Where's this "demanding we like it" business? I have to say, the allegations against Bioware just pile up, and more and more of them are just pulled out of the complainee's ass.Agente L said:
Mass Effect 3 Outrage Causes Unrelated Game to Change its Ending
- Thread starter Mike Kayatta
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Firstly, thank you so much for using paragraphs in your response. You won't believe some of the walls of texts I've been sent this week!Somebloke said:
Secondly, thank you for providing a well thought out response free of weak analogies. It was most refreshing to read.
Anyway, you make some very interesting points. There was definitely some 'experimentation' if you like being done by EA with ME3. It might not be to the extent that some conspiracy theories make out (I've heard some whacky things being said on these forums), but there is an overwhelming feeling that EA are testing new grounds here. Whether or not that's a framework for successfully exploiting their customer base, or something less.......sinister, well, I wouldn't like to say. But it's an important thing to bear in mind.
I completely agree with you on the ending. Anything emotional is indeed on a meta level. I wonder if Bioware understand that? They said the ending would polarise, but I hope they know the difference between eliciting an emotional response in the player due to events in the story and eliciting an emotional response in the player due to a shift in tone.
So would you say maybe, that Mass Effect 3 is being treated differently to many other games due to a culmination of many reasons that run deeper than it's Deus Ex Machina ending? That many don't just feel cheated, but actively exploited? Or am I just speaking out of my arse? - can/has/does happen.
That might be a fine answer if you have plenty of other venues, or you just didn't care about the said product in the first place, but what would your answer be if most of those things you have enjoyed immensely in previous years.OniaPL said:
Since you've grown up, you've always followed that sports game, and now it has a drastic change. You have team related clothing, you do a lot of game related activities. But the game changes, do you just walk away?
You've almost always gone to this concert all, because hey, they often play great music all the time. Ever since you've been there you've never had much of any issue. The occasional sub-par song, but most of the time you went home happy. They now decided to change it. Do you just walk away?
You have nearly every work on that novelist novel in your book shelf. Some of them are collectible and some of them are signed by the novelist. You have already picked up their books on release date. Now they decided to change the ending to start being edgy. Do you just walk away?
For every special event, you went to this restaurant. Great food, great atmosphere and great prices. You've can easily say 95% of your meals have been super, and then suddenly this one bad revolting desert. Do you just never come back?
I'm sure somewhere in there you would voice your displeasure in an attempt to get them to change it, make it better, before going somewhere else.
Thats what we are doing here, today, with ME3's ending.
I don't think this video was making the "People are mad cause the ending isn't happy" point. Just cause they had the word "happy" in there doesn't mean they're referring to the state of the ending, but the player's emotional response to it.
The message they're going for is that stories go in the direction their characters push them to go (good stories anyways), not in the direction their audiences want them to go. And while, the public can make the argument that they understand the characters, ultimately its the creators that know their creations better. ME certainly failed in its story ending, but setting the precedent that players should be able to demand the story be changed isn't going to suddenly make better video game stories.
The message they're going for is that stories go in the direction their characters push them to go (good stories anyways), not in the direction their audiences want them to go. And while, the public can make the argument that they understand the characters, ultimately its the creators that know their creations better. ME certainly failed in its story ending, but setting the precedent that players should be able to demand the story be changed isn't going to suddenly make better video game stories.
Perfectly put, thank you. Titanic part reminded me how I used to comfort my little brother when he was frightened by scary scenes in movies.Mike Kayatta said:
It doesn't really matter if we liked it or not. That was the ending we were given. There aren't any magical DLCs that can erase it from existence. Whatever they offer me now, I'll always remember confusion I felt as I watched those differently colored explosions wondering what the hell happened with -insert plot hole here-
This only goes to show what I've personally believed since childhood:
The more smugly self-righteous and "meta" someone is, the less I should give a shit about what they have to say.
So yeah, Frozen Synapse, here's me...utterly out of shits to give about you and your inane, self-righteous, self-indulgent, childishly smug dinosaur ending.
The sad thing is I just KNOW it has fewer plot holes than the one in Mass Effect 3...
The more smugly self-righteous and "meta" someone is, the less I should give a shit about what they have to say.
So yeah, Frozen Synapse, here's me...utterly out of shits to give about you and your inane, self-righteous, self-indulgent, childishly smug dinosaur ending.
