One Last look at Mass Effect 3.

Shadowkire

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I think the main reason the Indoctrination Theory was somewhat believable is because of the Destroy ending where Shepard survives.

This ending as well as the other two were changed in the extended cut(so much for artistic integrity) to make things seem less grim for the survivors of the invasion. Here are the reasons Shep's survival is hard to believe: He gets partially hit by Harbinger's beam and is bleeding heavily for the next 10-15 minutes, gets shot by Marauder Shields, the Destroy ending machine blows up in his face, the Destroy option was supposed to destroy the many implants in his body from the last time he died, the Citadel blows up, he burns up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, and hits the ground. Those last two are assumptions based on the cutscene in the original ending showing the Citadel breaking up in a series of massive explosions and the breathing scene showing the presence of gravity and air, the EC changed this so that the Citadel remains mostly intact(same for the mass relays).

In the face of all that seeing Shepard take a breath could make anyone suspicious of the events leading up to it(along with the huge shift in tone and pacing that accompanied those events).

Aside from the bitterness of seeing the EC changing significant details about the ending without changing everything, I think it was an improvement.

My impression of ME3 now is 'meh', I don't really care anymore. Considering ME1 was the reason I bought my Xbox360 that really means something. The ending debacle broke my confidence in Bioware, and honestly I don't think their reputation will recover from this.
 

crazyrabbits

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Falsename said:
That moment when the Reapers come down from the skies, the awesome sounds they made (with a good sound system) and the emotions that flood through your body when you leave Earth, when a friend dies or when a hard decision has to be made.
My problem with the game is almost every setpiece in it (much like most of BW's output these days) is a double-edged sword.

Earth has fallen? Who cares - we never got to visit it in the prior games, and the narrative gives us no reason to care, especially if Shepard is a Spacer or Colonist. Tragic casualties? Too bad it's wrapped in quite possibly the most emotionally-manipulative plot device (the kid) in any game this year. Cerberus is the main villain? They're led by TIM, who's done a complete 180 from the previous games and become a scenery-chewing villain.

I could go on and on all day. The point is that, if it was a standalone game, I'd probably be more forgiving of it. As the sequel to a series that relied near-solely on continuity, exploration, importing and lore, it's a complete failure. It railroads every Shepard, no matter what his or her alignment/morality/decisions were, into a linear narrative that treats past decisions with the same gravity that the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway? are - they don't matter. Add to that a number of broken gameplay mechanics, dialogue and missions (some of which, to date, still haven't been fixed) and you'll see why there's still a backlash months later.

Yes, the endings were disappointing, but they were fixed (for the most part).
The only thing the EC really did was fix a couple of plot holes, while introducing new ones at the same time (see my point above). Shepard's squadmates get rescued? Too bad it comes at the cost of the Normandy suddenly being able to teleport and sit in the middle of a warzone while Harbinger (who's been picking off troops with precision up to this point) does nothing to stop them. Shepard's love interest puts up Admiral Anderson's plaque on the memorial wall? How does he/she know Anderson is dead and not Shepard in the Destroy-Plus ending? It makes the Synthesis ending (which was already absurd in the original ending) downright hilarious in the EC.

Other than that, it was just more elaboration on the same silly arguments that the game tried to foist on the player ("we have to kill organics to save organics", "synthetics are evil", etc.)

But everyone quickly shut the hell up when EA declared the 'extended cut'. Perhaps that'll show some to give others with a differing opinion some respect, or atleast be less critical of differing opinions.
As I said earlier in this thread (five pages back), it's nine months later, and the backlash is almost as strong as when it started. Just about every account of the game, even if it's good, has to be qualified with "well, the ending sucked, but..." It's cognitive dissonance in effect for the entire fanbase. The franchise's rep is in tatters.

Remember that games don't belong to you, they belong to those creating them.
That's a fallacy. If that was really the case, we wouldn't have had Sherlock Holmes survive the Reichenbach Falls, or any movie in history that received a negative reaction from test audiences having parts changed, or Fallout 3 having its ending changed to allow the PC to survive.

