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

[dessertmonkeyjk]

So... anybody else miss the cool ME2 sidequests that were ditched in ME3? I sure still remember all that nonsense with the vague quest journal entries and crapload of fetch quests.

Oh yeah, the ending too but... why the side quest ditching?

Why no spaceship combat?

 

[Jynthor]

I'd rate ME3 above average but it wasn't great, my biggest problems with it:
-Lack of side quests, with a few exceptions the side quests were completely replaced by tedious fetch quests which don't even include dialogue, you just overhear people talking and get their stuff.

-Removal of character control and neutral dialogue. Not much to add here, Shepard keeps talking without you ever choosing a dialogue option, sometimes he says stuff you don't want him to. And on top of that they completely removed the neutral options and force you to choose paragon or renegade options which are often polar opposites, there needs to be a middle ground.

-Unsatisfying combat. Maybe I'm biased here because the single playthrough I did was on Insanity but the combat wasn't fun, I felt like I was unloading clip after clip into HP sponges, the combat with the standard troops was ok, but anything above that bored me to tears.


And the most personal one for me:
We have to fight Cerberus, I supported Cerberus in ME2, I thought of them as a necessary (minor)evil which we needed to defeat the big bad Reapers they had serious potential as a morally grey faction only to have BioWare turn them into the Masss Effect equivalent of Team Rocket in ME3... It's just terrible.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

It was good, not great, but o.k.

The decision to change the story for the third game could have been handled better, it was like only the minimal amount of thought was put in to it.

Most of the game was fun, Mordin's death was well done, but Legion? The "how" and "why" confuse me, how is direct dissemination any different from direct upload? His came off as meaningless.

For me, the ending, it wasn't so much as being talked down to by Glowbrat, it was that the choices rendered all the suffering, sacrifice and moral dilemmas experienced up until that point; Obsolete.

 

[ATRAYA]

People like to focus on the negative on the internet, save for a few sane sites. I still say "Mass Effect 3" was great, even with the ending. It's like everyone was expecting every single storyline you ever experienced in the entire series was going to converge and tie up neatly at the END (much like Hollywood movies do, and Hollywood is complete garbage), but instead we spent most of the game WRAPPING UP THOSE STORYLINES. People were massively complaining about BioWare not finishing all those little subplots we had along the way of the adventure at the end, when in reality, they were all finished DURING the actual game.

As for the end, I think the Indoctrination Theory is the perfect and most obvious answer, but is just being held in our face like a carrot on a string to keep people debating over it, thus letting E.A. come out with controversial D.L.C., hence making more money from those that are obsessed with proving the theory, or busting it. That's just E.A. being an asshole and trying to milk the franchise for every last penny, which is why I have boycotted E.A., not BioWare. If BioWare ever sees the light and breaks away from E.A., I will happily purchase another game from them.

 

[spartan231490]

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.

^This. The ending was just so incredibly bad that it got all of the attention, it doesn't make the rest of the game good. The fact that the taced on multi-player is the best part of the game says a lot.

 

[wintercoat]

Because it's hard to enjoy the lingering taste of the perfectly cooked steak, superbly cooked thrice-baked potato, medley of seasoned vegetables, and garden salad when you just ate a slimy, greasy piece of shit for desert.

 

[Zaik]

It wasn't that great.

The entire game was railroaded down a few narrow "choices", and almost none of the previous ones mattered at all beyond three seconds of dialogue and some tiny bit of military power that was completely meaningless because it was impossible to get the high score ending without slogging through the awful multiplayer.

That leaves you with...what, actual gameplay? Wow third person cover based shooter, so interesting.

 

[Skratt]

Imagine having the best sex of your life, only to find out your the guy in Basic Instinct at the beginning of the film.

That's kind of an exaggeration of course, but the feeling is the same.

Great Great Great Terrible, still leaves you with the Terrible in your mouth at the end no matter how many greats came before it. It doesn't wipe out the greats, but it doesn't let you walk away with any sort of satisfaction either.

 

[afroebob]

People are stupid. That pretty much sums it up.

 

[endplanets]

Yes the ending is the worst ending I have ever seen in all of fiction in any medium (even beating out Monster Ranchers, Dallas, Dinosaurs, St. Elsewhere and even Highlander 5: The Source).

But yea, the rest of the game is basically perfect. The gameplay is leaps and bounds above ME2. We get a resolution to most of the major plotlines like the Genophage, Quarian vs Geth and Cerberus. And lots of characters get their moment of glory.

 

[Largo833]

A lot of people here seem to be saying that it's because people "focus on the negative and ignore the positive", or because the ending is just SO bad that it outweighs the good in ME3, but I feel like those responses miss the mark. Like a few posters have mentioned already, I'd say the reason the ending ruined the game (and possibly even the series) for so many people was because it was the ENDING. It was what 3 games and 100+ hours led up to, and to many, it was a massive letdown that rendered all previous gameplay pointless.

To try to illustrate this a little better, consider both the ending and the Tuchanka mission. Players almost universally reviled the ending, and almost universally thought that Tuchanka was the highlight of the game, maybe the highlight of the series. Now, suppose that those had been reversed- that nearly everyone thought the ending was perfect and that Tuchanka was horrendous. Would we have seen the level of backlash that we saw over the ending? Would there have been a huge "change Tuchanka" movement? I'm pretty confident that the answer is "no" to both of those questions. It's easy to claim that 2% of the game shouldn't ruin the rest, but the fact that it was the LAST 2% is extremely important.

