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

[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.

 

[crazyrabbits]

I would hypothesize that many of the people who claim that "98% of the game was great" are hardcore fans trying to convince themselves that they didn't waste their money, and are using the whole "only the ending was bad" argument to (a) save face and (b) still feel like they have safety in numbers.

I've known about the narrative problems of the series beginning with 2 - I bought that game and all its associated DLC in spite of it. Narratively, ME2 was a mess - the Reapers were sidelined for a B-plot that had no relation to anything that happened in the prior or following game. The whole "Shepard dies" plotline was a hollow attempt at shock value that had no real relevance to the storyline. The supporting character arcs and the breadth of alternate dialogue is what made the game so enjoyable to me, in spite of those aforementioned problems, and I still consider the Suicide Mission to be one of the best ending setpieces in any video game, ever.

3 is weird and rushed from the get-go, and it shows. To a new player, it's practically incomprehensible, a cardinal sin for a company that publicly stated that it was the best point for new players to jump on. Characters get introduced with no explanation or exposition whatsoever, the initial Reaper invasion is relegated to a tutorial with a handful of enemies, the plot suddenly introduces a Deus Ex Machina/McGuffin (take your pick) with no prior warning, and the whole experience takes on this weird, stilted feeling that never goes away throughout the game. Yes, there are legitimately great parts - the entirety of Tuchanka and, to an extent, Rannoch. The rest of it is either filled with retcons, unanswered questions, illogical plot developments, the character assassination of practically everyone from the previous game and a reliance on the multiplayer horde mode concept.

The real test for the Bioware fans will be the release of DAIII. If that fails...well, I know in my case, I've already written off the company.

 

[Link Kadeshi]

Let me attempt to reconstruct your argument from ME3, into something else. Forgive the crudeness of this, but I wanted to keep your basic thought-pattern in this.

TITLE: Why do people completely ignore how great 98% of the Swiss Roll was and just focus on the Bone Fragments in the last bite?

Yeah I was let down, and even hated, the original Swiss Roll, but does that mean Little Debbie is now the worst snack developer in the world and I will never buy any Snack they make ever again? HECK NO! Am I going to ignore the rest of the SOTY*-potential Snack that had points that literally made me Salavate with Hunger and cry tears of sadness for the Last Bites? Hell no! Snack Developers sometimes trip and make mistakes, and just because you didn't like the ending to the Snack doesn't mean that Little Debbie will never make any decent Snack 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.

I would also like to state that Bioware blatantly lied to us, with full knowledge that what they said was patently untrue. We did not get the endings that would be drastically different, nor the failure of a A, B, or C ending. Then, in defense, we were pretty much called idiots. In defense of Chris' (Was that the guy's name? I'm so bad at names) story rewrite, and it was rewritten late in the game(So to speak) by two people of the writing team only, we were told that he thinks higher, and expects others to have his same knowledge and thinking. Oh, I see, it's not that the ending made no sense, ignored previous story elements, or came, not out of left field, but from behind the catcher completely... It's that we're idiots. Gotcha. Perhaps that's how I read the statement, though.

-

* Snack of the Year

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

1) The ending was one of the main reasons for getting the game.

The ending was one of the main selling points for ME3, a final chapter to cap off an epic trilogy. People didn't buy the game for its combat and gameplay, (in fact those two points tended to be mediocre) they bought the game for the story.


2) Expectations of Excellence

If ME3 was a company's first game then yes there wouldn't have been nearly as much bile thrown at it but it wasn't. Bioware has (or had in my personal opinion) a reputation for creating engaging worlds and amazing stories.


3) The 'WTF is this?' Ending

The Starchild came completely out of the blue, it didn't help that its logic was trollworthy at best and pants on head retarded at worst.

 

[Olas]

I guess it's like MovieBob's review of the Dark Knight Rises. He liked the movie but he was already expecting it to be good so the good parts didn't stand out as much as the bad parts. Thus his review seemed negative despite the movie being pretty good overall.

Though I actually liked the ending to that game so I'm probably not the best person to try and explain this to you. Honestly it gets annoying hearing people go off on the exact same thing again and again; nobody talks about any other parts of the game. Remember when the Thresher Maw took down the reaper on Tachunka? How awesome was that?

 

[Nomanslander]

I thought most of ME3 was a let down. It only had a few moments of genuine goodness: Tuchanka, Javik. And as for the rest... well... there was nothing worth mentioning.