jdarksun said:
josh4president said:
Wait, Jim, didn't you mock Mass Effect fans when they expected what they were promised back with Mass Effect 3?
That doesn't sound like something a consumer advocate should do.
What, precisely, were they "promised"?
For Starters (for jdarksun) Jim recanted on the "Mass Effect 3" thing and now agrees with the critics. I believe he even reminded us of this during his last video.
Secondly, for your benefit, Bioware made a lot of direct promises about how the ending of Mass Effect 3 was going to be, one statement from them was there was not going to be a simple "A, B, or C" ending, yet this is literally what you saw with "Mass Effect 3", as at the end of the game your literally given three choices for how you want to end the game. What's more Bioware long promised "Mass Effect 3" was going to be a complete story, and assured us that all of the questions were going to be answered by the conclusion of "Mass Effect 3". Not only did they not answer all the big questions, they released an actual app with behind the scenes information, where the game developers flat out say they never had any intention of answering all the questions since those answers could be spun out into other games in the franchise. What's more, when they started "Mass Effect 3" they literally had no idea on how to end it, apparently they pasted a fan-mail from a little kid up at one point and said "this should be the inspiration for our ending".
What's more there are thematic issues inherent in the whole "Mass Effect 3" thing. For starters the entire game is about winning non-win scenarios. Indeed "Mass Effect 3" has a central running gimmick where if you played the previous two games, you can literally resolve all of the hard choices in a way where you get your cake and eat it too and reap the benefits from both sides of every decision by having one of your previous companions who survived show up and lend
a hand. The ending is both surreal, and comes in one flavor of suck or another, there is no "the good guys flat out win" ending and having one is exactly what "Mass Effect" was always about even if other possible outcomes should have been there. What's more the ending didn't take into account all of the things otherwise going on, and rendered a lot of choices kind of irrelevant. For example through the game your putting together resources and new tech to fight the reapers so they won't have the normal advantage, among other things you are able to arm your ships with singularity torpedos and the like. This is to say nothing about various choices you make involving The Citadel and it's security.
At the end of the game in a playthrough where by definition the good guys should have tons of tech and preparation that The Reapers didn't calculate on, your still seeing everyone getting wiped out and so on. Raising the entire question of "why did I even bother?". To put things into perspective (since it's a favorite based on some of the flavor text) the basic idea of a singularity torpedo is it creates a black hole on/near the target, with all do respect to the reapers the whole bloody point of a weapon like that (and it adding to your resources) is that their shields and defenses weren't going to matter. Never mind the simple fact that by this point the good guys had themselves been re-arming
with the same tech/guns the Reapers had. The point here being that if you did everything "right" there should have
been a good ending with the Reapers pretty much getting their butts just flat out kicked in the final battle or whatever. This is to say absolutely nothing of the final "message" and how it's undermined if you say did manage to create a peace between the Geth and Quorians, you don't even have the option of saying "your entire cycle is BS, here
is evidence otherwise... oh and did you happen to notice that right now we have both Synthetics and Organics trying to stop you?"
The point here is that none of the endings gave "Mass Effect 3" a properly heroic series ending. What's more it was exactly the kind of "A B or C" choice they said wasn't going to happen, and the developers flat out lied when they said they were going to answer all the questions, and they knew they were lying when it happened.
Not to mention numerous game design issues. Having some Chinese Cyber-Ninja dude running around that doesn't fit in with the rest of the universe was really, really, bad. What's worse is when this same character that doesn't fit within the setting is used to railroad specific plot points "I kick the guy's butt... ooops here is a cinematic of him kicking MY butt and doing whatever I tried to stop him from doing and getting away anyway". In short exactly the style of garbage that "Mass Effect" was making a point of not doing. In a game where "your choices matter" suddenly saying the bad guy automatically wins in a cinematic (like a lot of games have done) is the exact opposite of what "Mass Effect" was supposed to be about and how this game series has worked.
Between this and "Dragon Age 2" (not to mention the desire to turn all their RPGs into Action-RPGs) I simply don't trust Bioware anymore. As I've said before I will not be pre-ordering any more of their games, and indeed will be waiting until after I hear all about them, including the endings... which means I can't even enjoy the full story anymore for fear that a bunch of developers with writers block decided to end the game while seemingly dropping acid
as they read fan mail from kids. Sure Bioware is making all kinds of promises "Really guys, Dragon Age 3 will be great, it won't be anything like these previous games... and we plan to give you all these options and have them matter for real this time, buy our product... please?", but they don't have any real trust from me anymore... and that's exactly what Jim is talking about, and where he's saying even more gamers should be.
If Bioware wants to get a serious pre-sell from me, what they need to do is sit down and actually re-do the entire ending of Mass Effect, at least giving it a proper ending for those that played the entire trilogy, even if they can't have ALL the choices matter like they promised (they themselves said this would be impossible due to all the variables... but it's not our fault they promised the impossible... so they deserve flak for that, but at the same time that doesn't excuse not having a proper ending). This whole "ending clarification" garbage might make things more clear, but it's polishing a turd... it's still a bloody turd, and I'm going to treat it like a turd as do a lot of people.