The Big Picture: Mutants and Masses

[RaikuFA]

So once again Bob doesn't understand the difference between games and movies. And misrepresents the retake ME movement. Standard stuff from him them.

Considering people are demanding donations back, making death threats and making BBB complaints over it, hes a bit justified. Hes just saying those above three make all fans of something look bad.

That is an extreme fringe and accompanies anything which is emotional. Bob is not a man to chide others for childish outbursts, remember the whole comparison between the Transformers movies and his dogs skeleton being dug out, covered in shit and views of it sold? I do.

Also he mentions the FTC without paying any attention to why that happened. That is not about the ending being bad, that is about Bioware outright lying in interviews. They said it wouldn't be an ABC affair and it was.

OK? And? I was promised a demo of MML3 and the sales of said demo would determine if it was gonna be cancelled or not. It got canceled before the demo was released and I can't make a BBB complaint over it cause it will be thrown out, just like your ME3 complaints.

Sorry I don't understand. I don't know what MML3 is or how it relates to this

Its Mega Man Legends 3 and it was said in an interview just like your ending thing that sales of the demo would determine if the game would be canned. A demo was never released and the game was canned. I was promised a demo, never got it and didn't get a game either. Therefore I was lied to just like your ME3 ending thing.

 

[The Material Sheep]

AGH YOU DON'T GET IT YOU DON'T GET IT YOU DON'T GET IT!!!!!

*Breathes* Okay.

How. How Bob. How do fans with INTELLIGENT RESEARCHED CRITIQUES of a game asking for a Goddamn intelligent ending from a group that has previously managed to provide them with such PREVENT ARTISTS FROM TAKING RISKS?!

They don't!! How does that, I don't even... URHGU It makes no goddamn sense!!

You did make some good points though...

But seriously? Telling someone that what they do was shit doesn't stop risk taking. Asking them to change said shit into something better doesn't stop risk taking. Because people will always make risky shit. And they will always make risky quality. That will NEVER change. How does someone asking for something to be quality change that?

Which brings us to the biggest difference between TMNT and ME3. TMNT is trying to make a story with changes to the original. No one has ANY idea whether it will be good quality or not.

Mass Effect 3 had a shitty ending.

That is the difference between them.

Captcha: Face The Music

Damn straight!!

You have creative rights over some1 else product or not?
Pick one.

If not then you get to critique the ending, not change it.

If you have you get to change it. How can you misunderstand that?

I don't think we're saying we have the right to force them to change it. Just that we want them to with our criticism. There's a difference.

 

[Terminal Blue]

In the interest of fairness, while the vast majority of what you have to say here is completely accurate, I feel I must mention that the FTC suit is not fans bitching about a shitty ending. It's fans bitching about false advertising. Whether or not that claim holds any water remains to be seen, I'm sure the legal system will be able to work it out, but from everything I've seen it certainly appears to be a valid complaint.

It holds no water at all.

Mass Effect 3 will enlarge your penis by at least 2 inches

..is false advertising. It makes a specific claim which is demonstrably beyond the scope of the product.

Mass Effect 3 will be a fitting conclusion to an epic story

..is not false advertising no matter how much the result personally disappoints you. Any claims involved are completely vague. Even:

Mass Effect 3 will resolve the plot threads from the previous mass effect games.

..is not false adversing. What qualifies as a plot thread in this case is not specific, and without a specific claim there is no case. As long as the game in any way references the previous games, it could be said to have 'resolved the plot threads'.

And let's not forget. None of these things were actually included in advertising for the game in the first place. They came from individual marketing people and members of the dev team who were expressing their individual opinions on the game. If you read that as an ironclad guaruntee, then that's kind of your problem.

Sorry, but I'm totally with Bob here. This is not a "controversy", you got sold a perfectly functional product which you didn't like. You can express that you didn't like it until you keel over and die, but you have absolutely no right to demand that it be changed.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Sorry I don't understand. I don't know what MML3 is or how it relates to this

Mega Man Legends 3, Capcom killed it, AFTER they gotten fans to send in designs for a contest they set up and AFTER promising a demo that would ultimately determine weather the game came out.

as for that whole 'our choices didn't matter' bullshit. ITS A BIOWARE GAME. they suck at 'choice', since they don't know what 'grey area' is, nope just what ever they're calling good, and evil, so deal with it.

 

[Karnesdorff]

Would you be able to give an example of how something that has been coded (read: prewritten) can not be an ABC affair?

Hmm, Something like the Fallout games. The main ending is usually one of a few choices, but the epilogue afterwards lets you know what happened to the people you met and places you visited; the ending may be primarily ABC, but the epilogue makes it feel more like you got a different end from other people who played since a lot of people wouldn't quite get quite the same end as their friends who play the same game (a different choice here, a dead NPC there...), so the Wasteland ends up feeling like 'yours' more. Instead of being A, B or C, it looks more like (A,d,f,g,i,m,o) or (C,e,f,h,i,j,p), each of those choices might have been binary, but all together they make it look more 'fluid'.