They can hide behind their "artistic integrity" excuse all they want, but if it does (and did) result in a fracturing of the fanbase like it did with ME3, then they'll be shut down just like all of the other studios EA has taken behind a woodshed and executed. They should have taken their lumps and apologized (like the Dragon Age II team did) and worked to satisfy their fanbase over the last nine months. Instead, the only thing they did was adopt this "boohoo, woe is me" attitude and cry to everyone who would listen (like the gaming blogs) that their fanbase "just didn't get it", while simultaneously trying to mitigate the damage in future DLC's via retconning.

There is no other example I can think of this year regarding a company who so callously destroyed its own franchise via apathy and non-action.
 

Falsename

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crazyrabbits said:
Falsename said:
That moment when the Reapers come down from the skies, the awesome sounds they made (with a good sound system) and the emotions that flood through your body when you leave Earth, when a friend dies or when a hard decision has to be made.
My problem with the game is almost every setpiece in it (much like most of BW's output these days) is a double-edged sword.

Earth has fallen? Who cares - we never got to visit it in the prior games, and the narrative gives us no reason to care, especially if Shepard is a Spacer or Colonist. Tragic casualties? Too bad it's wrapped in quite possibly the most emotionally-manipulative plot device (the kid) in any game this year. Cerberus is the main villain? They're led by TIM, who's done a complete 180 from the previous games and become a scenery-chewing villain.

I could go on and on all day. The point is that, if it was a standalone game, I'd probably be more forgiving of it. As the sequel to a series that relied near-solely on continuity, exploration, importing and lore, it's a complete failure. It railroads every Shepard, no matter what his or her alignment/morality/decisions were, into a linear narrative that treats past decisions with the same gravity that the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway? are - they don't matter. Add to that a number of broken gameplay mechanics, dialogue and missions (some of which, to date, still haven't been fixed) and you'll see why there's still a backlash months later.

Yes, the endings were disappointing, but they were fixed (for the most part).
The only thing the EC really did was fix a couple of plot holes, while introducing new ones at the same time (see my point above). Shepard's squadmates get rescued? Too bad it comes at the cost of the Normandy suddenly being able to teleport and sit in the middle of a warzone while Harbinger (who's been picking off troops with precision up to this point) does nothing to stop them. Shepard's love interest puts up Admiral Anderson's plaque on the memorial wall? How does he/she know Anderson is dead and not Shepard in the Destroy-Plus ending? It makes the Synthesis ending (which was already absurd in the original ending) downright hilarious in the EC.

Other than that, it was just more elaboration on the same silly arguments that the game tried to foist on the player ("we have to kill organics to save organics", "synthetics are evil", etc.)

But everyone quickly shut the hell up when EA declared the 'extended cut'. Perhaps that'll show some to give others with a differing opinion some respect, or atleast be less critical of differing opinions.
As I said earlier in this thread (five pages back), it's nine months later, and the backlash is almost as strong as when it started. Just about every account of the game, even if it's good, has to be qualified with "well, the ending sucked, but..." It's cognitive dissonance in effect for the entire fanbase. The franchise's rep is in tatters.

Remember that games don't belong to you, they belong to those creating them.
That's a fallacy. If that was really the case, we wouldn't have had Sherlock Holmes survive the Reichenbach Falls, or any movie in history that received a negative reaction from test audiences having parts changed, or Fallout 3 having its ending changed to allow the PC to survive.

They can hide behind their "artistic integrity" excuse all they want, but if it does (and did) result in a fracturing of the fanbase like it did with ME3, then they'll be shut down just like all of the other studios EA has taken behind a woodshed and executed. They should have taken their lumps and apologized (like the Dragon Age II team did) and worked to satisfy their fanbase over the last nine months. Instead, the only thing they did was adopt this "boohoo, woe is me" attitude and cry to everyone who would listen (like the gaming blogs) that their fanbase "just didn't get it", while simultaneously trying to mitigate the damage in future DLC's via retconning.

There is no other example I can think of this year regarding a company who so callously destroyed its own franchise via apathy and non-action.

