Jimquisition: Changing A Game's Ending And Destroying Art

[217not237]

The way I see it, yeah, the ending was shit, and, yeah, we deserved better, but the difference between your early episodes and ME3 is that no one ever changed your early episodes, they're still shit. You just learned from your mistakes and made better stuff in the future. Mass Effect 3's ending is already out there, and I personally believe we should instead hope that BioWare learns never to make an ending like that again.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Indeed, thank God for Jim.

 

[eventhorizon525]

I'm surprised, I don't always care of the Jimquisition, but I rather enjoyed this one, mainly because it was fair and honest to both sides.

However, the drawn images got boring/annoying part way through.

 

[Spongebobdickpants]

Jim, i love you.

There i said it, i want you to retake me right here right now. Be as renegade as you like i can take it.

Also your pronunciation of suicide was epic

 

[Fr]anc[is]

The way I see it, yeah, the ending was shit, and, yeah, we deserved better, but the difference between your early episodes and ME3 is that no one ever changed your early episodes, they're still shit. You just learned from your mistakes and made better stuff in the future. Mass Effect 3's ending is already out there, and I personally believe we should instead hope that BioWare learns never to make an ending like that again.

But why? The system is in place to easily distribute patches/DLC, and people are receptive to it. If the teacher gives you a 2nd chance to turn that D paper into a A, why not do it?

 

[MatsVS]

Well said, Mr. Sterling.

If a book with a shitty ending is sent to a publisher, they can tell the author to change it. If a film manuscript has a terrible ending, the same. If a film already shot is shown to a target group and they say the ending is awful, it can be changed. This is simply how things work and no one has ever started whining about art being undermined.

It is ironic, really, how certain pundits decry the fans for being childish and petulant, when it is the very opposite that is true.

Bioware has a great opportunity here to fix a broken game, and if they jump on it, it would not only be great for Mass Effect 3, but for the entire medium.

 

[Jonathan Canterbury]

I hoghly doubt bioware wanted to purposley piss off their entire fanbase and ruin their most well known and profitable franchise.

 

[Seventh Actuality]

O-kay...that was one of the best takes on the issue I've seen yet and definitely the most reasonable, concise view I've seen a GAME JURNALIZT put forward since it began.

So, a man who openly trolls for a living and starts his videos off with pun-based phone sex has a better understanding of both art and journalistic integrity than 98% of the gaming media.

 

[Aureliano]

The point of all this shouldn't be to make games more or less 'artistic'. The point is to make them better. And if changing the stupid, terrible ending to Mass Effect 3 makes it better and Bioware has the opportunity to do so then they clearly should.

And while I may not believe in God, I'll thank evolution for Jim. He is clearly homo superior with the mutant power to both make sense and have integrity.

 

[J.d. Scott]

Who would have guessed, Jim is right again.

So we have Jim and MovieBob with polar opposite opinions, what ever happened to Extra Consideration?

I don't think Jim and Moviebob have opinions that are that much at loggerheads. Bob never said that gamers didn't have a right to complain and that the ending wasn't bad, and that Bioware should never change it. He said that a large portion of the RME community are acting like entitled children, and that Bioware shouldn't be forced into doing anything and that Bioware doesn't have to compromise their artistic integrity if they don't want to.

Jim's position is that if Bioware isn't going to stick up for their artistic integrity, for whatever reason, neither should anybody else. If Bioware had made an effort to defend their ending - then most likely Bob and Jim would have been in a similar position.

In this case, Bioware is choosing to alter their ending - whether it's because they think it's terrible as well or see points where they can improve or whether they just want to make their fanbase happy - it's not really an artist violating his own integrity - since they're doing it themselves and hopefully for the purpose of doing something better that maintains their overall objectives for the plot (as opposed to Broken Steel...)

My only thoughts on this - one, is Jim reading my posts - I made an obscure joke in another thread about Thatgamecompany having a bunch of rabid COD:MW fans convincing them to add more terrorists and gunplay into Journey and either Jim made a similar joke by harmonic convergence or he's stealing my material.

And two, as probably the only person who openly LIKES the ending to ME3, I wish people would give it more of a chance. I think people openly hate the ending because they had different expectation, but while the ending could be painted with slightly broader strokes and needs a bit of fine tuning, there's something incredibly interesting from a philosophical and game writing perspective in that ending. It's really quite remarkable, of all the easy bad endings they could have come with, that they chose this one in particular.

 

[The Great JT]

Good, last episode on Mass Effect 3, no more talking about it. Thank you, Jim.

Perhaps now you can move on to a more...happy episode. I mean, no one wants to just watch episodes where people rag on things, it'll turn people cynical and make them think no good exists. Which is a lie, because Psychonauts is running around and that is nothing short of a pure good.

 

[Aprilgold]

Why do half the drawings on here have penises? It just seems a little juvenile and detracts from the intelligent point being made.

Because of LOLZ! Also, Jim himself seems a bit juvenile. Its better to listen to the videos then to watch them due to this type of shit.

 

[daxterx2005]

I don't believe Jim, we'll have another ME3 video soon

 

[johnnnny guitar]

Thank you Jim so many people when they look at the people asking for a better ending and just call them intituled little shits. You look at the movement and the game from a different angle rather than crying about setting back art

 

[Callate]

I'm glad to see the site can host both sides of an argument. Jim's feelings on this one are pretty close to mine, so I'm inclined to view it favorably (I'm silly that way), but I certainly appreciated that he took the time to give the matter some serious consideration rather than shooting from the hip.

The "retake" people are in kind of a strange position, if you think about it. I suspect a lot of the anger people feel is due to the bad ending being not just a game's bad ending, but the final game of a series' bad ending. Under normal circumstances, what could they do about being offered something that arguably detracted not only from the final game, but the ones that came before it? Those who have played through can't threaten not to buy the next in the series. They could threaten not to buy the DLC, but frankly, that's pocket change compared to the amount garnered from the popular series itself. They could threaten to boycott all future Bioware releases- indeed, some have- but such a response seems even less likely to get the pundits' respect than what they have done.

So... they did something fairly novel. I think you could argue that the sheer shitstorm that has come of that makes it unlikely, despite some commentators' [overstated] fears, that this tactic is likely to become a frequently used one in anyone's playbook, and that's probably for the best. But I agree with Jim that it's quite possible that the result will be a good one, a beneficial one, in this case. Certainly the ever-increasingly customer-hostile EA could stand to learn a lesson if anyone could.

 

[MegaSuperUberMe]

I'm outraged not because the ending was shit (hell, i swallowed Fahrenheits ending)It's because of all the lies. Bioware promised 16 DIFFERENT ending, no "choose your end" button (hello DeusEx) and many more things. They essentially did everything that they promised not to do. Beside, you can feel that the game was cut significantly, same enemies, almost no side quests, no impact what so ever was made by your army.
P.S. I really think that Bioware is the victim here, i think that they were rushed by EA to meet the release date.

 

[lead sharp]

You can change art, it's the how and why that matters. Take the biggest case of all...Star Wars.

Releasing a polished up 5.1 with deleted scenes added back in and maybe the odd tweak (adding stormtroopers when Han runs around the corner made more sense for example) jacking up the resolution till you get HD, all great, because you are releasing a classic that now stands up to today's expectations in quality and adding a little to make it sweeter to buy if you already owned it.

Filling it full of unessential cgi, and changing things in a massively clumsy way...fuck off.

It's a fine line, but it is there.