Mass Effect 3 Gets An Ending

[I.Muir]

The video I agree with that explains why the ending is shit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP-xs
This one more closely explains the fan rage and tears apart some of Bio Wares arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBETU-uOGh8
This is a douche bag who is being paid to attract free publicity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgRP5_YKu0
This video tears apart said douche bag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz8_j-ebfaI&context=C45cc0a8ADvjVQa1PpcFPCatMy5RZ1RUZyZNY8ye5RqUJfcOnt1b8=

This is the -bio ware dun goofed- side summed up neatly and the only one that seems to make any sense. If you had not watched these before to preserve the integrity of your opinions I, as many other may have or will soon do so, suggest you watch them.

 

[Lyri]

This is kind of what happens when "games journalists" get their takes on stories from eachother instead of looking straight at the subject. The best coverage of this has actually been in Forbes, of all places.

I'm not going into all the details of why ME3's ending is objectively atrocious storytelling, because there are (sane, eloquent) people who have already done so extensively. That said...

So was the objection that audiences wanted things to finish with multiple different outcomes?

Why the fuck would you think that?

Because that is what seems to be all the complaints are about, Casey Hudson lied and said your choices would matter, be impactful and would have various outcomes.
All fans got was a different coloured explosion.

 

[Frostbyte666]

Someone may have already mentioned this but haven't Bethesda already done a retcon ending from fan pressure with Fallout 3 (Broken Steel) and it seems developers didn't learn from that debacle. That would be don't give a nonsensical forced ending when I have many other possible options (Get in a the gas tank Fawkes you're immune to radiation and screw it's my 'destiny' my dad was the 1 who died for it why should I?)

Hmm interesting captcha 'believe me'

 

[satsugaikaze]

Someone may have already mentioned this but haven't Bethesda already done a retcon ending from fan pressure with Fallout 3 (Broken Steel) and it seems developers didn't learn from that debacle. That would be don't give a nonsensical forced ending when I have many other possible options (Get in a the gas tank Fawkes you're immune to radiation and screw it's my 'destiny' my dad was the 1 who died for it why should I?)

Hmm interesting captcha 'believe me'

A metric ton of people have already mentioned Broken Steel, and the same people don't seem to realise that the changes being demanded of Bioware are on a different wavelength.

 

[w00tage]

>>This may be a time of politically correct inclusion of all points of view, but sooner or later the cockheads of the world are just going to have to accept that there are people who know better than them. You know. People who don't have cocks for heads. <<

Yes, and do you know what industry has the biggest population of the aforementioned cranial mutation?

Artists. Like the successful ones in Hollywood. Also like the unsuccessful formerly-of-Hollywood artists (writers and directors) that have gone to the big dollar game companies so they can get jobs working on big dollar games and "show the games industry how to tell a real story like Hollywood does".

Their eventual overreaching and faceflop-in-front-of-everyone failures are inevitable. They've done it in the media entertainment industries to the point where there's an entire subindustry making a living from analyzing the wreckage, and now that those same artists have found a new set of suckers - I mean patrons - in the gaming industry, they're going to repeat the same mistakes all over again. Because their bosses in the gaming industry don't know when to tell them no.

 

[sonofliber]

leaving this here read it, its quite good its about "art" and whats wrong about the ending

http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2012/03/mass-effect-tolkein-and-your-bullshit-artistic-process/

and this:

http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2012/03/mass-effect-creative-license-and-the-rights-of-the-player-in-a-storygame-me3/

 

[Griffolion]

Oh dear, this has ruffled a mass of feathers.

 

[Mausenheimmer]

"Curing the Krogan Genophage implies that the Krogan Rebellions would start again"

No, they wouldn't because Wrex and Eve survived on my playthrough and they were determined to guide the krogan along a different path. Similarly, the geth and quarians started to get along and help each other, undermining the point that synthetics will inevitably fight organics.

But I guess paying attention to differences between playthroughs would require you to spend more than half a week thinking about it. And that requires way more effort than I've come to expect from you.

