LordOfAllHeSurveys said:
That just sounds a little crazy. Besides i really think it was Ea fault for rushing the game. Even after being srewed by EA it was one of the greatest games I ever played. So don't write off bioware off just yet.
why is it crazy? as i said tommy wiseau already did it, as do numerous purveyors of shlock. its a fairly common business tactic to pass off shitty products as being misinterpreted by you the consumer. hell, if you have it watch the behind the scenes for phantom menace: you see george lucas admitting that he fucked up the ending, then backtracking in a later meeting by saying it was "stylistically designed to be that way" in order to get the editor to shut up and do it his way.
i wrote off bioware after playing DA2 and have yet to see any reason to regret it. i played my friends copy of ME3 after he finished it because i refuse to support them anymore. he said he didnt care what i did with the game when i finished because he didnt feel like playing it again, and god do i know why.
you cant keep blaming EA for everything. EA likely doesnt give a shit what the writers do, as long as they finish on time. considering the quality of the game up until the beam to the face (and it is a very good game up until that point), i find it very, very difficult to believe that this was just the result of not having enough time. time constraints can only limit you so much, and given the visual and cinematic quality of the ending, they had to have had the time to come up with something better than the abomination we got.
at some point you have to accept that part of the ending is the creative intent of someone at bioware.
*and for those saying its about the journey, let me draw you a comparison and show you why that perspective doesnt work. the spirit of this philosophy is realized in something like this:
you and your friends set sail to imagination island. along the way you laugh and love and party and meet monkey pirates and save a princess and generally have a great time. when you reach the coordinates, you find nothing but more water stretching for miles. there is no imagination island. but, you had a memorable and fun time along the way, so fuck it who cares.
and here is ME3:
you and your friends set sail to imagination island. along the way you laugh and love and party and meet monkey pirates and save a princess and generally have a great time. when you reach the coordinates, you find nothing but more water stretching for miles. there is no imagination island. but, you had a memorable and fun time along the way, so... no wait, apparently you were destined to never ever get along with the monkey pirates, so that whole adventure was pointless. and somehow, the princess who was just with you, who pledged herself to you cause, is gone in the lifeboat and she took all your friends and got stranded on an island somewhere, so clearly friendship and love are bullshit because they just up and abandoned you at the most critical juncture. and then your sails spontaneously combust, meaning you are now marooned at sea, so really the whole journey was a bad idea. the whole reason you started this bullshit and even everything you learned along the way are now revealed to be lies. everything you did and your reasons for doing it were wrong in the end.
oh, but you get to choose the color of you near-death hallucination, so theres that.
see, ME3 doesnt just have an unsatisfactory ending, it has an ending that manages to invalidate your journey in almost every conceivable way. all the themes of the series are ignored and violated, plot consistency is violated, the power and impact of relationships, both personal and intergalactic is violated, player choice is violated... the ending just plain violates you. it taints your memories of everything up to that point and makes even thinking about a painful ordeal. even your happy memories are tainted, and made much less happy beacause you just cant ignore the context they took place in.