Why did Bioware write the pre-Extended Cut ending for Mass Effect 3 the way they did?

[Lawyer105]

I always like to compare the ending of ME3 with the ending of COD4. In both cases, it's unpleasant or miserable, or whatever... but in COD's case it was really well done. Scary when COD has better writing than Bioware.

In Mass Effect, Bioware set a pattern. Create huge unstoppable force, Shepard rallies everyone around and curb-stomps the big nasty.
They got infinite Geth and a bigass space-ship? Shepard.
They got immensely advanced aliens on the other side of a death-gate? Yup. Shepard.
They got super-robots that're gonna kill you so you don't kill yourself? You guessed it. Shep-.... hey wait a minute...

I personally would have had no problem with a "Well tough... reapers owned Shepard and galaxy got harvested" ending if Bioware had built up to that. But they didn't. They came out of left field, absolutely from nowhere, at the point where all the patterns they've set say that you've done the right thing, and take everything away with a lame-ass Deus Ex Machina that makes no logical sense at all. No, not even Reaper-logic.

They had the possibility to make some awesome comments on the cycle of life, or the smallness of man in comparison to the universe or whatever, but they utterly wasted it.

Imagine how you'd feel at the end of a Mario game (for example) if the Big Bad went : "Actually, the Princess only came over for a cuppa. She went home hours ago. Didn't she call you?"
You'd be all like FFFUUUUUUU- and justifiably so.
That's what BW did.

Compare that to the ending of COD4. You all died (well... the one dude didn't, but yeah). Against impossible odds, you achieved your primary goal (stopping the missile launch) but still got handed your ass when the enemy finally caught up with you. Throughout the game they built up the tension, built up the patterns, and then resolved them correctly (by correctly I mean using proper storytelling techniques, not that the did a specific ending).

So yeah... the COD4 storyline was better written imho than ME3's storyline.

 

[Triforceformer]

I honestly believe they had made the Extended Cut the original ending, but EA pressured Bioware to cut it down to sell later.

 

[Lawyer105]

Imagine how you'd feel at the end of a Mario game (for example) if the Big Bad went : "Actually, the Princess only came over for a cuppa. She went home hours ago. Didn't she call you?"
You'd be all like FFFUUUUUUU- and justifiably so.
That's what BW did.

You're not even approaching how stupid the mass effect ending was, it'd have to something along the lines of a mysterious character that has never even had the barest hint at appears out of no where and yammers on about how bowser is actually the good guy, and that this cycle of kidnapping was put in place to stop the princess getting kidnapped, and then instead of the traditional saving of the princess, there are three pits of lava, green, blue and red, and you have to jump into the one of the pits of lava, and after you do this no matter which pit was jumped into the lava would engulf the mushroom kingdom and destroy it but luigi and the other characters were riding away in a balloon and crashed in some random place, and to make it worse lugi is with the princess and they do the seen that joker and (insert love interest here) did at the end of mass effect 3, implying that after all your hard work luigi got with the girl.

that my friend is the stupidity of the original mass effect ending.

Yeah, OK, you have a point. I yield to your totally awesome-er description of the blatant stupidity that went into the ME3 ending. Seriously... how did the people that came up with it make it past infanthood. Remembering to breathe is harder than avoiding this level of utter fail...

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

From what I've gathered since then, the ME trilogy was originally meant to have an entirely different ending to the one we got, that had been planned as such since day 1. However, when the script for that ending was leaked around November 2011 the feedback that Bioware received was not at all positive, so they went back to the drawing board. At the same time, EA were already getting antsy about the game's release already having been delayed once before, so when Bioware felt that they needed to completely rewrite the ending to ME3, EA refused to give them any more time or money to do so. This meant that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters were insanely rushed when writing the new script, and it had to be produced pretty much on a shoestring.

 

[number2301]

I'd like to echo some of the previous comments, Bioware wrote the ending like they did because they didn't know where they were going until right at the end, and because they wanted an open ending. Which clearly a lot of people couldn't cope with for whatever reason.

This whole, "the mass relays destroyed the entire galaxy", nonsense was just a conclusion which people came to due to the open ended nature of the ending. It also doesn't hold up to even half a second of scrutiny but don't let logic get in the way of jumping to conclusions.

They assumed people were intelligent enough to formulate their own conclusions (in other words they made an "open ending" which I'm an absolute sucker for).

captcha: it's over

Yes it is.

we did come up with our own conclusions, it looked like every one in the fight at earth starved to death because of the lack of mass relays

Of all the criticisms of the ending I'm sorry but that is by far the most moronic. Faster than light travel existed outside of the mass Relays. You spend a significant proportion of your time in all three games travelling between systems without using mass relays. How does EVERYONE miss this fact?