You make some great points (that damn kid included, I guess I mentally blocked that one out. Haha) but we have to remember that everything you pointed out is more opinion than fact.

Which is why everything was so divided towards change/don't change. Everyone's different, everyone appreciates something things that others overlook and vice versa. You do make some good points of course, and there is a lot that has to be overlooked to consider ME3 a great game, but even without overlooking it's at the very least a good game.

I often find that over-examining anything, be it a video game/movie or even a poem, it's like chopping down a tree. You can't re-build that tree once you've dismantled it. If you look at all the imperfections that's all you can see from now on. Concentrate on the good. Like... uh, that moment you Save the Krogans (if you did). Tell me that wasn't awesome. And the music! Best music in a game I've ever heard!

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm going to assume you're not saying I am either.
 

crazyrabbits

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Falsename said:
You make some great points... but we have to remember that everything you pointed out is more opinion than fact.
Alright, point out where my "opinion" is. I'm very careful when I write out replies on this subject, because I ground everything in objective facts and figures.

But even without overlooking it's at the very least a good game.
That's not the vibe I've gotten over the last nine months. Considering where this site was then (which I rightly pointed out several pages back), finding someone who legitimately likes the game and isn't being facetious is very rare.

The first time I saw the game in action, I was stunned at how badly they botched the narrative - there's nothing quite like 500 people watching a pre-release livestream of the game and collectively laughing at it the entire way through. Even now, the scant few outlets that gave it "RPG/Game of the Year" still qualify it with, "Well, the ending sucked, and it had problems, but yay for Bioware!" It is, quite possibly, the largest disconnect between the media and fans I've seen in quite a long time.

I often find that over-examining anything, be it a video game/movie or even a poem, it's like chopping down a tree. You can't re-build that tree once you've dismantled it. If you look at all the imperfections that's all you can see from now on. Concentrate on the good. Like... uh, that moment you Save the Krogans (if you did). Tell me that wasn't awesome. And the music! Best music in a game I've ever heard!
Well, for one thing, half the music in ME3 was recycled from 1 and 2. Clint Mansell contributed a whopping two pieces to the game, and Sam Hulick did the rest. I mean, yeah, it was still good, but it didn't have much power over 1 and 2 besides a handful of standout tracks.

That said, you can criticize a game and still enjoy it. There is nothing wrong with pointing out a game's flaws if you still actively want to play it. It's when you ignore those problems, to the detriment of the narrative, that you run into problems. From just about every conceivable standpoint, the game was a step backwards from the prior installments.

Sure, Tuchanka and Rannoch were good-to-great, and they were...what, 6 missions total in the grand scheme of things? The planet scanning mechanic was just a holdover from 2. The N7 missions were just the multiplayer maps repurposed. All the fetch quests involved eavesdropping on people and scanning a planet to get a random item - it is, comparatively, nowhere near the depth or breadth of content accessible in ME2.
 

Falsename

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crazyrabbits said:
Falsename said:
You make some great points... but we have to remember that everything you pointed out is more opinion than fact.
Alright, point out where my "opinion" is. I'm very careful when I write out replies on this subject, because I ground everything in objective facts and figures.
You do understand what an 'opinion' is don't you? Saying that "ME3 Sucks because of these reasons:...." is an opinion, in it's entirety. There's nothing factual about what you've said, it's ALL opinion.

And I'm not sure if you're trying to change my mind or just tell me I'm wrong, but either way it wouldn't make sense to do so. I thoroughly enjoy ME3, and I'm not telling people why they should as well. I'm just expressing what I enjoyed.

So you have your opinions (and that's exactly what they are) and I have my own. Don't get too worked up over it like many others do, just accept we're two different people who like different things. :)
 
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crazyrabbits said:
Earth has fallen? Who cares - we never got to visit it in the prior games, and the narrative gives us no reason to care, especially if Shepard is a Spacer or Colonist. Tragic casualties? Too bad it's wrapped in quite possibly the most emotionally-manipulative plot device (the kid) in any game this year.
Yeah, that is really one of the major problems. There was plenty of stuff to choose from the previous games that Shepard and the player had an already established connection to. I mean, just listen to the ambient sounds and music from the nightmare sequences:


It really makes you wonder why the dreams couldn't be centred more around Shepard's fallen friends. Instead of chasing the ghost of the stupid kid, they could have used the Vimire casualty as the ghost. Have the moments actually carry some weight.

