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

[chiefohara]

Strangely enough the 2% was enough to kill it,

I love the whole Mass Effect universe, gutted/poisoned by the ending(s) but it wasn't until the EC was announced that i tentatively went for a second play through (bought into the whole thing late, but played the games in order) and it was the EC that saved it for me.

Thanks to the EC I now feel my chars have a proper send off im enjoying playing through a third time and achievement hunting now.

Mass Effect is a game you unknowingly invest a hell of a lot in, and I didn't realise the level of my own investment until the betrayal that was the original rushed/copy pasted endings cheapened the whole experience for me.

It was so so so good, that the big fuck you at the end really hurt. Hurt cause i really gave a damn, It was so brilliantly written and pulled off that i had a big emotional investment, and to have that dismissed so blatantly, hell its not surprising people reacted the way they did.... it was like a bad break up

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

The ending was an incompetently executed fuck-up of a bad idea. The emotional investment that ties everything together for you detonates at the worst possible moment. You may have really enjoyed the game before that point, but you will never look back on it in the same light.

EDIT: Believe it or not I'm OK with them simplifying the dialog, at least in theory. I don't think their approach to choice really works. They need to make choices challenging to the player. As it is, I literally know what choice I'm going to pick even before I hear my options. Talk about boring. Another option is to cut out the choices, freeing them up to deliver a more dramatic narrative. I would much prefer the former but either would be an improvement. But let's be honest, we know they used so much auto-dialog to dumb down the game and because it was easier to develop. It certainly wasn't done to tell an amazing story.

 

[oplinger]

I didn't even make it to the ending for it to ruin the game. My femshep, which I have complained about before, caused me to quit the game only a couple hours in. Because the dialogue choices are either very polar, or they say the exact same thing with different tones.

For example: I like my crew, they're good people. I take care of my crew. I do not fuck my crew. Any of them. We're all a big happy family on the USS Friendzone. However in 3, I went from having the respect of my crew, and my duty bound shep ceaselessly trying to save the galaxy, eyes on the prize of not dying. To some sort of ridiculous evil twin, where I can be a sex crazed cougar, or a rock hard frigid vagina of hate and destruction. I didn't like it. I was always warm and motherly.

So, I stopped playing ME3. It is, to date, the only. Only. game that I have stopped playing, and never intend to go back to.

 

[Awexsome]

Did you not SEE how many people were going into the game with full intention of hating the game before ever playing it? When they found something truly bad about the game they took it and ran with it.

Still was a 9/10 game and a 9.5 game now with the extended cut.

 

[Redd the Sock]

While the journey is often cited as more important than the destination, I wouldn't want a great fun road trip to sit in a pile of shit.

Okay, bad metaphors aside, I think there were a few factors that drove the rest of a great game out of our minds. How badly it broke from the marketing (choices matter, no A B C ending) hurt a lot, as did the lack of personal closure we've come to expect in games like these in favor of something that came off like the Normandy crew were the only beings to survive long term.

Most of all however was just how poorly done it was. The sudden info dump that explained very little aside, it pretty much dropped the tone of the game we'd been playing. Even with the EC explanations, Most of us wanted to tell the little brat his assumptions were wrong and we could maintain peace without his "solutions" and had the game history to prove our case, but were forced to take them anyway. Forcing a fatalistic tone on a game that until then had been about succeeding despite impossible odds was just a blow to the testicles.

Then the aftermath cemented the pain. Between comments about this being one man's last minute, self-absorbed re-write, to the long rants about how stupid and or entitled those of us that didn't like the ending and thought better could be done with it were, suddenly it became personal.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

I didn't realize the ending, Cerberus brand Sephiroth, bait and switch day 1 DLC character, broken side quest log, Tali's picture, endless waves of generic Cerberus goons, Snookie, and spamming your own memes only added up to 2%.

 

[Texas Joker 52]

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

(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 post here actually does sum up the main reason. The ending is what the entire game, and in fact, the entire series in this case, led up to. And the ending kind of sucked. Not only that, but there was a relatively stark difference in writing quality between, say:

Spoiler

The time on Earth where you essentially say good-bye to everyone, and the final mission itself. Or, to fine it down even more, the point where it really seems to go down in quality, is right at the beam section itself.

