IGN wades back into the Mass Effect 3 scandal.

[sanquin]

It's good to keep talking about it. It's good to keep things in our memories so we don't forget about it and let it happen again. I mean, people saying 'shut up about it already' sound like they want to forget history, imo. I always disliked my history classes during school but we shouldn't forget the past just like that.

That being said, really...? People hated the ending because it was bad/sad? Sure there will be some people like that, but overall that was not the reason. Most people hated it because it was an incredibly bad ending to an otherwise very good franchise. Had the guy also talked about artistic views and such I would have accused him of being hired by Bioware or EA.

 

[EternallyBored]

Oh look I've even seen this same opinion in the, past, at least film critic hulk managed to make his elitism mildly entertaining to read, this doesn't even manage that.

The ending itself was a perfect storm of fuckups, just eliminating the downer ending wouldn't have satisfied more than a few people and we still would have likely gotten the same controversy we got now. The ME3 clusterfuck was a massive combination of factors and reasons that just reached the boiling point and everyone went wild. You would have to eliminate a significant chunk of those factors before the game came out, to stop the backlash of what happened.

1. Pre-release press statements built the ending up specifically to not be a simple multiple choice A,B,C ending, but it turned out the actual ending was exactly that, they didn't even really try to dress it up or hide it. It was literally shepard standing in front of various epilogue cutscene buttons and they didn't even have the integrity to not reuse massive amounts of assets so the endings almost look like color swaps of each other.

2. Plotholes galore! There were a bunch and I won't waste the time pointing them all out since others have done it far better than me over a year ago. The big one of course is Joker gathering your squadmates offscreen and making it through a relay all before the explosion hits, even if you can justify it, it's still basically cheap emotional manipulation meant to make you worry about your crewmates. The extended ending improved this flaw the most, but it was too little too late at that point Bioware wasn't putting the genie back in the bottle.

3. EMS was pointless. Seriously EMS was completely pointless the only thing it changed was who walks out of your ship at the crash site and whether earth got decimated, it also changed what ending options you got, but none of these changes made any sense. The entire assault on earth, the culmination of 3 games worth of plot and action was just a linear corridor in a fairly ugly setting compared to the other setpieces in the game, it was pretty much just slogging through enemies and was all pretty much the same no matter how high or low your EMS was. This is pretty much unacceptable after ME 2's well-executed suicide mission, so we know Bioware can make an interesting final mission where your choices can effect things, but they still fucked up the entire final chapter of the journey.

4. After Dragon's Age 2, there was already a contingent of fans out there ready to leap on any Bioware screwup. And there were some good things to criticize before you even got to the ending. The simplified dialogue wheel, the elimination of any sort of vehicle component, again. Planet scanning somehow managed to be even more annoying than Mass Effect 2. Kai Leng couldn't hold a candle to Saren and Harbinger as far as villains go, he actually seemed to be a step down in threat from the villains of the previous 2 games. Most of this stuff got drowned out by ending rage, but it still added fuel to the fire.

5. It tried to be sad and failed. Look I don't mind sad endings, but only if they are sad for a reason, and not just because everybody dies in the last 10 seconds to a giant energy wave. If the reapers had been shown tearing apart the quarian or alliance fleets that would have been sad and justified within the setting, but what we got was a giant energy wave that strands a bunch of species on one end of the galaxy, most of them with no chance of ever seeing home again, and strands the Normandy on an alien planet, also with no indication of them ever getting home again. It's a contrived sad that comes out of nowhere and feels like a, "rocks fall, everybody dies" kind of ending.

6. the Coup de Grace to all of this was that when the game originally released, literally the last thing you saw before being kicked back to the title screen was a pop-up box that said, "Thanks for playing, now go buy some DLC". I'd imagine that was like a focusing lens for a lot of the hate that got spewed right after. That little corporate message probably galvanized some of the EA hate we see even today.

People have a lot of reasons for hating the ending, and fixing only one issue (making a happy ending) would only satisfy a very small number of the people who raged against the game.

 

[Something Amyss]

H
I personally found the article ridiculous and actually insulting, seeming that he was implying we couldn't deal with a sad ending. (Despite the fact I think a lot of people expected an unhappy ending to the cthulu robot invasion).

Thankfully, you're giving them more hits to reward this behaviour. Even worse, I sort of expect that's the point of this. To stir the pot for more page views.

What does the Escapist think?

It's the right line for the wrong reasons. This is a series about choices, especially badass choices. Now, badass doesn't mean successful. I consider the whole Thermopylae last stand, especially as it's portrayed in popular culture to be badass even if the man behind it and the men involved ended up slaughtered. I consider punching a God to be badass, even if the God turns around and dissolves your atomic structure.

We didn't necessarily want a "winning" decision, but rather decisions that reflected our choices, made sense in context, and gave us closure. And yeah, every choice being a compromise was a minor problem. As with the other choices, a "I reject your reality and substitute my own" won would be nice, even if the catylist just went "*****, please," and went about it anyway like in the EC.

now, that was still a problematic result, but not because we didn't win. There are other reasons.

I don't mind bad endings. I played through ALL the endings to Drakengard. The further you go, the "worse" the endings are, but there were a couple of cool ones. I liked the end to RDR (Both of them, if you want to get technical), though I can see why the ending would seem repetitive to those who have played more R* games than me. I think the villains sometimes need to win to make things interesting. And sometimes, even when you win, you lose.