But, no. Instead it was this forced connection to the kid and the Earth (even Earthborn Shepard wouldn't be very found of the place, as it was where s/he lead a troubled life of poverty and crime before jumping at the first chance to run away away with the Alliance), resulting in these very forced, obliviously manipulative moments that are just short of big, red, flashing letters on the screen spelling "FEEL SAD NOW!"

EDIT: Come to think of it: In retrospect, Mass Effect 3 actually seems a bit hostile to the idea of player involvement and agency. Besides what I just wrote, there is also Shepard being less of a player avatar, and the increased level of auto-dialogue.
 

Moonlight Butterfly

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The game was amazing, I loved it and played it non stop until I was finished, I even liked the multiplayer.

But the ending made no goddamn sense and I haven't played it since. I think that shows me how much I hated the ending as I love Mass Effect (I;m even subscribed to the comic). I haven't even been able to summon enough enthusiasm to play the DLC's.

The only thing that could reawaken any interest for me would be a post reaper attack game. Because I just don't see how anything could have continued after the Mass Relays were destroyed.
 

AD-Stu

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BrionJames said:
After playing Mass Effect 2, I thought to myself, " I have no interest to play Mass Effect 3, the end boss in this games looked like a giant robotic skeleton and seemed to be a throwaway final boss that had zero effort put into its design or explanation."
I think the problem with the human reaper mostly had to do with the change in writers from ME1 to ME2 to ME3 (ie: ME1 being Drew Karpyshyn alone, Mac Walters coming in for ME2 and then taking over completely for ME3). From the stuff I've read, the human reaper (and indeed many of the other plot elements of ME2, such as the Haestrom section and the Collectors abducting humans specifically) would have made a lot more sense if Karpyshyn's original plot had been stuck to.

Whether people would have liked his ending more than the Mac Walters / Casey Hudson one is another question, I guess, but he at least had answers for a lot of those leftover ME2 issues.
 

Machine Man 1992

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Politeia said:
It is not broken, that is simply dishonest terminology. A plot hole, a deus ex machina, and a shitty ending are not things that would make the legal definition of a defective product.

Day 1 DLC is not the same as being sold an incomplete product, between the time a game goes gold and release there is a window where nothing is happening. Lately major developers realized they can have their employees working, developing new content, instead of sitting around collecting a paycheck between projects. The existence of some or part of that code on the disc isn't evidence of, well, anything.

I didn't say people can't return a product if they're unsatisfied with it, I said they can't return a product and expect a full refund at any time for any reason. There is a gulf between what I said and what you claim I said. On this subject though, you didn't actually prove anything. Your first link explicitly states Amazon did not promise a full refund and the latter is conjecture from a random forum poster.

What does the fact that they're multinational corporations have to do with anything? The point wasn't that I was worried they'd lose money, it's that they worry they lose money. Hence, I do not see under what mythical system you people believe that retailers have always offered full refunds for any reason.

You fucked yourself over, consumer protection laws cannot stop you from making a hasty purchase you then have to live with. That was his point, you ignored that point to interject gobs more self-righteous indignation. You keep convincing yourself that you're some sort of freedom fighter for consumer rights, it's kind of cute.


That doesn't matter; The Two Towers was also important to the plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy but you aren't entitled to a free copy of the book because you bought The Fellowship of the Ring. Legally, EA could've given you half of Mass Effect 3 and made you buy episodic DLC expansions for the rest of it. Otherwise known as ex-fucking-actly what Valve did with Half-Life 2.

No, those clauses were there to begin, nice try.

I've mentioned that some retailers have specified "grace periods" where you can return a product for a full refund, Gamestop for instance. That doesn't answer my question though, which nation(s) require that by law?