HOWEVER. As much vitriol as I had over the original endings, both making little to no sense, having little context in terms of the Starchild, and the fact that there was absolutely no resolution as to "What the hell happened to the galaxy? And the Mass Relays? Or more importantly, MY FUCKING SQUAD AND SHIP?!", I deeply enjoyed Mass Effect 3. I think its a great game that was a ton of fun simply for what it was, more Mass Effect.

It also helped that I could easily ignore the original endings, and that the new endings fixed most of my complaints, save the fact that the Starchild still exists, and that:

Spoiler

Destroy still kills off EDI and the Geth. Fuck you Starchild. You had better believe I am finding a way to remake Geth, AND Legion, AND EDI once the Relays are repaired. Fucking Reapers.

 

[psicat]

Personally I loved the whole game, endings and all.

 

[Overusedname]

When you have amazing sex and get shot in the crotch with a crossbow afterwards, you don't remember how good the rest of the night felt.

 

[Snotnarok]

Because people have extreme opinions on random things, Bioshock 1 and 2 had awful endings but for some reason that game gets the "gameplay and overall impression makes up for it".

The ending was mediocre, there's been a lot worse, a lot worse that didn't get 1/4th the rage this game did. ME3's ending hardly made me blink considering did everyone think they could save the day and everyone when the entire galaxy has millions dying/being converted constantly?

Honestly each to their own, I'm just surprised people are still flipping about it.

 

[axlryder]

If I watched a movie that was excellent 98% of the way through, but the last couple of minutes was nothing but the protagonist taking a massive dump, I think I'd be more disappointed with the movie as a whole and its wasted potential than just focus on how great everything but the ending was. ME3 is even worse though, because it's the ending to a trilogy that you were directly involved in and touted how much your influence mattered throughout the course of it. That only serves to amplify said disappointment to the point where it creates this black hole of negativity surrounding the ending. Just my perspective, considering I didn't really care much for ME.

 

[Robot Number V]

The rest was great, but we expected it to be great. Nothing else about the game disrupted the status quo. The ending...did. So, it's what people remember.

 

[Samurai Silhouette]

The game wasn't THAT good to me. I got to see the endings before I got halfway through the game, I uninstalled and got bitter after that.

 

[Burst6]

Because people have extreme opinions on random things, Bioshock 1 and 2 had awful endings but for some reason that game gets the "gameplay and overall impression makes up for it".

The ending was mediocre, there's been a lot worse, a lot worse that didn't get 1/4th the rage this game did. ME3's ending hardly made me blink considering did everyone think they could save the day and everyone when the entire galaxy has millions dying/being converted constantly?

Honestly each to their own, I'm just surprised people are still flipping about it.

I think it's more that games like bioshock rely a lot on atmosphere or gameplay rather than a straight up story. You didn't focus that much on the story because most of it was pretty out of the way.

Mass effect shoved the story into your face and build it up for 3 games, and then it just came crashing down at the end. The shooting in the series is good, but it's not the main draw of the game.

It's also about standards. Bioware has been known to make great games, so people expect them to make great games.

OT: I hate mass effect 3, but i forgave Bioware already. yeah they fucked up, but they at least tried to fix it with free DLC. My personal final verdict will come from how dragon age 3 is handled. To me it's a test to see how deep EA sunk its teeth into Bioware.

 

[Twilight_guy]

People don't focus on good things, they focus on bad things. Nobody wants to hear about your nice day butt hey want to hear about your crappy day because a bad day is more interesting. Same principle applies here, everyone wants to talk about the bad because the good is more forgettable. Also, gamers are whiny and like to hold grudges for decades so don't expect the fallout from this to end for the next decade or so at least.

 

[Kekkonen1]

For me it is the other way around. I wasn't really that pleased with ME3 as a whole, but I really loved ME and ME2 so I would have been inclined to forgive the game feeling rushed and somewhat lackluster if the ending had atleasts been good. But since the ending was what it was I am less forgiving to all the glaring flaws the game had as a whole.