Why do people completely ignore how great 98% of Mass Effect 3 was and just focus on the ending?

[NewYork_Comedian]

Yeah I was let down, and even hated, the original ending to Mass Effect 3, but does that mean Bioware is now the worst triple A developer in the world and I will never buy any product they make ever again? HECK NO! Am I going to ignore the rest of the GOTY-potential game that had points that literally made me laugh out loud and cry tears of sadness for the characters? Hell no! Developers sometimes trip and make mistakes, and just because you didn't like the ending to the game doesn't mean that Bioware will never make any decent product again.


That is just how I feel about the whole cluster-f. Just my opinion on the matter and I hope at least 2% of the raging escapist community agrees with me.

 

[Newby_Newb]

To be honest, I found all of Mass Effect 3 to be huge letdown.


Even without the bad ending, I don't think that it deserves any GOTY awards.

 

[Zhukov]

That's a silly question.

(a) Some folks don't consider the 98% to be great. (EDIT: See above.)

(b) The ending is the final impression, the taste that lingers on your tongue so to speak.

(c) The climax and the ending of a story are what everything before it leads up to. If those parts suck then I can't blame people for no longer being enthusiastic about the lead-up parts.

 

[Flamezdudes]

I did enjoy most of ME3 myself, but something was very off about it that bothered me... the changes they made just felt too jarring and the game definitely wasn't as good as ME or ME2. So when I got to the ending, it just enraged me so much that the entire game was pretty much ruined for me.

 

[Tumedus]

If you read the thread about still being mad you will notice two very frequent statements.

1) The ending is such a huge letdown that it ruins the whole series. Many people have lost all desire to play the game due to that ending. Its that big of a deal, especially for a game whose biggest draw is the long term consequences angle.

2) The rest of the game wasn't actually that good. People were glad to see their old friends and get closure on some of their story arcs. But I think some people let that sentimentality blind them to the games many flaws. There are some ample lists out there so I name a few of the issues:

ME2 characters given shoddy treatment, loss of mini games except the worst one made even more boring and pointless, adding more functions to a single button removed precision from the controls, war assets/readiness rating, almost all story elements not created in part 1 were terrible, most of the new characters were terrible, bad graphics/physics, the list goes on.

 

[Spartan Altego]

(a) Some folks don't consider the 98% to be great. (EDIT: See above.)

(b) The ending is the final impression, the taste that lingers on your tongue so to speak.

(c) The climax and the ending of a story are what everything before it leads up to. If those parts suck then I can't blame people for no longer being enthusiastic about the lead-up parts.

This. And one of the big selling points of Mass Effect was seeing how every choice you made from the first game to the last would culminate at the end of the trilogy. Mass effect 3 essentially made all that effort of making your own, unique ending worthless by just giving you three end-all-be-all choices at the very end. The difference between Mass Effect's ending and a game like Deus Ex: HR is that Deus Ex had the courtesy to not lead you on for 3 games. A lot of players felt betrayed and rightly so.

I'm a firm believer of "It's not the destination that matters, it's the journey," but for many the destination that mattered more. Add in the fact that the endgame was basically a total mess from the moment Shep entered the Citadel, and BioWare refused to even acknowledge that the ending was, in fact, poor (Though I'm happy they didn't change the endings because that would be a horrible precedent to set) and you have all you need for an epic amount fan backlash.

To be honest, I liked Mass Effect 2 better.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Put it this way.


Imagine you just sat down to a 10 course meal.

Every course is more delicious than the last.

You sit forward eagerly as the 10th course is placed in front of you, only to find a nice big dollop of excrement.


Those 9 courses before it may have been the best food you've ever eaten, but that of dollop shit is what is going stick with you.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

The internet is an echo chamber for hate. If you go on the internet disappointed and a little pissed off about something, you will fall into the vicious circle of forum discussions where everything is picked apart and analysed frame by frame by like minded fans, and argued back and forth with those on the other side of the fence, over and over again. Your disappointment will fester until it turns to hate, then that hate will poison everything you once thought beautiful; and then... you are lost, nothing but a slave to the flame wars. The cycle cannot be broken.

Of course, there are also many people who genuinely dislike ME3 for reasons beyond just the ending. I know I for one was far more annoyed by the cut-down dialogue and the frankly shoddy amount of bugs the game had compared to its predecessors, than I ever was about the ending. I actually kind of liked the ideas behind the ending (making the culmination of Shepard's journey to find a solution to the rift between organic and synthetic life, something that had been a staple of the universe since day 1, rather than it being some bullshit about dark energy that had only been brought up in one mission in ME2 that nobody remembered). What let the ending down in my opinion was mostly just a rushed and ultimately poor execution of those ideas, which was largely fixed in the EC. Beyond that, anything else I didn't like is a difference in vision between me and the writers. It may not change the fact that I don't like it, but it doesn't make me feel like I was personally 'let down'.

The other stuff I mentioned though, now that does make me feel let down, because it's not a difference in vision, it's shoddy workmanship that has no excuse. The dialogue (and more specifically the dialogue wheel) is the cornerstone of Mass Effect. Who the hell asked for it to be cut down? As for the bugs. They had no less time to develop ME3 than it's predecessor. So how come ever since I got it in 2009 I've never found a single bug in my copy of ME2, and yet some parts of ME3 feel distinctly unfinished by comparison?

