crazyrabbits said:
The terrible ending is symptomatic of the shoddy quality found throughout the rest of the game. They rushed it, and it shows. In fact, I wonder how the game would have turned out if EA didn't give them that four-month deadline extension because, even in its final form, it's a buggy, unpolished mess.
There are moments of serious lag in heated firefights, many accounts of bugs throughout the entire game, clipping issues, weird holes in the levels, unfinished character models in sight on the hub world, etc.
Bugs aside, the game seemed stunted. There was only one hub world, and many of the missions (not just the later ones) were dull and uninspired. People have mentioned Thessia and Earth, but I also remember Palaven being kind of weak too, until you get to the Brutes (or whatever they're called).
Never mind the myriad problems with the story and plot itself.
The story fell off of the rails in part 2, and stayed off those rails. The arc wasn't advanced, and no questions were answered, so I had little hope for 3. There was a small part of me that hoped that 2 was the "action movie" interlude between the brilliant opening and closing of a good sci-fi story, but that simply wasn't the case. In fact, 3 sort of stumbled along until it finally shit itself and died right before the finish line. Once again, there was that small part of me that hoped they'd pull it all together at the end, but holy cunthat did they fuck the pooch with that ending.
There's no excuse for this type of shitty storytelling, and this applies to Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Prometheus too. This should have been worked out years ago, and yet anyone that followed the development knows that they put the ending together in the fall of 2011.
What
the
fuck
This isn't a fucking tenth grade english paper on Macbeth, motherfuckers. You don't make a pot of coffee and pull an all-nighter to bang out an ending at the last minute in a multi-million dollar production.
I keep thinking that Matt Stone and Trey Parker should've been involved. Comedy writing aside, those guys lovingly craft excellent stories, and do it consistently.
The fact that Bioware, according to all accounts, is trying to push the Synthesis idea on the player base via their upcoming Leviathan DLC, should tell you all you need to know about how rushed and confused the development team was.
I'm sure. Something clearly isn't right over there. On a side note, the Synth ending was the worst one.
Control was badass with the borgish voiced Shep, and destroy seems like it's "cannon" due to it requiring the highest EMS for the best version, and in that best version Shep lives (as a person) and the Mass Effect universe continues on fairly normally, but with Reapers.
Control and Synth kind of end that universe by having it protected by god-like sentinels.
They seemed to think that ending the game in one of the dumbest ways imaginable (leave your crew and the entire universe in a state of destruction) was passable, and they are still (even after the EC) unwilling to admit they screwed up monumentally.
Pride comes before the fall.
You really can't come out and say, "we botched the third game, so we're gonna make it over and everything in that third game didn't really happen."
Everybody has to live with the fact that Mass Effect's "Return of the Jedi" was really "Revenge of the Sith."