One Last look at Mass Effect 3.

[Machine Man 1992]

When there's a bug, you tell the developers and they release a patch to fix it. When the ending to the story, which is a major component of the product, and in fact was marketed as such, is so utterly broken fans, no, customers have a right to call Bioware on their bullshit and demand they fix their product.

Free speech guarantees that you have the right to make any demands you want, Bioware is under no obligation to change the ending, in-fact, they shouldn't change the ending. You aren't entitled to a full refund for theater tickets, the price of a DVD or even a different ending to Gangs of New York because you didn't like the original ending.

I never saw Gangs of New York.

You're right, Bioware has no obligation to change the ending. Just like I'm not obligated to give them my money.

If they want to maintain the good name of the Bioware brand, it's in their best interests to make the fans happy, or at least less pissed off.

(as a side note, several people did receive full refunds for their games)

 

[Machine Man 1992]

I never saw Gangs of New York.

I don't know what movies you saw and the ending wasn't controversial, it was provided as an example and I knew it wouldn't cause a secondary discussion about the ending of Gangs of New York to pop-up.

You're right, Bioware has no obligation to change the ending. Just like I'm not obligated to give them my money.

Correct, this is how the market system works.

If they want to maintain the good name of the Bioware brand, it's in their best interests to make the fans happy, or at least less pissed off.

I agree, however it's an arguably worse precedent to provide refunds to everyone who at least claims to be unsatisfied with their product. When you purchase a piece of entertainment you take a calculated risk that you may not enjoy the media you're about to consume. It isn't a fair process but I've yet to hear practical solutions.

Expending resources to create a new ending everytime an ending is controversial and fans are dissatisfied is a bad precedent to set as well. Especially when there is no guarantee that it will result in sales.

(as a side note, several people did receive full refunds for their games)

Due to dissatisfaction with the ending? Do you have a source for that?

I don't have a source, sadly. It was something that popped up amongst the fucking INSANE number of articles that were cranked out during the fiasco.

Anyway, I was hoping you'd bring up "the bad precedent" fallacy. How is bad that fans are holding a company accountable for their fuck-ups? How is it a bad thing that fans care enough about a video game that they're willing to donate money to charity to prove they can and will put their money where their mouths are? And then there's this line:

"it's an arguably worse precedent to provide refunds to everyone who at least claims to be unsatisfied with their product."

That makes no sense. What, is there some scientific scale of measurement for dissatisfaction? If they claim they're unhappy with their product... Then they're unhappy! End of story! Give the man his sixty bucks back and hopefully fix the problem before he tells his equally dissatisfied friends and they come back for refunds too.

Fixing the ending may not guarantee sales of ME3 (even with a cover that boasts "new and improved ending!"), but it would restore consumer loyalty and faith in the brand. So, when Bioware makes Mass Effect 4, or Dragon Age 3, or KOTOR 3, they'll have the given sales of their hardcore fans (who, in this hypothetical scenario, haven't descended into the black cloying void of dispassionate loathing born of hurt and betrayal).

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

I think I got a good analogy for this: Let's say that Leonard da Vinci had decided to paint donkey ears on the Mona Lisa. As the artist, he would certainly have been free to do so, but I don't think Francesco del Giocondo, the guy who commissioned the painting, would have accepted such an insult against his wife, and much less paid any money for it. He would probably have called da Vinci a hack or something worse, and told all his merchant colleagues not to commission art from him, and da Vinci would have ended up forgotten and hungry because no one in their right mind would trust him with a job.

Or in other words, look at this mean, old, entitled and whiny pope disrespecting Michelangelo's artistic integrity:

 

[keosegg]

snip

snip

I'll have you know, the only reason I'm coming out of my fortified flame shelter is because I forgot to bring the porn. I mean, what was I supposed to do instead? Read a book?

Seriously though. I do agree with you that he did spend too much time discussing the fan reaction and too little time talking about why he liked it. From what I gathered, he liked the original ending because it ended the cycle and a new one was beginning. A brave new world to be populated by the weird half robot, half man offspring of Joker and Edi. The ending left no sense of closure because that's the point of the "brave new world", to leave everything uncertain.

