they will still be better than most games that come out these days. Sure, they're no Baldur's Gate 2, but we can take it. Hell, even the ME3 fiasco would've been tolerable if they just expanded the endings decently. If they gave closure, and showed you how you made a difference, i would've been fine with the A/B/C endings shenanigans. Sure, it would've been disappointing, but not torches and pitchforks material.
I seriously don't understand american companies. Seems like all they can do is walk on eggshells.
Newsflash: it did more good to your case to have that one guy from ME3's writing staff throw Hudson and Walters under the bus than any of your PR riddlied non-statements. People want decisiveness, people want definite answers, by stonewalling us you're giving us good reasons to doubt your good faith, you're giving us reasons to think you're deliberately damaging your products.
There would be far less people thinking this whole thing was just a plan by EA to deliberately ship out a product that needed fixing only to charge us for the fix if they simply came out and explained themselves. I'm not even saying they should apologise, just explain what in the fuck went throught their heads.
When you start deliberately obfuscating your processes in order to save your own ass, you're doing it wrong.
I don't want to ruin anyone's lives, but this is an industry of entertainment and, much like i will pass up a movie whose director/protagonist/whatever i don't like, i want to know whose brilliant idea this was (especially if, as it turns out, it was a select few's), so i can avoid them in the future, much like I avoid David Cronenberg when he gets out his soapbox and starts writing movies instead of just directing them.
I seriously don't understand american companies. Seems like all they can do is walk on eggshells.
Newsflash: it did more good to your case to have that one guy from ME3's writing staff throw Hudson and Walters under the bus than any of your PR riddlied non-statements. People want decisiveness, people want definite answers, by stonewalling us you're giving us good reasons to doubt your good faith, you're giving us reasons to think you're deliberately damaging your products.
There would be far less people thinking this whole thing was just a plan by EA to deliberately ship out a product that needed fixing only to charge us for the fix if they simply came out and explained themselves. I'm not even saying they should apologise, just explain what in the fuck went throught their heads.
When you start deliberately obfuscating your processes in order to save your own ass, you're doing it wrong.
I don't want to ruin anyone's lives, but this is an industry of entertainment and, much like i will pass up a movie whose director/protagonist/whatever i don't like, i want to know whose brilliant idea this was (especially if, as it turns out, it was a select few's), so i can avoid them in the future, much like I avoid David Cronenberg when he gets out his soapbox and starts writing movies instead of just directing them.
Valve has the common sense and human decency to actually work on their games until they're done and done right. Unlike pretty much everyone else that big, save maybe bethesda and cd projekt (irrational is good too, who seem to be content with shitting out whatever buggy mess is on hand at deadline, taking everyone's money and wiping their hands of it. In short, valve actually cares about their reputation and community.
Actually looking back at Half-Life 2, Portal 2, and L4D2's histories one will find Valve actually spent tons of time working on something else, then threw it all out at the 10th hour and just made something up relatively fast.Joel West said:
Valve can be described as good on accident a lot of the time.
I honestly don't get this sentiment. The remaining 95% was a grab bag of really quite good gameplay/story mixed with rather uninspired missions, broken gameplay elements, pointless time-wasting, and rather poor story elements.Gemore said:
My initial reaction was that everything after legion's last scene was downhill from there. Truth of the matter is though that much of the elements before this point were a mixed bag. Couple this with only the facade of any actual decision making (I found out very quickly that one's choice in the ability side of things really changed nothing at all, and the weapon upgrades were almost unnoticeable in terms of actual effect), and a good chunk of the game was rather boring, predictable, and uninspired. The game really has more wrong with it than the last 10 minutes (Which I'm of the opinion is just the cap on a massive mound of "meh"). The entire endeavor seems rushed with very little actual foresight put into it, and very little attention paid to anything even remotely akin to depth.
Edit: I also don't understand how anyone could have put more than 30 hours into the game itself. I finished it in just over 20 hours, and was relatively completionist in the endeavor. I scanned every system to the fullest, fulfilled almost every side-mission, and in the end was missing only about 100 or so war assets. Hell, half this time was pretty much spent doing the rather pointless fetch-quests, returning to the citadel, searching the entire bloody thing to find out if I found anything that somebody wanted, returning back out, scanning bloody well again, etc. & so forth. Really, a massive chunk of the game is spent doing absolutely nothing of value. Actually gameplay is logged somewhere between 10-13 hours worth of time, with very little actual replay value added. And really, a good portion of this time is cutscenes/dialogue. The game is bloody well short, with only a facade of length added to it in a cheap and pointless fetch-quest system with a broken journal entry system.