It isn't about making computer games that can have a billion endings, for every single player choice, games are inherently linear because they can't predict everything that I can do in a game, but its about making the player feel like their actions weren't ABC. ME3, where Starchild Hitler turns up and forces you to take one of three very similar options without any means to disagree, then you get a recoloured cutscene followed by another cutscene that makes you say 'WTF?' fails in that challenge.

People don't like being forced to see the the code strings that their avatars dance on due to bad writing, it breaks immersion.

K.

 

[IceStar100]

Aw this song and dance again.

The way I see it. They will try and sell DLC and tie in to Mass Effect. So yes fans do have a say otherwise their stuff stops selling. Honest since Dragon Age 2 how many comic and book have been put out about that world.

So yeah they have all right to say our work deal with it. We have all right to say our money deal with it. Then if Bioware goes belly up because it lost all the good will of its fans. Are we not going to hear about how it was our fault for not putting money into a company we no longer believe in?

TLR
They have all right to their work. They also have all right to go bankrupt.

 

[Gxas]

Would you be able to give an example of how something that has been coded (read: prewritten) can not be an ABC affair?

Hmm, Something like the Fallout games. The main ending is usually one of a few choices, but the epilogue afterwards lets you know what happened to the people you met and places you visited; the ending may be primarily ABC, but the epilogue makes it feel more like you got a different end from other people who played since a lot of people wouldn't quite get quite the same end as their friends who play the same game (a different choice here, a dead NPC there...), so the Wasteland ends up feeling like 'yours' more. Instead of being A, B or C, it looks more like (A,d,f,g,i,m,o) or (C,e,f,h,i,j,p), each of those choices might have been binary, but all together they make it look more 'fluid'.

It isn't about making computer games that can have a billion endings, for every single player choice, games are inherently linear because they can't predict everything that I can do in a game, but its about making the player feel like their actions weren't ABC. ME3, where Starchild Hitler turns up and forces you to take one of three very similar options without any means to disagree, then you get a recoloured cutscene followed by another cutscene that makes you say 'WTF?' fails in that challenge.

People don't like being forced to see the the code strings that their avatars dance on due to bad writing, it breaks immersion.

K.

So are we complaining about some ending cutscene then?

Like I said above, I have no idea what happens, as I've not even finished the first game. But, if it's an epilogue cutscene that people are complaining about, then this is even more ridiculous to me than it was before.

 

[crimson sickle2]

Bob, you got a little offtrack at the end; now I think this whole video was just an introduction into a rant about the retake movement.

 

[The Material Sheep]

Aw this song and dance again.

The way I see it. They will try and sell DLC and tie in to Mass Effect. So yes fans do have a say otherwise their stuff stops selling. Honest since Dragon Age 2 how many comic and book have been put out about that world.

So yeah they have all right to say our work deal with it. We have all right to say our money deal with it. Then if Bioware goes belly up because it lost all the good will of its fans. Are we not going to hear about how it was our fault for not putting money into a company we no longer believe in?

TLR
They have all right to their work. They also have all right to go bankrupt.

This is exactly it. We took that risk, and a lot of us feel burned by it. So much so that we won't buy things anymore. That's completely fair.

 

[Callate]

You see kids, multi-millionaires and media conglomerates can revise things any way they want. They can do test screenings and focus-testings, they can cut and edit and reboot, but that's as close as you will ever get to actually influencing how the things you care about turn out: as proxy for a money-generating process.

You can care, but don't care too much. One, you're likely to get your feelings hurt, and why? So holier-than-thou people can cast disdain on you for giving a shit? Don't be ridiculous. And two, you might harm the ability of artists- or as we call them these days, intellectual property creators- to take risks which are the soul of great art. Or at least, the kindling for the next generation of "re-envisionings" when they sell off their rights to said multi-millionares and media conglomerates so they don't have to warm their houses with fires from big piles of rejected scripts. (Remember, don't care too much!)

What is important to this process- really, really important- is that you give up your money. And then, shut up. Because you are irrelevant to the process beyond your ability to be a revenue stream. The big boys have been trying to tell you this for years, but only recently have they managed to get critics to argue with a straight face that your anger at losing multiple hours of your life towards a result that insults everything you came to care about in those hours is something called "entitlement".

Remember: protect artistic integrity! Buy nine-figure-development-cost-products, and then shut up about them. Thank you.

--

To this, let me add one small note.

I am, myself, deeply ambivalent about the question of re-writing an ending to address an audience's unhappiness about said ending.