I personally didn't see what he saw in the ending. I found the original to be inoffensive at worse. I mean, the ending of the first Assassin's Creed was the worst video game ending I had ever encountered. Seriously, it just ended. Left me very angry.

Sorry about that, got a bit sidetracked.

I also agree with your opinion on the ending, but I would say that all of that stuff you mentioned was the right way to end the series. In my mind, nothing short of divine intervention would end the conflict against the Reapers. That's the problem with having a race of magical space Cthulhu's as your bad guy, the only way to end that story is to bring a god in to fix everything. I guess that's why I found the ending so inoffensive. I had prepared myself for the Space Child, an eleventh hour character with game changing abilities that utterly changed the world at large.

Not sure what that says about me. Maybe I'm precognitive? Or perhaps I'm just a retard, since in addition to liking the original ending I also liked the entire second season of The Walking Dead.

Also.

I agree with him that fan reaction was unreasonable, honestly I used to be in one of the "change the ending" camps but I've revised my position after I first read his article because he's right that, it is entitled and anti-art. Bioware should be allowed to make the statement they wanted, the rest of us should learn to live with that.

In total agreement

 

[Kingjackl]

I've found that all the people who ***** about the endings are the ones who ended up picking Destroy. Which strikes me as a bit of faulty logic: you pick the ending where you knowingly commit genocide and then get upset about things being bleak and depressing! I on the other hand am a Control boy, so I got the Reapers to fix the mass relays, the geth stayed alive, the organics stayed organic and everybody lived happily ever after with my Shepard becoming the benevolent emperor of the galaxy. Yeah, it's a bit of a heavy-handed way to end a series, but he was already a Mary Sue to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, he's an awesome Mary Sue and fun to play as, but facts are facts.

Also, Mordin's death is one of those gaming moments that will stay with me for a long time. Between him, Grunt, Thane and Legion, Mass Effect 3 rivals stuff like John Marston's last stand, Andrew Ryan's final speech and Batman carrying the Joker out of the theatre in terms of sheer emotional weight.

 

[Savagezion]

I share the same opinion as Film Critic Hulk

However, part of my major disagreement that I alluded to above was that he never actually addressed why he liked the ending. The delivery of the ending was only ever briefly touched upon along with waxing poetic about the nature of the ending and yadda yadda cycles, blah-blah death and rebirth.

I enjoy FCH but he misses the mark a fair amount. Mass Effect's theme wasn't cycles. The only cycle ever brought up was the reaper cycle. It got brought up from many different vantage points (the protean civilization rose and then fell... because of the reaper cycle.) The game's theme was more about the conflict of working together in spite of differences. Essentially racism is more present in the game than cycles. The game even makes a point to tell you that synthesis would be bad as it would stagnate society's creativity and ingenuity due to everyone viewing everything the same way. (This was even Javik's explanation for why the proteans couldn't stand against the threat) I didn't see more than one cycle in the game to call it a theme. So much so that when the word 'cycle' is used in the game, it always refers to the reaper cycle specifically.

This is why I found FCH's analysis rubbish. He couldn't even pick out 1 of the game's actual themes to support the ending. He basically said "As I played, the game used the word cycle a lot so the ending was poetic because it said cycle a lot too."

 

[IronMit]

I became heavily invested in Mass effect because it was supposed to be a ''planned'' trilogy.

I say planned but obviously not everything is planned, but the reaper motivations, prothean legacy, the main mysterious have to be planned right? unplanned are The things which are more a tool to advance certain themes and the bigger story include the illusive man and collectors- that is completely fine btw

Then later after Drew left the project he said 'the order-chaos AI' ending was one of many considered? along with dark energy? I am pretty sure he was just defending his own team. He can't be happy about it because he has been 'so busy he hasn't had time to play it'. This is a universe that he lead the creation of.