If you tell people that they can return a product at anytime for a full refund then SHOCK! HORROR! they will.
In order:

- The story is a major part of the game and it's broken beyond belief. That's not getting into the various bugs and glitches and the couple times the game crashed. The game is defective.

- It is in this case. You're dismissing evidence out of hand for no decernable reason other than it contradicts this little argument you're trying to make. From Ashes is way too complex, and blends way too seamlessly with the game to be anything but a piece of the game that's being sold back to us. To get the complete experience, we have to pay an extra ten bucks. Compare this to the Zaeed DLC (which was free!). It's one thing if Day 1 DLC is weapons, or skins, or some non-plot integral area to explore, it's another thing if it's a entirely new dimension to the story that should have been in the game in the first fucking place. (And it's a frickin' prothean!)

- Costco does it. I would know because I work there.

- Where are you getting this?

- Nice victim blame there. If a company can fuck over a customer for extra profits and get away with it, they will. How was I supposed to know the game was a complete lie? This was back when Bioware was still respectable; A preorder from a company I respect, of a game series I love(d) is not hasty. If I don't make a scene and act like this is a violation (which it is) then companies will continue to get away with it.

- Oh, piss off! The Two Towers is a SEQUEL! It's got enough meat on it's bones to be an entirely entity. Half-Life 2 episodes 1 and 2 are stand alone games and, oh yeah, I can get ALL of them, together, on one disc for the price of one of them. And at least Valve gives a shit about it's customers.

- No they weren't.

- Can't answer that, never left America.

- Bullshit. Just...BULLSHIT. That's the biggest load of fuck-nuttery I've ever heard, and I watched Bush's State of the Union address. What breed of humanity are you basing this on? BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST! If I buy something it's because I want to KEEP IT. Even if a full refund was offered, if I like my whatsit, I'll still want to keep it. You're arguing for argument's sake now.

All in all, I'm seeing a lot of corporate apology and not a whole lot of a substantive argument on why I shouldn't be able to return Mass Effect 3. Okay granted, there should be a "within reason" clause (like the whole 90 days thing, incidentally more than enough time to finish this piece of crap), but I still see no reason why it shouldn't be done.
 

GrumpyPirate

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For me it was simple, never before and i very much doubt after, will i be so completely and totaly pissed of at a game and a company. It killed a part of the gamer in me cause, dramatic as it may sound, i havent quite been able to work up that true excited feeling for any game since then. I will never ever again pay a single cent for anything even slightly, Bioware, or more impportantly EA related. Never ever and ill do my damndest to keep anyone i know from doing it either. I may just be one person and my impact is ridicoulos overall but if enough people who has this sentiment sticks to it they will seriously feel it. Hopefully Bioware will stay in decline and the good people who works/worked there can find a new non-EA related studio.
 

DioWallachia

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Politeia said:
DioWallachia said:
But that DLC was SUPPOSED to be important to the plot
That doesn't matter; The Two Towers was also important to the plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy but you aren't entitled to a free copy of the book because you bought The Fellowship of the Ring. Legally, EA could've given you half of Mass Effect 3 and made you buy episodic DLC expansions for the rest of it. Otherwise known as ex-fucking-actly what Valve did with Half-Life 2.
Yes, but it was ALREADY on the DVD/game. In fact, i think i saw a video of someone just changing ONE number in a variable on the files and WHOILA! From Ashes was unlocked. So again, how i am not entitled to what i already pay and its already in my possetion?

Did Valve anounce to everyone on the first day that it will be a episodic thing? or people reached the ending of HL2 and THEN they anounce: "mmnn..?? OH YEAH, forgot to tell you that the game was divided and shit"
 

DioWallachia

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Politeia said:
Machine Man 1992 said:
The story is a major part of the game and it's broken beyond belief. That's not getting into the various bugs and glitches and the couple times the game crashed. The game is defective.
The story is a major part of any piece of entertainment you buy, but no one believes that a bad story makes a product defective. To argue that Mass Effect should be given preferential treatment based upon its story is special pleading.