But would Wrex be able to stop them? What if a majority of the krogan want revenge for the Genophage? Wrex may be a respected leader, but he's just one krogan. If they all want blood, he may not be able to stop it happening. And let's not even get started if Wrex didn't survive and Wreav took over.........

Well, I'm pretty sure you haven't played Mass Effect 3 yet. But the game goes out of its way to make it clear that Wrex and Eve (the krogan female whose tissue was used to cure the genophage) cause a cultural paradigm shift in the krogan. Furthermore, they pretty much explain that the unintended consequence of the genophage was 1400 years of nihilism and hopelessness for the Krogan. An end to the genophage means that krogan have a tomorrow to fight for and will actually focus on rebuilding their culture again rather than fighting as hired muscle.

I could never bring myself to pull the trigger on Wrex, but from what I've read, Wreav's violent tendencies are kept in check by Eve's influence. But if Eve and Wrex are dead, then you're right. There would be no culture shift and then history would repeat itself.

But that's the problem with the ending and why everyone hates it. All of that diversity of choice is completely meaningless. The game couldn't be bothered to tell you what happens on Tunchanka after the Reaper invasion. Or anywhere else. So long as you get your 2800 Effective Military Strength in whatever way you deem fit, you have your three endings carved in stone.

Uh, I'm actually on my third playthrough of ME3, and Eve herself even said that Wrex is only one krogan, and that if the majority wants blood, he may or may not be able to stop it. I'm not saying that Wrex wouldn't bring peace to the krogan, (disregard the ending for a sec) but there would still be some krogan that need to be convinced that peace is the best option, or eliminated.

Fair enough. You didn't mention Eve in your first post and Wreav was established as a jerk in Mass Effect 2.

There would be some renegade krogan, but it wouldn't be on the same scale as the Krogan Rebellions. Eve is as important for Krogan stability as Wrex, based on how she single-handedly calmed down the bickering krogan at the start of the Shroud mission. Most of the krogan war assets also seem to imply that the krogan are eager to be the heroes of the galaxy again (based on how many clans fell in behind Urdnot and that the Terminus mercs returned to Tuchanka). Something that seems to be forgotten a lot is that virtually no krogan alive in Mass Effect 3 were around during the Krogan Rebellions. By this point, the genophage is a lot like the sins of the father being passed to the son.

 

[Syzygy23]

Someone may have already mentioned this but haven't Bethesda already done a retcon ending from fan pressure with Fallout 3 (Broken Steel) and it seems developers didn't learn from that debacle. That would be don't give a nonsensical forced ending when I have many other possible options (Get in a the gas tank Fawkes you're immune to radiation and screw it's my 'destiny' my dad was the 1 who died for it why should I?)

Hmm interesting captcha 'believe me'

A metric ton of people have already mentioned Broken Steel, and the same people don't seem to realise that the changes being demanded of Bioware are on a different wavelength.

I don't think that people demanding that the ending not be such a lump of shit is very far from the wavelength Fallout 3 was on.

See, here's an easy way to prevent this from happening in the future: When a developer is writing a game, they should rate everything they write on a scale from Shit to Ten. If you rate what you write anything less than Ten you rewrite it.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

Sigh...Okay, I am going to completely explain the retardedness that is the "synthetics created to kill organics to prevent synthetics from killing organics" thing. Ready?

The Reapers were created, not to kill advanced organic life, but to ascend it to the singularity of form that the Reapers are. This is done to stop the creation of synthetic life that will wipe out all organic life, from complex animals to simple bacterium, to even strings of amino acids and proteins. They view Reaper-fication as a gift. They don't view the deaths of trillions as a loss, because they go into the manufacture of what they view as a perfect being.

Sure, it's still bat-shit insane, but from a cold logic standpoint, it makes a weird sense.