So in short, yes, in my opinion a lot of people got (and in some cases still are) way more butt hurt about ME3's ending than they should have done. However, I also think the people who claim that the game was absolutely perfect up until the last few minutes are blowing their side of the argument out of all proportion too. I love the game overall, but it does have its fair share of flaws other than the ending.

 

[fuzz]

You answered your question in the title. When you play through a game where 98% is great, when you hit the 2% that's dogshit it's going to stand out and sour your perception of the rest of the game.

 

[votemarvel]

Because the rest of the game wasn't awesome.

Does the ending blind people to the comedy animations, the abysmal lip-synch, the 'auto-dialogue' making people's Shepards acting out of character, the reducing of crew interaction to ME2 Zaeed and kasumi levels.

How about the import problems such as importing faces which still don't work correctly after Bioware's 'fix' or that DLC choices from the previous games don't import correctly.

How about the lack of influence of what you did in the previous two making little difference to how the game plays out, the biggest example being the Rachni choice.

 

[Zhukov]

Put it this way.


Imagine you just sat down to a 10 course meal.

Every course is more delicious than the last.

You sit forward eagerly as the 10th course is placed in front of you, only to find a nice big dollop of excrement.


Those 9 courses before it may have been the best food you've ever eaten, but that of dollop shit is what is going stick with you.

Did... did you just steal my metaphor?

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Put it this way.


Imagine you just sat down to a 10 course meal.

Every course is more delicious than the last.

You sit forward eagerly as the 10th course is placed in front of you, only to find a nice big dollop of excrement.


Those 9 courses before it may have been the best food you've ever eaten, but that of dollop shit is what is going stick with you.

Did... did you just steal my metaphor?

I'm not sure...

I do remember seeing the analogy somewhere else, so it may have been you

 

[LetalisK]

Don't know what you're talking about, most people I've seen recognize that the 98% is awesome, even under the long shadow cast by the 2%.

 

[Zhukov]

Put it this way.


Imagine you just sat down to a 10 course meal.

Every course is more delicious than the last.

You sit forward eagerly as the 10th course is placed in front of you, only to find a nice big dollop of excrement.


Those 9 courses before it may have been the best food you've ever eaten, but that of dollop shit is what is going stick with you.

Did... did you just steal my metaphor?

I'm not sure...

I do remember seeing the analogy somewhere else, so it may have been you

Oh, it was me alright. I have proof [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.362122-Mass-Effect-3-Is-a-Good-Game?page=2#14214155]. The search bar sees all and knows all.

The animated Half Life trailer was bad enough, but this... sir, I really must protest!

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Put it this way.


Imagine you just sat down to a 10 course meal.

Every course is more delicious than the last.

You sit forward eagerly as the 10th course is placed in front of you, only to find a nice big dollop of excrement.


Those 9 courses before it may have been the best food you've ever eaten, but that of dollop shit is what is going stick with you.

Did... did you just steal my metaphor?

I'm not sure...

I do remember seeing the analogy somewhere else, so it may have been you

Oh, it was me alright. I have proof [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.362122-Mass-Effect-3-Is-a-Good-Game?page=2#14214155]. The search bar sees all and knows all.

The animated Half Life trailer was bad enough, but this... sir, I really must protest!

So it was.

We gotta stop meeting like this, Zhukov, you're making it look like I'm stealing your ideas

 

[TheLizardKing]

Even if you exclude the ending, it was still a streamlined piece of garbage. It deserves nothing.

 

[ThePuzzldPirate]

no...I'm pretty sure the rest of the game was a let-down with it, hard to say, I wiped it off my brain.

 

[Mirroga]

Allow me to give you a close analogy as to why no one should make bad endings of good games. And no, this does not involve GOOD TWIST endings.

Imagine you just ate the most delicious banquet, but you are now forced to finish a dessert you think tastes really bad just to save face with your friends and family. Once the night is over, you will always remember that particular restaurant to have a really shitty dessert instead of a delicious banquet.

That's pretty much what impressions are. 1 terrible impression will always be more remembered than multiple good impressions since we are born to instinctively avoid bad things.

And that's just me mentioning the ending's impressions. The ME3 gameplay experience was average at best.

 

[DustyDrB]

Mass Effect 3 is like a hot girlfriend that shits during climax.

Sure she is hot, but she ruins the sex by shitting on you at climax.

Is this simple enough?

An analogy that really works because, like Mass Effect 3's ending, a few strange people are really into that shit.

OT: It was surprising. Shocking, even, but for the wrong reasons. I found myself saying, "No. No, no, no. Why would you even? Who thought this was a good idea? How did this happen?"

I was kind of like this:

That said, I don't ignore that I still really did enjoy the vast majority of the rest of the game. Though I like it less with repeat playthroughs (something I can't say at all about the first two games, which I've played at least ten times each), because I really see more and more how little each choice I made in the previous games mattered. And that's not even referring to the ending. I just mean they flat-out fucked up the outcome of most of the major choices (councilor choice, Rachni, Maelon's data, the god damn Collector base, the outcome of Tali's trial, and that's all I feel like listing. Someone else can take over if they wish). There is shockingly little impact from a lot of the big decisions. As a guy who really loves tinkering with the variables to see what all can happen, that's a huge disappointment.