How can you be winging the fundamentals of the plot in a planned trilogy. Seriously they made ME1 with 5000 years of detailed established lore...but they couldn't come to decision on why the reapers are doing this? how they were created?

ME2 had dark energy forshadowing.

This is where the problem of ME3 started...it was not just the ending. They went for a different self contained story for new players that ignored much of ME1,ME2.
There were many advantages the galaxy had that they never had before; no surprise attack at heart of citadel, the citadel, the relay network, at least 2000 years longer,thianx cannons reverse engineered, diverse (whearas protheans kept saying their weakness were that they were the same). These all went out the window for 'reapers attack! over powered, deus ex machina everyone can understand'.

I will not buy the next mass effect game. If they mess up a planned trilogy that badly what's going to happen to an unplanned installment

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

I've found that all the people who ***** about the endings are the ones who ended up picking Destroy. Which strikes me as a bit of faulty logic: you pick the ending where you knowingly commit genocide and then get upset about things being bleak and depressing! I on the other hand am a Control boy, so I got the Reapers to fix the mass relays, the geth stayed alive, the organics stayed organic and everybody lived happily ever after with my Shepard becoming the benevolent emperor of the galaxy.

It could have something to do with the fact that Destroy is the most consistent with the goal of the series, i.e. stop the Reapers, and that the death of the Geth and EDI is so transparently and obviously an arbitrary punishment that is only added in to keep most players from heading straight for that one after Casper the Genocidal Ghost makes his spiel.

It could also be because it is what the Illusive Man, a secondary antagonist, wanted to achieve, and he was portrayed as mad and wrong until the end, and it was shown that his pursuit made him lose his soul and humanity in the process. And we only got the word of the leader of the main enemy that it will work for Shepard. That it then actually works for Shepard, comes across as a huge fluke, even if you metagame the hell out of it.

 

[DioWallachia]

I should amend that, he focused far too much in both columns on the reactions of others. I agree with him that fan reaction was unreasonable, honestly I used to be in one of the "change the ending" camps but I've revised my position after I first read his article because he's right that, it is entitled and anti-art.

You know what ELSE is anti-art?

Imagine an Orwellian's 1984 Dystopia, where the population doesnt believe in an Objective Reality because "There is no way to objectively measure something as good or bad. Therefore, everything is subjective" Where every person alive has been lied to so many times that they actually believe that (you know, just like how people are being lied to on the "ME3 and Dynasty Warriors make children violent." Since everything is subjective, works like Citizen Kane are equally as good as Birdemic, Gone With The Wind is equal as Twilight, Melancholia is equal to Mein Kampf, and so on.

And for this reason i ask to the artists of the world: What is the point of trying anymore? People no longer take seriously your efforts, your "Stanley Kubrikian" attention to detail, the visual storytelling, nothing. Your efforts are now completely meaningless since people its too dumb to notice the sheer difference between works. No point competing with other artist if your godlike efforts to move the medium foward with a movie the "The Fall", is going to be meet with the same standing ovation like the lazily designed "Transformer 2"

If people doesnt demand quality from art, then art is meaningless. This is the gift of ME3 "Artistic Integrity". A world that NO ONE can say anything wrong about something fundamentaly wrong because we are "entitled" and therefore, wrong by default. And developers ruining the path for other artists to actually bring true innovation, because the audience would have stopped trying to ask good art.

Spoiler: Artistic Integrity at work, gentlemen

DAT INTEGRITY

And now back to ME3: If Casey and Walter reeeeeeeally want to defend their "vision" (because its sooooo important that they send their message to the world) then why is it that we never see them in the Comic Cons with the filthy unwashed masses, and instead they hang out with people that tell them how awesome they are for getting away with this bullshit?


They DID say they were going to do that....but didnt.

And why they say THE DAY BEFORE RELEASE that all answers about the Protheans and the Reapers backstory would NOT be on DLC.....and yet....


...here is it.