But I really don't think it's my place to demean the emotional commitment of people who do feel that way, or to suggest that they're about to destroy the product, or the medium, or... gasp... art itself with this terrible, terrible precedent.

I am deeply skeptical about any argument that can't stand on its own without foretelling crushing doom if its warning isn't heeded. I could take the arguers much more seriously if they would just get down from the pulpit and walk among the hoi polloi, rather than taking up the sword as the defenders of Great Art (ever increasingly (tm).)

Doesn't it seem a little strange that this much anger and fear should be summoned at the idea that creators might listen to their audience?

 

[Ralen-Sharr]

I just wish Bob would STFU about Mass Effect. Every time he brings it up, he stirs up a shitstorm and he ends up just crapping on his own videos.

Shut up about it if you want it to go away. Giving it this kind of attention is just throwing gas on the fire.

 

[Frozengale]

Personally I agree with Bob. The moaning and whining is just silly and is to much. You want to know how you can show Bioware you are disappointed? Don't buy their next game. It's that simple. You don't need to nerd rage all over the place and become noisy whiny brats. Yes 60 bucks and 30+ hours is an investment, but it is an investment you made with your own money/time and did so willingly. You got burned, but you entered into the social contract, you signed on the dotted line. They promised you a game, you got a game. They did what they thought was best, or were forced into doing. They may have speculated that you would love it but they never promised that it would fulfill all your hopes and dreams about the series.

As for the Ninja Turtles... it's Michael Bay. He takes things and makes them bad, no one should find this surprising.

 

[Vault Citizen]

The way that retake Mass Effect was presented to me was that it was a group of fans who wanted to show Bioware that they would be willing to spend money in order to support DLC that changed the ending of the game to a less objectionable state, while at the same time recognising that such action didn't guarentee it would happen and the child's play donations being thrown in as a way to create something good out of the controversy.

I think the effort was hampered by two things, the use of the word "Retake" in the name, and by the reports that people wanted their money back, as if they genuinely expected a direct, concrete result from their donation.

 

[Mousse Templar]

"echo chamber of mutual butt-hurt outrage"
I wonder, if the internet only displayed opinions
you disagreed with, would there be less-angry people
or just less angry-people.

 

[Stalydan]

Thank you. I don't care about the turtles in the slightest, but thank you for the remarks regarding Mass Effect. I have gotten so sick of all the moaning. I haven't played Mass Effect 3 yet because 1: My Xbox is broken and I need to fix it in order to import my save files and 2: I'm waiting for the game to get cheaper so I spend less overall on the game and DLCs.

But all the whining and complaining has been so aggravating to me. I even accidentally ran across a spoiler the other day that nearly brought me to tears in frustration. I happen to feel that the Mass Effect games are the best RPGs I've ever played. Are they perfect? No. But they are the best I've played because of how well they facilitate roleplaying and making me care about the characters I interact with.

I won't go into spoilers about the previous games (because even though they've been out for a while, I will show some basic courtesy to even the smallest percentage of people who haven't played them yet and are curious), but I made decisions in roleplaying during those games that I deeply regret. Those decisions will have consequences in Mass Effect 3, and that saddens me. But at the same time, I'm grateful that Bioware made the game so that could happen.

Ultimately, I don't give a flying feather about the ending because I know I'm going to enjoy the game itself. As they say, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

TL;DR: Dear Internet, shut up and get over it.

Oh yeah. You have fun with that.

I thought I was going to be like that as well but you wait until you actually see the ending after you've gone through the rest of the game and then get back to me on that.

OT: Bob, I respect your opinion on the Turtles because from that aspect, it's possible that Bay misspoke. Thank God he is not directing it but him having anything to do with it at all is a bit frightening.

However, do not bring up the ME3 ending. You don't know how it's different, how many promises were broken and (if it's true) how little involvement the ACTUAL writers got in it!

http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/5695/article/mass-effect-3-writer-allegedly-slams-controversial-ending/

If this is true then this really defeats your argument. There is an amount of artistic license that creators should have over their games but when you promise one thing and then totally go against it and say that your fans are part of the creative process, that's too far.

I loved ME3 until the complete mind-fuck of an ending happened. Now, it's a great game but with a huge flaw of completely stripping away all of my previous decisions away from an ending like that, missing huge pieces of explanation and variation in a game that has always shined in choice and consequence whilst presenting you with the knowledge you need to make your decisions the way you want to.

 

[Darkmantle]

I just wish Bob would STFU about Mass Effect. Every time he brings it up, he stirs up a shitstorm and he ends up just crapping on his own videos.

Shut up about it if you want it to go away. Giving it this kind of attention is just throwing gas on the fire.

Like I said earlier, it must get him a lot of hits.