The sad thing is I just KNOW it has fewer plot holes than the one in Mass Effect 3...
Irrelevant choices? That depends on your definition. Are all the choices in life irrelevant because you'll end up dead regardless? The undecided fate of the universe doesn't change the fact that you still helped shape it.JeanLuc761 said:
Shephard didn't overcome the odds in the end? I thought he unified the galaxy, and supposedly stopped the reapers from completing a cycle that had been going on for millenia. Surely other heroes must've tried to stop them and failed. How is it he didn't overcome the odds?
Besides, I thought the themes were of sacrifice and compromise. Both of which are still present in the ending. It may be a rather shoddy ending, but it still holds true to the themes.
Bioware promised that your choices would make a difference in the fate of the galaxy and it didn't, according to most of the people who played it. I find it interesting that nobody who defends Bioware seems to notice that some people feel that way. Until then, I'm on the fan's side.Simonoly said:
Sorry, I should clarify. When I say "irrelevant choices," I mean that the choices we made really had no bearing on how the endgame played out. Someone who played all three games and 100%'d all of them could get the same ending as someone who skipped all the sidequests and made some horrific decisions along the way. That does not, and will never sit right with me.irishda said:
As for overcoming the odds, yeah, the Reapers are gone. However, as a poster on BSN said so well:
"Shepherd didn't beat the Reapers. Shepherd didn't do anything. The Reapers did everything. Shepherd became passive in his/her own story. And that effectively removed all the conflict from the game.
Shepherd was given permission and even assisted by the Reapers to both reach and activate the catalyst/crucible. Shepherd was even used by the Reapers to do it."
In Mass Effect 1 and 2, Shepard and his team beat the odds and emerged triumphant (depending on your play style). Hell, even with a supposed suicide mission I could make my way out of that with 0 casualties and a shit-eating grin on Shepard's face, knowing that I showed the Reapers what's what. Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, does not have this feeling of success and satisfaction, at least not for me and many others. I don't feel happy that I beat the Reapers; I don't feel like I succeeded. The Reapers may not be harvesting all life anymore, but at what cost? The galaxy as we know it is destroyed, I have no idea what happened to any of the characters I've grown to know and love over the past 90 hours...it's all just left hanging in the air.
This is just a developer goofing off, because as is pointed out the change is temporary, and intended to make a sort of statement. If they had ended the game that way when they first released it, it would have probably lead to a lot less sales over the long term, and also some serious damage to their cred on whether anyone would purchuse it again or not.
The industry, and people looking at this, need to understand that while the ending of ME3 is where the line was drawn, this is ultimatly the result of a lot of things all coming to a head at a once.
The lesson to be taken away from this, is that the gaming industry has to have standards, and that this kind of garbage isn't something people are going to stand for indefinatly.
Right now while this is a temporary thing from a small developer, I have been half expecting the industry to be deliberatly obtuse with the endings of some upcoming games in an effort to "teach people a lesson", or Bioware to intentionally create an even more crap ending (or at least one that is snarky about the situation). A lot of the attention around this is that an industry that is used to running around unchecked and expects to be able to use "art" or other excuses to justify whatever stupid thing or cash grab it wants to pursue, is getting all butthurt about being called on it.
See, the lesson learned from Mass Effect 3 is that the fans are not just going to accept crap writing because it's what the company chooses to provide.... and understand, ME3 is full of crap writing other than the ending, that's just the clincher. If it wasn't for the ending you'd probably hear more about "Leng" and how he doesn't fit with the game, or how the game includes a boss fight that you win, but then lose due to a cinematic... an event ultimatly worse than a quick time event. That right there amounts to crap writing in a game. It could be argued that Bioware blew not only the finale, but the end of Act 2 and the big point of climax for the game by creating a "WTF, that is stupid" moment rather than the reaction they were probably hoping to illicit.
ME3 can be more or less saved by changing the ending, unlike other works like "Dragon Age 2" which was bad on a level that the entire game would pretty much have had to been redesigned... yet it's important to understand people had not, and still have not forgotten that and all the stuff surrounding it.