Oh, by the way, This is ALSO the player story, not just the artist. At least, it WAS until ME2. Since Armando Troisi didnt work on ME3

 

[Machine Man 1992]

snip for great justice.

It's obvious you like the ending but what I don't get is why you keep perpetuating this anti-consumer screed. Yes, games are art. They are also a product, as I've said before. Movies are art, music is art, paintings are art, but the moment money changes hands, they are automatically classified as a product as well. When someone fucks a product up as badly as Bioware did with Mass Effect 3, customers are entitled (nyuck, nyuck!) to air their greivences with the company. Again, Bioware is under no obligation to bend to their fans desires, but the fact that they did, must indicate something about their collective confidence in their own art work. They could have easily said, "fuck off and deal with it," but they didn't. Art has no rules; it can be changed, warped or improved to the creator's whims. It shouldn't matter whether the creator was swayed by negative feedback, or they just didn't feel it was to their satisfaction.

And one more note on the "bad precedent" bullshit, because it pissed me off that much; Fallout 3, Prince of Persia 2009, and Asura's Wrath all had DLC that changed the endings significantly. Where were you during that time, hmm? Were you shouting from the battlements prophecies of doom for all artistic endeavors? Were people lamenting the fact that *gasp!* companies were being held accountable to their fans?

 

[DioWallachia]

snip for great justice.

It's obvious you like the ending but what I don't get is why you keep perpetuating this anti-consumer screed. Yes, games are art. They are also a product, as I've said before. Movies are art, music is art, paintings are art, but the moment money changes hands, they are automatically classified as a product as well. When someone fucks a product up as badly as Bioware did with Mass Effect 3, customers are entitled (nyuck, nyuck!) to air their greivences with the company. Again, Bioware is under no obligation to bend to their fans desires, but the fact that they did, must indicate something about their collective confidence in their own art work. They could have easily said, "fuck off and deal with it," but they didn't. Art has no rules; it can be changed, warped or improved to the creator's whims. It shouldn't matter whether the creator was swayed by negative feedback, or they just didn't feel it was to their satisfaction.

And one more note on the "bad precedent" bullshit, because it pissed me off that much; Fallout 3, Prince of Persia 2009, and Asura's Wrath all had DLC that changed the endings significantly. Where were you during that time, hmm? Were you shouting from the battlements prophecies of doom for all artistic endeavors? Were people lamenting the fact that *gasp!* companies were being held accountable to their fans?

Asura DIDNT change the ending, it just had it for DLC all along like Final Fantasy XIII-2. They literaly sold the people an incomplete game.

In the other hand, movies have ALSO been subjected to Director's Cut and revisionism and they are still art. Even Roger "Games will never be art" Ebert didnt say anything about "The Brown Bunny" being NOT ART because some things were changed.

blip.tv/brows-held-high/brows-held-high-the-brown-bunny-5399912

 

[RobinHood]

The way I remember it the initial response to the ending was actually quite civil, there was a lot of constructive criticism explaining exactly why and where the endings went wrong, it was only when the gaming media got the wrong end of the stick and started flaming the fans then it all got a bit nasty.

Looking back I think Bioware handled it in the worst possible way, hiding in a shell in for a few months and refusing to talk about anything was probably what the PR manual said, but a lot of fans got frustrated at this, if they had come out and openly discussed and explained their decisions then I don't think they would have attracted so much hate.

Then came the Extended Cut which improved things a little, but by then I'd given up on the series, which was a huge shame, as I loved ME1 & 2. Haven't bought either of the DLC's, haven't even looked at them on YouTube.

 

[DioWallachia]

I still maintain, adamantly in fact, that the "Retake Mass Effect" movement WAS an act of entitlement. It has been said a billion times, but I will say it again. Bioware did not owe you anything. Yes, they said your choices would matter, and in the end they really didn't, but that doesn't change facts. Bioware, as a game company, does not owe you the time of goddamn day. You might hate them for it, but that's the truth.

And Bioware is not entitled to OUR money. They must ear it and failed.

And acording to Armadon Troisi and "The Agreement", the lead cinematic designer of ME2, its also the player story besides the the artist.

