Terramax said:
As he mentions, people were pretty upset about the ending to the Lost TV series. Or how George Lucas milked the Star Wars franchise for all its worth. But surely these aren't examples of the fans of the said medium showing sophistication, rather the latter, that in many ways people reacted pretty childish or overzealously?
So my question is - what is the difference? Are people within the gaming community going too far? Or is this really a serious issue for the gaming community and industry?
I truthfully don't know and the indecision itself is bothersome. You have a point about childish reactions that from outside must appear frivolous, and from inside are...what? I'm not sure, but you must acknowledge that the fact it is such an issue in itself speaks volumes about what people really think.
If a film ended badly, that's just the way it ends and there's little to be done for it. If a book ends badly, fans will write fanfic in droves to correct it. With a game, it's harder than with a book but not impossible like the movie.
I'll admit that I was vastly disappointed by the ending...if you haven't seen it for yourself, you won't really understand but to put you in our shoes...you played ME1 5 years ago, BioWare's first game on the current gen platform. We had a sci-fi RPG with their own IP and an evolved cinematic story telling experience (created in KotOR and refined in JE). And it was brilliant. The promise of our choices being ours made us all the more invested. I have multiple playthrus just because I wanted to see what would have happened if...
Move forward to ME2, post-EA take over. The game becomes more 3rd person shooter than action RPG but the updated GFX, extended cast and the promise of seeing what happens next meant ME2 worked great. Again we had choices to make, large and small and again we were promised that all the myriad choices stored would in some way shape what was to come.
And then ME3 came. I will grant that the cast, combat, loot/upgrades, etc were all excellent. The story too is great. It was a little too "call of duty" for my liking (replete with obligatory on-rails turret scenes, "get to the LZ for evac" nonsense, etc) but each mission had an immediacy to it, an importance that kept us moving. The let down however was that most every decision we made to this point, irrespective of the difficulty at the time, the implications or moral dilemmas at the time became simply a "War Asset", a numerical value.
The ending was the ultimate expression of this. Instead of taking any (or even some) of those decisions into account and ending in such a way as to a) reflect any of it b) show us what actually happens to the galaxy or characters we get an "ending machine" like Deus Ex. All three lead to what is, for all intents and purposes, exactly same FMV with minor differences that says absolutely nothing.
So 5 years, multiple playthrus, engaging characters, moral choices and 100s of variables ends with a damp squib. And we know BioWare are better than that. They create incredible games and are masters of storytelling. They're also historically very good at making things fans like. They missed this one by a long way, letting themselves and the fans down.