Part of the lesson here also is that games are not movies, you cannot create a bunch of cinematics and then throw in some playable sections, and expect that to be a great game. It's a game, not a cartoon show, the two have to work together, something Bioware used to know. Moving plot points along by creating cinematics that step on the gameplay, like the whole thing with Leng (which while bad, isn't enough to ruin the game) defeats the entire point of playing a game to begin with. There was no point to the boss fight, if it ultimatly is not going to matter, a point JRPGs have been criticized for heavily, and which western games were lionized for not embracing. If anything ME3 has done a lot to actually move gaming backwards when you get down to it... but this can lead into another whole discussion.
The industry, and people looking at this, need to understand that while the ending of ME3 is where the line was drawn, this is ultimatly the result of a lot of things all coming to a head at a once.
The lesson to be taken away from this, is that the gaming industry has to have standards, and that this kind of garbage isn't something people are going to stand for indefinatly.
Right now while this is a temporary thing from a small developer, I have been half expecting the industry to be deliberatly obtuse with the endings of some upcoming games in an effort to "teach people a lesson", or Bioware to intentionally create an even more crap ending (or at least one that is snarky about the situation). A lot of the attention around this is that an industry that is used to running around unchecked and expects to be able to use "art" or other excuses to justify whatever stupid thing or cash grab it wants to pursue, is getting all butthurt about being called on it.
See, the lesson learned from Mass Effect 3 is that the fans are not just going to accept crap writing because it's what the company chooses to provide.... and understand, ME3 is full of crap writing other than the ending, that's just the clincher. If it wasn't for the ending you'd probably hear more about "Leng" and how he doesn't fit with the game, or how the game includes a boss fight that you win, but then lose due to a cinematic... an event ultimatly worse than a quick time event. That right there amounts to crap writing in a game. It could be argued that Bioware blew not only the finale, but the end of Act 2 and the big point of climax for the game by creating a "WTF, that is stupid" moment rather than the reaction they were probably hoping to illicit.
ME3 can be more or less saved by changing the ending, unlike other works like "Dragon Age 2" which was bad on a level that the entire game would pretty much have had to been redesigned... yet it's important to understand people had not, and still have not forgotten that and all the stuff surrounding it.
Part of the lesson here also is that games are not movies, you cannot create a bunch of cinematics and then throw in some playable sections, and expect that to be a great game. It's a game, not a cartoon show, the two have to work together, something Bioware used to know. Moving plot points along by creating cinematics that step on the gameplay, like the whole thing with Leng (which while bad, isn't enough to ruin the game) defeats the entire point of playing a game to begin with. There was no point to the boss fight, if it ultimatly is not going to matter, a point JRPGs have been criticized for heavily, and which western games were lionized for not embracing. If anything ME3 has done a lot to actually move gaming backwards when you get down to it... but this can lead into another whole discussion.
He didn't overcome the odds because he failed. Spectacularly, by the way.irishda said:
In his attempt to save the galaxy from the reapers, he destroyed all Mass Relays (And with that, probably dozens or even hundreds of star system were destroyed - Trillions of lives lost, in a conservative guess.).
All the armies he gathered at Sol system are now stranded and unable to gather more resources, since earth is a husk of it's former self and the mass relay was destroyed. Actually, The destruction of the Charon Relay should've destroyed the Sol system. And with it, the entire armada shepard brought.
He destroyed the reapers? Sure, but at what cost? The galactic community will NEVER recover. In the reapers cycle, atleast it was certain that they would recover and use the mass relays to find the citadel and recreate a society. All colonies, humans or not, are stranded, unable to receive essential resources from the Home Planets or even other colonies.
The Entire Quarian Flotilla is there and will die, not only because they don't have where to go, but they can't eat human food. Neither can the Turian Armada, which will also die.
Not only that, but the entire:
The "godkid" or whatever that was. That just insulting to the entire canon.
Anyone who buys this game and gets this "make a statement" ending should sue to get their money back. They paid for a video game, NOT some film school reject's attempt at being meta.
If people wanted to hear some childish hipsters smugly tell them off, then That Guy With The Glasses would get more traffic. Or at least Phelous would. Maybe Spoony.
Whatever. The point is, this is beyond immature and if anything it only goes to show what level of intellectual rigor goes into these asinine, and ultimately transitory and meaningless, so-called "artistic" visions people keep claiming to have. If this guy was so willing to change his so-called vision simply to thumb his nose at people he doesn't even know, who've done him no harm, and who have a perfectly valid gripe with someone else...then what precisely is so sacred about this so-called artistic vision in the first place? Clearly it can be altered on a whim, even if only to insult and belittle people the "artist" in question has never met.