Most stores have a set grace period in which you can return a game for full-price, afterwards a matter of a few bugs and occasionally crashing to desktop isn't enough to motivate anyone to give you a refund, especially if the problem is fixed via patching. You would have to demonstrate that it's impossible for you to progress in the story and that the issue hasn't been fixed.
Curiously enough after all that DLC and multiplayer add ons.....they didnt fix the bugs (or even the quest log). But still not gamebreaking (except maybe the ocasional "phase throught the floor and fall eternally into the nothingness")

Still, ME3 is a box full of surprices, so all we have to do is wait for someone else to confirm a worse experience with bugs.
 

gaiusimperator

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Honestly, I find that most of the complaints come from gamers that do not remember the whole "Ultima 9" debacle. To say that Mass Effect 3 was a massive betrayal of a fanbase unlike anything ever seen is to forget Ultima 9.

I was but a kid when I started that game, but when I had finally quit, crying, after loving the rest of the the 8 Ultima games, I was truly a man.
 

Gergar12_v1legacy

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I wish they did more mission involving your former mates. I would have love to fight aside grunt, and his company or be in the front of the battle while jack and her students repair our barriers, but nope. Instead we get a magical wand that just wishes away the reapers instead of fighting a real war. Forget the ending the plot was already screwed up. Or maybe I would have even done some shadow broker missions too. Nope magic wand, and multiplayer. Fine keep the multiplayer, but what about space combat. You think they be like assassin creed 3, and put those thanix cannons to good use. Nope don't even get a cutscene. Over all I expect world war 1, and I got world war 2 1945 skipped ahead to almost before the a bomb is deployed.
 

Uszi

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Moonlight Butterfly said:
The game was amazing, I loved it and played it non stop until I was finished, I even liked the multiplayer.

But the ending made no goddamn sense and I haven't played it since. I think that shows me how much I hated the ending as I love Mass Effect (I;m even subscribed to the comic). I haven't even been able to summon enough enthusiasm to play the DLC's.

The only thing that could reawaken any interest for me would be a post reaper attack game. Because I just don't see how anything could have continued after the Mass Relays were destroyed.
I'm in the same boat on your first two points. I beat the game in three marathon, 12 hour sessions. This is when I was working 8-5, so I was going to work on 3 hours of sleep just because I couldn't put it down. I had, going into the ending, at least five or six other save files loaded up and ready to go, and it was my intention to keep playing like this to see how all of my different decisions in each of those subtle endings would affect my final outcome...

And I haven't been back to the game since then. Its dead to me. The ending was bad, but it was also a betrayal of what Mass Effect had been up to that point.

I think I'd prefer a pre-ME1 extended universe type game, as opposed to a post reaper invasion game. I'd like to play as just a pirate, or a mercenary, or some citizen on Omega who rises up, something like that. I think Post Reaper attack causes even more issues, because it means Bioware needs to pick one shit ending as the "Cannon" ending, which is going to ruin player agency even more. There's no way you can just leave it open what happened, because the ending where all AI dies, where there are giant robot guardians controlled by Shepard flying around like benevolent overlords, and where all organic and synthetic life is combined (what does that even mean?) are totally incommensurable. It has to be one of them.

GrumpyPirate said:
For me it was simple, never before and i very much doubt after, will i be so completely and totaly pissed of at a game and a company. It killed a part of the gamer in me cause, dramatic as it may sound, i havent quite been able to work up that true excited feeling for any game since then.
No, I am totally on board with this. My relationship with games as a medium is different after the ending to Mass Effect 3.
 

Machine Man 1992

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gaiusimperator said:
Honestly, I find that most of the complaints come from gamers that do not remember the whole "Ultima 9" debacle. To say that Mass Effect 3 was a massive betrayal of a fanbase unlike anything ever seen is to forget Ultima 9.

I was but a kid when I started that game, but when I had finally quit, crying, after loving the rest of the the 8 Ultima games, I was truly a man.
I didn't even know Ultima even existed until Yahtzee made an off hand comment about it, and Spoony did an entire series of reviews on it.

So yeah, if you're wondering where EA got off on butt-fucking franchises, it's because they've been practicing.