Doesn't for me. I admit my experiences with Mass Effect were superficial, so feel free to correct me anywhere, but I distinctly remember one of the Reapers mentioning the Mass Relays ensure that Organics evolve among the paths they desire. Does that mean they /want/ them to come up with crazy AI? Are they just too lazy to mentor Organics while the crazy AI outbreak can still be stopped? The Protheans certainly seemed good at controlling the evolution of the species until the Reapers woke up. Seems like somebody is too lazy to install anti-virus software and decides to reinstall Windows every 50k years.

But that's mostly speculation, if we look at what's actually going on in the galaxy, we see Geth that want to live in peace but are denied exactly that, we see Geth going batshit crazy because of Reaper indoctrination and we see EDI who is everything but a crazy rebelling AI. So synthetics seem like pretty cool people unless you brainwash them. What else have we got? A history of Krogan, organics, that nearly killed everything in their path. We got a lot of political disputes and wars on record whereas the Geth have achieved some sort of Utopian democracy as long as everybody is synched once in a while so everyone can understand each other's viewpoint.

In the face of that, synthetics seem like a much much smaller threat than organics, and even if they wiped out all organics, it would be more like natural selection and the survivors would be much more civilized people than any other species.

 

[WarpZone]

See, this is what I'm talkin' about. Fans don't want them to change the ending, they just want to feel like the choices they made *mattered.* Hell, even if it was just single freeze frames during the credits of individual satellite characters trying to cope with one of three aftermaths going on in the background, that would have tied everything together. Players would have felt like "Okay, the COMPLETE ending to MY Mass Effect story would have cost WAY too much to script, voice, animate, and pre-render, but hey, at least it's ADDRESSED. Hey, look, there's my love interests in half-reaver form standing on a ruined Earth. At least that's something. I wonder what they're saying to each other." That would have avoided the entire controversy.

 

[MonkeyPunch]

Still giggling at the fact that there's still 14 pages of replies on this subject, at this point.

TBH I think game companies just need to stop releasing any info on the games they are making so far in advance then they'd save themselves all this hassle.
Of course it wouldn't put an end to it because you'd still have the fans whining that there was no info on something... but there'd be slightly less of it and more bearable whining.

 

[walrusaurus]

he more or less nailed what I hated about the ending. I didn't mind the content so much as the way it was presented. I honestly would have perfered that the entire dialogue with the child-god-thing and the subsequent red/blue/green choice was ommited. The endings were all functionally the same anyways, so I don't really see what the point of the choice was, you stop the reapers, stop the in a slightly more dickish way, or stop them in a slightly weirder way. NO matter what you pick shittons of primary charecters die, the mass relays are destroyed, and the galaxy is 'saved.' So why did they not simply cut straight to the giant space lazer firing after you hit the button? Their attempt to provide an illusion of choice cheapened the whole process. THat and the lack of resolution for my crew. All they had to do was have a shot of a funeral, the dead crew members in caskets, and whoever survived mourning around them. It would have taken all of 5 seconds of screen time. At the very least they should let you see what happened to whoever you romanced. What the hell happened to Tali?????

 

[Nick Holmgren]

Bioware did say it would not be A,B or C multiple choice endings.

Angry Joe has this very well searched and it is honestly a sign that they were rushed in some way, which, when combined with the responses to the effect of "we are planning to fix this" from multiple levels of the company, indicates EA wants it to be must have DLC.

 

[WarpZone]

TBH I think game companies just need to stop releasing any info on the games they are making so far in advance then they'd save themselves all this hassle.

How would that have helped? Fan expectations weren't based on some magical press release, you know. They were based on the previous two games, and Bioware's reputation as storytellers.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

You'd think that the Reapers would just come in, throw a circus tent over the galaxy to roach-bomb synthetics every few millennium, and leave a big post-it note telling people to stop fucking around with AI.

It wasn't even really necessary. I mean the current civilization had already outlawed AI.

And the Geth had become peaceful and the Heretics only turned violent because Sovereign - who was using synthetics to stop us from using synthetics - gave them the opportunity.

And EDI was all about helping out organics. She had the hots for one.

And the human race seemed to be kicking all kinds of ass so why did it need "saving" through Reaper conversion?