I wouldn't even mind a sensible compromise. But one of the statements in the ending was that organics and synthetics cannot work together. There's a good number of Sheps who proved they could. S/he should have been able to say "yeah, we proved that wrong, what else ya got?"

Or just given the Femshep headbutt, because why not.

Or there's the "none of our choices have worked, so you must choose. but you can only choose from three choices from our admittedly flawed philosophy. Choose."

Even if the choices were sometimes trivial in the rest of the series, they were never this dumb or railroading.

 

[clippen05]

Once I heard about the endings, I got really pissed off and stopped playing Mass Effect 3. But when I eventually came back to it and beat it, I didn't mind it as much. It still wasn't great, but it wasn't as terrible as I had thought. The leviathan DLC also better explained somethings related to the ending. But the fact that you couldn't beat the Reapers through normal means or see all your war assets come together still sucked. Oh, and the lack of choices was bad too.

 

[LetalisK]

Meh, I'm more comfortable here with all the hate on current popular games, like Bioshock: Infinite and The Last of Us.

You've served your purpose well, ME3 hate, but it's time for us to part ways.

Yeah, it's like Michael Jordan coming back to play for the Wizards. You get kinda happy...but it's just not the same as it was. Let's move on to Lebron.

 

[MCerberus]

Post on IGN... Mass Effect Controversy.
No matter the content of the post, it's a glass-house situation considering a certain 'reporter'

 

[nathan-dts]

That ending was just horrific.
A year on from Mass Effect 3 I've played Bioshock Infinite, The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. All of which have unhappy if not downright depressing endings. Loved every single one of them. If anyone tells me that I don't like Mass Effect 3's ending because it was sad ending, which it wasn't, then they didn't play the Mass Effect Trilogy or they didn't pay much attention whilst playing.

 

[darthzew]

I can see where he's coming from. But I was sated with the Extended Cut and the Citadel DLC. I got the closure I wanted. I still play the Mass Effect games today and I still love them.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I'm so glad I have little interest in Mass Effect at times like these, it's nice to be neutral and sit in the corner giggling at the strong opinions on both sides.

 

[Seracen]

We've been on this train before. Between all the fanfics, videos, and mods, I think there's plenty of alternatives to "headcanon" away BW's mishandling of the ending.

Heck, even BW's own extended cut makes the lackluster ending palatable, if nothing else.

In all fairness, I can look on the series with fondness, and simply replace the ending with the story I actually wrote out and posted. Heck, I even went to the trouble of making it a multi-path epic. Imagination is a wonderful thing!

And if nothing else, I still tip my hat to BW for giving us such a wonderful playground in the first place.

EDIT: concerning the article, I can't help but feel that this is a troll post. It pretty much parrots the same things that the defenders said, while called paying fans "entitled."

Either this was done for the rage hits, or he's just being lazy. In the event he actually feels this way, I am happy for his satisfaction with the series, but lament his need to act in such a manner to his fellow man.

 

[dreadedcandiru99]

OT: the thing that annoys me most about this is the title. "The REAL reason you didn't like the ending!" That basic title structure is just irritating, and way too many people use it.

Seconded. I know why I didn't like the ending. I don't need some smug IGN dickhead to enlighten me.

 

[Callate]

The article/blog post really wasn't as bad as I was expecting, especially given the source. (Yes, as has been repeatedly mentioned, it came from a blog, not directly from IGN, but that was hardly clear from the initial link.) At least the author managed to cage his terms to the point where it wasn't really presented as "Here's my unified theory of all dislike of the ME3 endings, explaining why all criticism is moot and the persons behind it petty and dismissable, I await your applause" which was certainly a possibility based on the title.

He may actually have had something of a point, though what I hear still makes it sound like an oversimplification. It wasn't simply a sense of failure that seemed to have many players displeased, but the disjointed, arbitrary, and disconnected way that it got to its conclusion, along with the sense that promises their personal journey with Shephard through three games would be considered and vindicated.

I think it was perfectly possible to end the trilogy with a Pyrrhic victory, a bittersweet ending, or even an out-and-out tragedy and still feel like it had taken the player into consideration. What wasn't so thus achievable was to wrench all agency away from the player and hand the power off to a sort of Diabolus-ex-Machina for the final stretch, leading to the much-criticized "three color options" ending choice.

 

[viranimus]

And yet, this is perhaps the closest anyone has come to the point of the ending thus far. Still not there, but much closer.

 

[FFHAuthor]

Meh, it's just the same points that I made over a year ago. Games up to the last five minutes cast the character and the story as being one thing, but the last five minutes rips the ENTIRE narrative up to this point to shreds, replaces it with a confusing and far weaker one riddled with logical faults and general incosnsistencies, then forces the player into a situation entirely divorced from any previous behaviors of the character, and as the final punctuation leaves us with questions about the characters we developed a deep connection to.

Well, it's a bit annoying and a touch contemptuous, but if you take it for what it's worth the guy pretty much says the ending leaves the player with a sense of failure...so the Blogger is basically saying that the fans are mad because the story was poorly written at the end and didn't fit with the rest of the trilogy?

Hmm, seems that's what we've been complaining about since this mess started...

 

[Arslan Aladeen]

Can we get over how terrible the ending was and focus more on how poor the rest of the game was? Side missions being activated by overhearing random conversations you pass by (and the game not even letting you know you got it unless you stand still and listen to the whole thing). The whole catalyst thing being thrown in there cause they were just dicking around in ME2. All the stuff involving Cerberus. The only new crew member being another boring human. The really lame rival who looks like an Adam Jensen reject. Jessica Chobot.