So no, everyone did not starve, and even if you thought they did (aside from being wrong) you never knew that, it was just a conclusion you came to.

 

[MetalDooley]

Here's a quote from Casey Hudson

?I didn?t want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people?debating what the endings mean and what?s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in,? he said.

?That to me is part of what?s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it?s a story that people can talk about after the fact.?

http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/14/mass-effect-3-director-stands-by-ending-promises-single-player-dlc/

Going off that it seems like the original ending was his plan all along and wasn't due to time constraints or budget

 

[Knight Templar]

Well for one thing it didn't get run past any of the other writers, it was the lead writers' work and nothing else. He seems to have a rather high opinion of himself, and seemed to think that not knowing what was even happening was why people played these games.
If you ask me, it's because the person who wrote it didn't understand the games.

 

[nathan-dts]

They never said directly why.

People assume many reasons:

Laziness
EA
Casey Hudson
Casey Hudson on drugs
Meth
A massive typo as soon as the final run happened

There's legitimate evidence for EA pushing deadlines with the unused dialogue, and there's testimony that Casey Hudson was the only person that did the ending. To make an ending like that though, even after the extended cut, he had to be on some drugs.

 

[number2301]

I'd like to echo some of the previous comments, Bioware wrote the ending like they did because they didn't know where they were going until right at the end, and because they wanted an open ending. Which clearly a lot of people couldn't cope with for whatever reason.

This whole, "the mass relays destroyed the entire galaxy", nonsense was just a conclusion which people came to due to the open ended nature of the ending. It also doesn't hold up to even half a second of scrutiny but don't let logic get in the way of jumping to conclusions.

They assumed people were intelligent enough to formulate their own conclusions (in other words they made an "open ending" which I'm an absolute sucker for).

captcha: it's over

Yes it is.

we did come up with our own conclusions, it looked like every one in the fight at earth starved to death because of the lack of mass relays

Of all the criticisms of the ending I'm sorry but that is by far the most moronic. Faster than light travel existed outside of the mass Relays. You spend a significant proportion of your time in all three games travelling between systems without using mass relays. How does EVERYONE miss this fact?

So no, everyone did not starve, and even if you thought they did (aside from being wrong) you never knew that, it was just a conclusion you came to.

I understand that light speed still exists but it takes far longer to travel to all those different systems without mass relays, weeks, months, even years, with the galaxy in that state of disrepair, I could not foresee anyway to get necessary supplies to those in dire need of it,oh and yes I couldn't actually come to another conclusion due to not being given a good amount of information to make me think otherwise, also in the original ending it shows a massive explosion from each mass relay, after the arrival dlc that allowed me to come to the conclusion that each of those systems died because I had no proof to the contrary.

Arguing that I was most defiantly wrong in an open ending is probably the more moronic thing, and I was also voicing quite a few opinions I had heard for the first ending of mass effect 3.

Fair point on your last paragraph, I shouldn't have replaced your certainty with my own.

No where do you see the mass relays exploding and causing damage to anything, you see some kind of pulse from the galaxy map. If you thought that was an explosion did you think they were decimating dozens of systems each? Because in Arrival it is clearly established that it would damage one system, not light years around.

The whole point of an open ending is that anything you can imagine that isn't ruled out by what you've seen can happen. You didn't see the races starving to death, so they could have travelled away and been fine. Travelling between star systems without using mass relays is presented as a pretty much everyday occurrence. Not something which would lead to the ruination of entire fleets.

I don't blame you for coming to some of the conclusions you did (aside from the no mass relays = no ftl travel), but I really cannot understand why so many people thought the ending gave a number of extremely certain answers which it clearly didn't!

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Drew's original idea for the ending was just as WTF as pre-E.C/post-E.C was/is. His (Drew) idea raised far too many questions to be answered with one game. So they went with "Aliens invade, defeated with Hand-Wave and Space Magic" was shoe-horned in instead.

 

[number2301]

I'd like to echo some of the previous comments, Bioware wrote the ending like they did because they didn't know where they were going until right at the end, and because they wanted an open ending. Which clearly a lot of people couldn't cope with for whatever reason.

This whole, "the mass relays destroyed the entire galaxy", nonsense was just a conclusion which people came to due to the open ended nature of the ending. It also doesn't hold up to even half a second of scrutiny but don't let logic get in the way of jumping to conclusions.