 

[DioWallachia]

Yeah, probably... but, so what? You may not like it, but that's how it works. The creator, at the end of the day, can do whatever the fuck they want with the thing that they're making. That's how it goes.

YEAH!! THAT IS THE SPIRIT!! because he can do whatever the fuck he want, that means he can also jump of a bridge and die. Because he can thanks to his integrity. It doesnt matter if this inconvenies him with that little overrated problem that we know as DEATH, he can even paint the monkey ears on the Mona Lisa and end up dying but GOD DAMMIT it was worth it!!!

...or was it??

Same here for ME3. They had a perfectly functional message/theme that could be described as "Unity despite difference" sort of like Lord Of The Rings in Space. How is the new "vision" in the last minute the best?? why that nonsensical circular logic of nothingness is a more theme more worthy of our attention? does it have ANY applicability?

 

[Frission]

And for this reason i ask to the artists of the world: What is the point of trying anymore? People no longer take seriously your efforts, your "Stanley Kubrikian" attention to detail, the visual storytelling, nothing. Your efforts are now completely meaningless since people its too dumb to notice the sheer difference between works. No point competing with other artist if your godlike efforts to move the medium foward with a movie the "The Fall", is going to be meet with the same standing ovation like the lazily designed "Transformer 2"

For great justice. There is such a thing as "bad art".

Yeah, probably... but, so what? You may not like it, but that's how it works. The creator, at the end of the day, can do whatever the fuck they want with the thing that they're making. That's how it goes.

The fans can also whine as much as they want. That's there right I guess.

Criticism is important in Art and unless you want to live in a hug box always crooning on how great everything you make is, you have to accept that. I don't know about those that wanted a new ending, but those who hated it didn't deserve to be called whiners for using basic analytical skill.

 

[DioWallachia]

And for this reason i ask to the artists of the world: What is the point of trying anymore? People no longer take seriously your efforts, your "Stanley Kubrikian" attention to detail, the visual storytelling, nothing. Your efforts are now completely meaningless since people its too dumb to notice the sheer difference between works. No point competing with other artist if your godlike efforts to move the medium foward with a movie the "The Fall", is going to be meet with the same standing ovation like the lazily designed "Transformer 2"

For great justice. There is such a thing as "bad art".

I doubht that in an Orwellian Dystopia that we are heading, the word "Justice" would even have the same meaning anymore (or that it even exist)

 

[Maze1125]

And Bioware is not entitled to OUR money. They must ear it and failed.

Er... No they didn't.
They made huge amounts on ME3, and retain a very large fan-base for ME4. Just because a minority have gotten so annoyed that they might never buy another ME game, doesn't mean that no-one will.

 

[Frission]

8 pages already.

Let me ask you something.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT MATTER?

Mass effect is a space power rangers dating sim gears of war game by now ANYWAY. Changing the ending WON'T CHANGE THAT.

Just give mass effect up already!

Huh. I just realized that I stopped even talking about Mass Effect. This thread has become now "the value of art and whether it's truly objective, game company PR and the gamer and game designer relationship"

Someone should really rename this thread.

 

[Frission]

And Bioware is not entitled to OUR money. They must ear it and failed.

Er... No they didn't.
They made huge amounts on ME3, and retain a very large fan-base for ME4. Just because a minority have gotten so annoyed that they might never buy another ME game, doesn't mean that no-one will.

This is actually becoming cyclical funny enough. A few pages ago there was a huge rant on how much this "minority" was. Was there a silent majority, if so why haven't they had an effect by now? The amount of polls, people who were just dissatisfied at the start, but grew angry due to treatment and yadiyadiyada.

The cycle continues.

 

[Machine Man 1992]

I just wanted to know what people thought. You know, one last look before the new year and we can forget this fucking game forever. One last hurrah for the biggest cock-up in video-game history since the Crash.

But no, it seems some people need to re-argue the same points over again. Ironically, it seems they haven't gotten over it either.