 

[votemarvel]

If BioWare ever sees the light and breaks away from E.A., I will happily purchase another game from them.

EA now own Bioware, so they can't just see the light and break away.

The most you could see are people leaving to start their own studio.

 

[00slash00]

well i dont know about the rest of the world, but i know in america the general mentality toward life is "if its not completely what i want, the way i want it, then it sucks and i dont want it at all!"

 

[ResonanceSD]

Ok, so what about the people who found the other 98% mediocre?

And what are you going to take away from an experience? How it ended. That's why people focus on it.

 

[Acton Hank]

First, Your argument is what exactly?

Second, Who'se to say they won't use tactics to adapt to that, they disabled the Normandy with a virus didn't they?

Third I'm pretty sure that once you launch a full scale invasion on all planets with space traveling races that those races will be aware of your existence; it doesn't matter if they changed from surprise attack to open warfare.

In Mass Effect 3 they still spread through the galaxy without much opposition; any less and they wouldn't have been the "inevitable end of everything and everyone"

My, quite obvious, point is that they couldn't survive an attack on a well protected colony/planet, which is why they did hit and runs.

You reached for the wrong straw my friend, they disabled the Normandy through the IFF, we have no evidence of other means to disable enemy ships given that every other time it appears it has to engage in a fight.
The only "evidence" of their intentions to attack Earth is a squadmate wild guess.
And we already know about Arrival, the Collectors were small time and never meant to do something big like raiding Earth.


Ultimately, the events of ME1, under Sovereign's desires, gave "birth" to Shepard and that caused the end of the Reaper cycles of extinction, if you don't think that was a big deal that's... well i don't know what that is...

They did hit and runs so that they could get what they wanted and leave before anyone knew what the fuck.

And you missed the point again, just because they are attacking remote colonies now doesn't mean that they weren't researching ways to hit Earth later, they already established they had a way to disable a ship from a piece of 37 million year old equipment that predates the Collectors.

Well that's a bit of a reach isn't it? By that logic you might as well be saying that it was Liara that saved the galaxy because she found the Crucible blueprints or that what doomed the Reapers were the repeated acts of complete idiocy that Sovereign and Saren did in game 1.

 

[Rack]

Where's this 98% was great concept come from? What about the Crucible? Or Kai Leng? Or the way the stupid kid dreams ruin every single dramatic moment? Or Cerberus?

 

[Lovely Mixture]

Mass Effect was announced as a trilogy where your choices would carry over and have an ultimate effect (a "mass effect" if you will) in the end.

This announcement was at the same time as big-heads like Peter Molyneux were saying pretty intricate stuff about their titles that never delivered. Some believed it, some were skeptical (like me) but figured to wait until the product was finished.

Mass Effect 1 came out, it had problems but was ambitious.

Mass Effect 2 came out, it removed some of the problems but dumbed down a lot of the gameplay, however some of us found that forgive-able because Bioware seemed to be the only developer that cared about writing. Despite Mass Effect 2's story going nowhere the presentation and character development was "competent" (I thought so, but not everyone did).

Mass Effect 3 doesn't deliver on it's promises but more importantly is just badly written, deus ex machina can be forgiven if the story isn't reliant on it.

 

[the abyss gazes also]

I haven't played Mass Effect so take my commentary with that in mind, but imagine you are eating a meal and it is great. Lets say it is pizza but is the best pizza you have tasted in a loooong time. And then as you are getting full, you take one of your last bites and it crunches funny and you realize you have bitten a dirty cockroach in half.

Now tell me, was that a good meal?

Imagine great sex and then as you are about to climax your partner just stops and punches you in the head. (Unless you are into that, I'm guessing you would call that great sex.)

Look at how people are viewing the legacy of LANCE ARMSTRONG (the bicycle guy, NOT Neil Armstrong the astronaut-if you confuse the two of them I sort of have to hate you on principle) after it ended so abruptly in scandal. The ending colors his whole career.

Endings matter. In a narrative it is always disappointing to see a good story squandered and my understanding of the ME series is that it was a very narrative game.

 

[VoidWanderer]

I didn't mind the game, and I admit to never finishing the game.

BUT, I did not finish becaus eof the ending debaucle.

I have never played online for any shooter with that option. But when I tried the demo and played it online 'for the hell of it' I found it to be great fun.

Then I saw how they whoring out the DLC for it. "Buy console armor and get multiplayer DLC" sure, makes sense. "Buy the Concept Artbook/T-shirt and get multiplayer DLC", can go straight back to the hellish dregs of the EA Viral marketing department, who sadly have not succumbed to a deadly virus.

A multiplayer mode I loved, for a game I didn't mind too much. The vastly different styles of planet molesting was different, and the fact that your old team-mates suddenly didn't like living for no logical reason, other than that one guy where it was mentioned he was dying in Number 2.

Since my take on the whole game was more introspective compared to who it ended, I will say nothing more than this.

/Sigh

 

[The Last Nomad]

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

Basically this, the same thing happened to me with Mass Effect 2. After the boring ending (compared to the rest of the game) I just stopped playing for a long time due to my distain for it. It wasn't until I started a new game with a new character that I actually remembered how good it was.


But the real reason I think is that people prefer to moan than praise. Even if there is a little amount to complain about compared to what their is to enojy, complaining about something makes many people feel like they are 'better' or 'smarter' than people who like it. And people love feeling better and smarter than others.