They assumed people were intelligent enough to formulate their own conclusions (in other words they made an "open ending" which I'm an absolute sucker for).

captcha: it's over

Yes it is.

we did come up with our own conclusions, it looked like every one in the fight at earth starved to death because of the lack of mass relays

Of all the criticisms of the ending I'm sorry but that is by far the most moronic. Faster than light travel existed outside of the mass Relays. You spend a significant proportion of your time in all three games travelling between systems without using mass relays. How does EVERYONE miss this fact?

So no, everyone did not starve, and even if you thought they did (aside from being wrong) you never knew that, it was just a conclusion you came to.

I understand that light speed still exists but it takes far longer to travel to all those different systems without mass relays, weeks, months, even years, with the galaxy in that state of disrepair, I could not foresee anyway to get necessary supplies to those in dire need of it,oh and yes I couldn't actually come to another conclusion due to not being given a good amount of information to make me think otherwise, also in the original ending it shows a massive explosion from each mass relay, after the arrival dlc that allowed me to come to the conclusion that each of those systems died because I had no proof to the contrary.

Arguing that I was most defiantly wrong in an open ending is probably the more moronic thing, and I was also voicing quite a few opinions I had heard for the first ending of mass effect 3.

Fair point on your last paragraph, I shouldn't have replaced your certainty with my own.

No where do you see the mass relays exploding and causing damage to anything, you see some kind of pulse from the galaxy map. If you thought that was an explosion did you think they were decimating dozens of systems each? Because in Arrival it is clearly established that it would damage one system, not light years around.

The whole point of an open ending is that anything you can imagine that isn't ruled out by what you've seen can happen. You didn't see the races starving to death, so they could have travelled away and been fine. Travelling between star systems without using mass relays is presented as a pretty much everyday occurrence. Not something which would lead to the ruination of entire fleets.

I don't blame you for coming to some of the conclusions you did (aside from the no mass relays = no ftl travel), but I really cannot understand why so many people thought the ending gave a number of extremely certain answers which it clearly didn't!

You seem like a nice enough person to not be attacking my viewpoint (which is a rarity on the internet) so I'll try to explain how I came to my conclusion.

We see shepard die and then the pulse goes out, this pulse seems to destroy every mass relay it comes into contact with, I had previously seen what happens when a mass relay gets destroyed, an entire system gets wiped out, usually the population centres are based in the system with the mass relay, not all but most it seems, now we then cut to joker randomly running away from the action, and this lead me to assume that they screwed over joker's character as he never received an order to flee and just appeared to be abandoning shepard, then the normandy appears to no longer be working and they crash, so it looks like the crew is stuck there and I took the old man and the child to just be the descendants of the crew (I know that's a little bit, stretched, but humans do what they need to survive,so with the galaxy in a lot of disrepair and no fast and easy system (ftl can take weeks, months, years, while mass relay is hours to days) it just seemed that the places that were very war torn would probably die out, and I didn't really think the war ships at earth were packing much the food...

I did assume a lot but I kind of had to, I hoped I made my interpretation at least a little clearer for you.

Clear enough and completely logical, as long as you ('you' being the collective will of the ME3 ending sucked people, not just you personally) recognise that fact that wasn't the only possible interpretation which most people seemed to forget.

On the old man though, I think they clearly did intend for us to interpret him as a descendant of the crew of the crashed Normandy. Which is why the retcon with the repaired Normandy confused the hell out of me.

 

[Nimcha]

They assumed people were intelligent enough to formulate their own conclusions (in other words they made an "open ending" which I'm an absolute sucker for).

captcha: it's over

Yes it is.

Yes, this. I wasn't surprised that all the extra info the Extended Cut gave me I had already deduced by myself.

 

[Misterian]

Here's a quote from Casey Hudson

?I didn?t want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people?debating what the endings mean and what?s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in,? he said.

?That to me is part of what?s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it?s a story that people can talk about after the fact.?

http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/14/mass-effect-3-director-stands-by-ending-promises-single-player-dlc/

Going off that it seems like the original ending was his plan all along and wasn't due to time constraints or budget

And then he released Extended Cut.....

I get the impression he either caved in from the fan rage or somehow saw how he screwed up with his approach.

though personally, I don't see how the Extended Cut endings would make the game forgettable, all 3 games are some of the best-selling and critically acclaimed in the industry, how could games like that end up being forgettable?

 

[MetalDooley]

Hmmm seems legit, although if that was his intention, he seemed to mix up "little bit of mystery" with copious amounts of what the fuckery...

The stupid part is that by including the Starchild and his pants on head retarded explanation for the Reapers actions in the first place he actually ruined any sense of mystery that existed in the first place