I mean, like, fifteen years ago David Cross did a joke about nonsense like this when he posited an alleged "performance artist" suing to have the right to shit in public, his rationale being that it was "art" and therefore above reproach.
I'm sad to say that David Cross underestimated how absurdly childish and, for lack of a better term, butthurt these types can actually be when they get their shorts in a knot. If I didn't know better I'd half say they were ripping off his comedy routine.
If people wanted to hear some childish hipsters smugly tell them off, then That Guy With The Glasses would get more traffic. Or at least Phelous would. Maybe Spoony.
Whatever. The point is, this is beyond immature and if anything it only goes to show what level of intellectual rigor goes into these asinine, and ultimately transitory and meaningless, so-called "artistic" visions people keep claiming to have. If this guy was so willing to change his so-called vision simply to thumb his nose at people he doesn't even know, who've done him no harm, and who have a perfectly valid gripe with someone else...then what precisely is so sacred about this so-called artistic vision in the first place? Clearly it can be altered on a whim, even if only to insult and belittle people the "artist" in question has never met.
I mean, like, fifteen years ago David Cross did a joke about nonsense like this when he posited an alleged "performance artist" suing to have the right to shit in public, his rationale being that it was "art" and therefore above reproach.
I'm sad to say that David Cross underestimated how absurdly childish and, for lack of a better term, butthurt these types can actually be when they get their shorts in a knot. If I didn't know better I'd half say they were ripping off his comedy routine.
I don't know. He still (potentially) united the galaxy, something never done before. And he's still the first person the reapers recognized as the one who could change the cycle. He still overcame tall orders. The satisfaction, that's less tangible, and partly why a lot of people feel like the push the change the ending isn't grounded in any sort of definable reason.JeanLuc761 said:
I dont know what the original ending for his game is, but if he feels he vadalized his own work, its because he did. Changing the original ending to some stupid crap doesnt exactly mean you arguement is right.Mike Kayatta said:
I don't buy that the entire galaxy is destroyed forever. Clearly, the Relays exploding didn't destroy solar systems (which I suspected would always be the case because how many times have Relays been destroyed?). People existed without the Relays, they'll manage. But Shepard's goal was always "stop the reapers", and he managed to do that. So you can't say he failed spectacularly.Agente L said:
As much as I hate the ending, I did understand the Reapers logic.Agente L said:Not only that, but the entire:
The "godkid" or whatever that was. That just insulting to the entire canon.
Reapers (synthetics) kill HIGHER level organics before they have a chance to develop synthetics that could kill ALL organics. Thus continuously allowing the galaxy to thrive with organic life.
It takes one to willing ignore very specific adjectives in a attempt to break apart their logic. And saying EDI or GETH as PROOF isn't proof enough. As a galaxy synthetic threat could still be developed some time in the future, fulfilling the Reapers preventive practices.
Unless they do some major retcon, The Arrival DLC from ME2 clearly states that the explosion of a Mass Relay create a super nova big enough to wipe out it's star system from the face of the universe.irishda said:
Of course, bioware might retcon that and say it didn't go supernova. I don't know, that's their thing. But I'm stating what we know from the ME already established canon.
Also, I didn't said there wouldn't be any civilizations left in the galaxy. Only that the Galactic Society (The one we had in Me 1/2/3, and the protheans before them, and the other before the protheans that are unknown) ended. We can't have it happen again, UNLESS bioware decideds to change the canon/pull out a deus ex machina.
Well, In my opinion, I think he failed. Imagine you go into a war to save your country. You reach the HQ/Bunker/Base where the leader of the enemy faction is. But he's locked in a unrechable room. You can't destroy it or kill him except for a button outside the room.
The button will kill the leader, destroy all supplies of the enemy faction, and pretty much end the war. But doing that will also activate the nukes, which will bombard not only your country, but the entire world.
Sounds a bit like a comic? Sure, but I think it's a valid analogy for the ME3 ending. That's not bittersweet, that's a downright downer ending.
Yeah I have to say that it wasn't the events themselves I disliked. It was the fact it was not explained, full of plot holes, character contradictions, and left me with no closure All I want is...nathan-dts said:
for them to explain WHY Joker suddenly flips the fuck out and runs like a chicken. And maybe what happens to the enormous fleet that's left stranded in the sol system after the mass relays are destroyed??!?