The Geth Heretics were barely a threat after the first game.

And Cerberus were somehow even more of a threat than the Reapers.

It would almost make more sense for the Reapers to save the rest of the galaxy by wiping out/converting humanity and taking us out of the galaxy before we became so powerful we conquered the galaxy the way the Protheans did and forcibly homogenize all cultures until our eventual stagnation and self-destruction topical jab at the U.S.

Still trying to wrap my mind around the gaping plot holes. Not really bringing anything new to the debate.

 

[Frostbyte666]

Just thought that why don't they do what happened with Throne of Bhaal at the end, a page of text telling you what happened to each character, It's not got a cgi wow factor but it gave a hell of a lot of closure.

 

[akakaze]

I absolutely love Mass Effect. The first game is, for someone of my gaming/storytelling sensibilities, absolutely perfect it was the best game I, personally, could have played. I also liked two and three, I felt the combat mechanic changes were a mix of good and bad, (the overheat mechanic in one was brilliant, IMO).

I liked the ending. Not loved, and it definitely paled to some of the rest of the game's moments, but ever since the reaper on the Quarian homeworld called itself a savior, I was expecting an ending a la "Childhood's End", vaguely dissatisfying, but in a way that made sense. My Fem-Shep took control of the Reapers, as every decision up to that point supported her doing. Just because the mechanic didn't account for your past decisions didn't mean immersion wouldn't. Shephard died and had to trust that the universe would continue without her, and neither I, nor she, knows how things got along after that; that's fitting.

 

[Grunt_Man11]

Point. Missing it. Thanks for not understanding, Yahtzee.

Holding the Line.

Why is it that every time someone makes an article about the Mass Effect 3 ending that isn't just a long-winded /agreement of those that are demanding a new ending, they're accused of "missing the point"?

We get the point already! Mass Effect 3's ending(s) are bad and poorly done, and probably done so to justify additional DLC. Bioware either lied about the "vastly different endings that just won't be the ABC ending," or don't grasp the concept that picking between destruction, control, or synthesis at the end of the game is an ABC ending. It's Executive Meddling from EA. It's a way to milk the franchise.

We get it!

Now...

Our Point. Missing it. Nice job not understanding.

We're not claiming the ME3 ending(s) aren't bad... some are, but most aren't. At least I think that's the case anyway.

Our point is that all of this is just not worth it. In the end, it's just a video game.
It's the same with the Star Wars fanboys who have wasted over 10 years of their lives trying to "retake" Star Wars. In the end, they're just movies. Disappointing origin stories, horridly unconvincing loves stories, highly annoying goofy sidekicks, and poorly conceived techno-babble explaining how the Force works are just not worth frothing at the mouth all your life over.

All of the time, energy, effort, and money thrown at this is just not worth it!
People are spending thousands of dollars to sent Bioware symbolic cupcakes for crying out loud! It has just gotten silly at this point. Don't become like the Star Wars fanboys. Don't obsess over this. You'll only regret it later in life.

There are more important things to put so much effort into fighting. Poverty, crime, starvation, pollution, child abuse, animal abuse, sexism, and racism just to name a few. A crappy ending to a video game should be at the bottom of your activism list.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Also repeatedly sweeping counter-arguments under the rug by declaring that they "missed the point" is not helping your cause. It's making you look like overly-dramatic children to many people, including those you're trying to convince.

(Yes, I see the irony of me saying this after accusing you of "missing the point," but I honestly believe that many do miss the point of those saying that the outcry over the ME3 ending needs to stop.)

Now if I somehow still "miss the point," then please explain what the point is.

 

[head desk tricycle]

"The sanctity of the creator's original intention," lol. Take my word for it, sometimes the creators are the "cockheads" who really need to defer to all of "the people who know better than them." To quote Roger Ebert, "if you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't." Which is another way of saying that what the creator HOPES to do, aka "the creator's original intention," is irrelevant; all that matters is what the creator ACTUALLY did.