 

[370999]

Ahh, see, I've not finished the first game, so I have no idea what is going on with the third in terms of ending or changes based on decisions. I also never, ever pay attention to interviews or anything like that, so I have no leg there. It just seems that, to me, people were expecting a butterfly effect-type ending in the sense that not doing a side-mission - let's say, for my sake, mining all of the gas nodes in the first game - would have a huge impact on the game.

From an outside viewpoint, as I see myself, the whole complaint with everything is utterly juvenile and ridiculous.

Especially the FTC/BBB complaint. Ads lie all the time, if you really look into them. Blatantly. Look at the AXE marketing. I wash with that shit every day (I really do like the smell of it) and I've never, ever had a girl all over me like the bottle/packaging/commercials/magazine ads say I will. If I were to complain, the FTC/BBB would just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Well you see the way ME is presented you get to make choices which appear to have major impact on the world. Do you give this base of advanced technology into the hands of a terrorist who wants to use it for humanities benefit, do you help cure a disease that sterilizes a species, do you save the last remaining individual of another species that previously waged a huge galactic war, etc. This doesn't really affect the final battle, only doing so in the form of a numerical score that determines wherever you get either the choice of option C, option C and B or, the best case, option A B and C. And all of the options are baffling and seem (at least to me) to actually be against the theme of game.

Now being honest with you I'm not sure if they should change the ending. I tend to think that Bioware should, the current ending is awful and they can do such much better but I don't know. It's just I hate Bob completely misrepresenting one side of the argument. He is ignorant on this subject and then him getting paid to talk about it taste sour, especially when he does it in such a dogmatic fashion. Remember how he had a defensive tone in his transformers 3 review where he immediately started by vetoing accusations of fanboy bias? He doing the same now

I think the thing with the endings, was again, people were worried that we could end up in the present scenario and Bioware said we wouldn't. And while it would of been very difficult I tend to believe they could of presented an ending which did the series justice. Again not everybody would be happy with it but certainly much more then we have now. So unlike say Lynx, Bioware was presenting something which could actually happen, and then it didn't happen.

 

[Findlebob]

Ive said this before but im going to resay it. Have you actually seen the ending's of ME 3?

 

[orangeapples]

Bob is not saying the Mass Effect ending was good or that the fans are wrong in being upset. What he is saying is that there is a line between criticizing a property and being a whiny little brat throwing a temper tantrum and fans tend to cross that line way too easily.

anyone remember Bob and his Green Lantern review? Bob was livid when it came to that movie. He hated everything about that movie, and told people not to touch the movie. But there is one thing he did not claim: ownership over the property and for them to "fix" it. He was mad, vented and lamented the movie, but he did not cross the line into throwing a tantrum to get the movie he "wanted"

 

[The Material Sheep]

AGH YOU DON'T GET IT YOU DON'T GET IT YOU DON'T GET IT!!!!!

*Breathes* Okay.

How. How Bob. How do fans with INTELLIGENT RESEARCHED CRITIQUES of a game asking for a Goddamn intelligent ending from a group that has previously managed to provide them with such PREVENT ARTISTS FROM TAKING RISKS?!

They don't!! How does that, I don't even... URHGU It makes no goddamn sense!!

You did make some good points though...

But seriously? Telling someone that what they do was shit doesn't stop risk taking. Asking them to change said shit into something better doesn't stop risk taking. Because people will always make risky shit. And they will always make risky quality. That will NEVER change. How does someone asking for something to be quality change that?

Which brings us to the biggest difference between TMNT and ME3. TMNT is trying to make a story with changes to the original. No one has ANY idea whether it will be good quality or not.

Mass Effect 3 had a shitty ending.

That is the difference between them.

Captcha: Face The Music

Damn straight!!

You have creative rights over some1 else product or not?
Pick one.

If not then you get to critique the ending, not change it.

If you have you get to change it. How can you misunderstand that?

I don't think we're saying we have the right to force them to change it. Just that we want them to with our criticism. There's a difference.

So you dont have the right to force them.... you just want the right to do so.....

The whole "Retake Mass Effect" idea never happened right?

I mean for someone to go "Retake mass effect" he must believe it was his and it was taken from him. Or am I missing something?

No... lol... I'm not saying I can force them, I'm saying I will not buy more of their products unless they do change the ending. They have the right to make a shitty ending and keep it that way, just like they have the right to go bankrupt if people don't like it.

I can voice my opinion and say I think you should fix it and if they do I'll be there to support them in it. That's what I'm saying and I didn't really like the retake mass effect movement and I don't agree with the dumb false advirtising claim. To be entirely honest I don't think the majority of the disgruntled fans do. Just easier for you to pin us all in that group you can smugly look down on though doesn it?