Which makes me wonder. The journal system is so obviously broken, I have to wonder if it is intentional. Adds length to the gameplay, as you continuously have to return to the citadel and go back out again. In essence hiding the fact that the game is ridiculously short by modern standards.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think the game was *bad* in the strictest sense of the word. Much of the game was quite good. But I can't seem to find a single element that was necessarily "stellar". Further, I found myself getting quite bored during certain parts due to some rather uninspired missions (Biggest offender in my book is Cerberus base: How many bloody times do I have to clear out a nearly identical room filled with nearly identical baddies? Ronnach was another example... wave of geth, disable gun, wave of geth, disable gun, wave of geth, I'M DONE!).Gemore said:
That said there were some missions I had quite a bit of fun with. I just don't really get how any reviewer that is being completely honest could give any game, ME3 included, a perfect score. Or give ME3 a near perfect score at that. It's a solid game, and I mostly enjoyed myself, but I found quite a bit to fault it with to say it was any better than "A good bit above average". To many elements were either rushed or not given a large degree of consideration. I don't understand the 9's and the 10's, really. After reading a few I really do wonder if they actually played the game at all.
An 8 is reasonable in my mind, but anything more and I really am quite cynical towards. As far as "professional" reviewers are concerned, anyway. If you absolutely loved the game in it's entirety, I'm not one to tell you wrong. Every game has it's fans who view the game differently than others(And some are quite awful that have fans that love them). I personally though just don't see it. It simply isn't the "Bee's Knees" or whatever you crazy kids use these days.
The main issue and its been stated by other posters is publishers.
Publishers have too much power in the gaming industry, lets take for example Novels.
When you write a book, the publisher provides a great deal of financial support and usually editors to help pick up grammar mistakes. But the publisher never gets a say in how the story ends. This is left up to the Author.
Publishers, like EA, are in it solely for the money as they should be. Their job is to provide financial assistance and impose deadlines. Thats it. However, publishers in games have direct influence on development and use the threat of "pulling funding" to add in or alter features. This job should be the job of the development team not the publisher.
When multiplayer suddenly became a big thing many games were published with shoddy multiplayer because the game was originally meant to be singleplayer but publishers felt they needed to branch into the MP market and forced development teams to add multiplayer aspects. This ruined both the singleplayer and the multiplayer experience.
This shouldn't have happened, yet they do this and worse.
Publishers are needed and they are a necessary evil in the long run, but they've grown to0 powerful.
Publishers have too much power in the gaming industry, lets take for example Novels.
When you write a book, the publisher provides a great deal of financial support and usually editors to help pick up grammar mistakes. But the publisher never gets a say in how the story ends. This is left up to the Author.
Publishers, like EA, are in it solely for the money as they should be. Their job is to provide financial assistance and impose deadlines. Thats it. However, publishers in games have direct influence on development and use the threat of "pulling funding" to add in or alter features. This job should be the job of the development team not the publisher.
When multiplayer suddenly became a big thing many games were published with shoddy multiplayer because the game was originally meant to be singleplayer but publishers felt they needed to branch into the MP market and forced development teams to add multiplayer aspects. This ruined both the singleplayer and the multiplayer experience.
This shouldn't have happened, yet they do this and worse.
Publishers are needed and they are a necessary evil in the long run, but they've grown to0 powerful.
I dislike EA more than Bioware, Im just irritated at Bioware recently for all the shitty interviews talking about artistic integrity when they used their artistic integrity to use stock images for talis face and ripped a picture of deviantart for the stargazer scene. Thats real integrity there...
As for EA, they Killed Westwood, so I can never like them DX
As for EA, they Killed Westwood, so I can never like them DX
Another company bought by EA and gutted of it's good staff that runs on brand name alone.
It's like taking Ford Sedans and putting Lamborghini stickers on them, eventually people WILL catch on. Aside from the few people driving their sedans around screaming "IT'S NOT THAT BAD YOU JUST DON'T APPRECIATE GOOD CARS!"
It's like taking Ford Sedans and putting Lamborghini stickers on them, eventually people WILL catch on. Aside from the few people driving their sedans around screaming "IT'S NOT THAT BAD YOU JUST DON'T APPRECIATE GOOD CARS!"
That's a very good point. So much for integrity.Smithburg said:
We already established that there is no artistic vision either, since the original lead-writer was divorced from his creation.
So ME3 is art, without artistic integrity and without artistic vision.