BioWare Acknowledge Widespread Discontent over Mass Effect 3's Ending

[Toby McCasker]

what i like even more than the lack of quality and value in ME3 is the way the GON staff have appeared to be almost sycophantically pro-bioware in the face of all reason

LOL: "...Happily, BioWare will be continuing to support Mass Effect 3 throughout the year, presumably with sweet DLC..."

seriously toby, are you being paid to say rubbish like that or what

You haven't read our roundtable write-up of the game, have ya. True, we did enjoy it on multiple levels - but "sycophantic" isn't quite what springs to mind.

[Auld]

HOW DARE YOU ENJOY A GAME THAT IS PRETTY DAMN GOOD ALL ROUND BUT HAS ONE OR TWO PROBLEMS!!?

[Marius]

You haven't read our roundtable write-up of the game, have ya. True, we did enjoy it on multiple levels - but "sycophantic" isn't quite what springs to mind.

And let's not forget my editorial where I both criticised the game and suggested Toby might get punched in an amusing quick time event.

[Toby McCasker]

You haven't read our roundtable write-up of the game, have ya. True, we did enjoy it on multiple levels - but "sycophantic" isn't quite what springs to mind.

And let's not forget my editorial where I both criticised the game and suggested Toby might get punched in an amusing quick time event.

Yes, let's not forget Mari- you are the worst guy I know.

[Marius]

You had it coming, Traynor-sympathizer.

[Black Patriot]

I think the thing that struck me as the worst part of the "ending" was the contrived nature of it. The biggest issue I had was:

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The Reaper-controlling child (the ****?) announced that "synthetics will always try to destroy organics." That would have been fine if it had been proposed in the first game, but having it come out of nowhere in the third, especially as I'd spent a good deal of the game helping the Geth and EDI achieve individual sentience and an understanding of the value of organic life, just struck me as idiotic.

Sorry if that hidden tag contains my entire argument, but there's no way to separate it from the spoilers. Not to mention the fact that we're expected to believe that the best outcome for 2 of the 3 choices is that Shepard dies. If the galactic readiness thing had been about whether Shepard has enough time to activate the damned thing and get out alive it would have been far more satisfying. Do all the side quests and get the readiness high enough, and Shepard gets pulled out of the rubble. Skip them to get on with the story and Shepard dies stopping the Reapers. Far more satisfying.

And that bit about it "needing to be a bittersweet ending"; what the hell was most of the game for if not to make your eventual victory bittersweet. How many billions of lives are lost before Shepard can stop the Reapers, or do they mean nothing if the player doesn't personally lose something (I already felt bad when Thessia fell, I didn't need some arbitrary **** shoved down my throat at the end).

Horrible ending to a very good game. Make no mistake, right up until the last 5 minutes it was excellent, full of atmosphere, rich characters, and (relatively) enjoyable gameplay. But the ending has left a very sour taste in my mouth, so much so that it will be some time before I'm willing to play it again, and when I do I'll probably stop before it goes off the rails.

[Ooshp]

At the end of ME1 you had an ending you could not change... at the end of ME2 you made a choice which sitll didn't change much.

Yeah but the difference with those endings is they didn't overwrite everything else. In each Mass Effect 3 ending all the races are stranded at earth with only human food to eat. So all three endings = death of the galaxy = your journey didn't mean a damn thing, unlike ME1 and ME2.

What about the journey itself?

The game was littered with great moments that felt very personal to my Shepard. If you seriously think the journey didn't mean a thing, I pity you.

I certainly won't defend the ending as anything more than average, but dismissing 100+ hours of emotional engagement with this series over it would be silly.

Besides it wasn't all pointless

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Although Shepard couldn't save the galaxy as it was, she made her galaxy the final loop in the 50,000 year cycle. Every previous cycle selflessly added to the plans for the Crucible for the benefit of the next cycle. Completing the Crucible, even at the cost of most of Shepard's galaxy, gives some meaning to the sacrifices of billions upon squillions of lives in previous cycles. I'd call that some kind of closure.

But yeah, the Normandy thing is pretty silly.

[Marius]

I think it's more that all choices over those 100 hours ultimately came down to an A, B, or C choice.

Say I want to do something in life. I don't get to stuff around and then choose the final outcome in the last few minutes. Things done at the very start will have a measurable impact on what those choices are. Do things well and you have a good and great choice, in addition to throw-it-all-away bad choices. Do things badly and your choices are bad and worse - you're locked out of the good choices.

I know comparing real life to games can be a bit silly. But it does impact on how we perceive choice. If a game is going to portray itself as representing true choice, then it needs to have some semblance of how choice is experienced in life.

In contrast, Mass Effect 2 did this really well, I thought. At the start your choice regarding Tali's squad member had a measurable impact on your chances of success with the Quarian missions.

So for me part of my disappointment is that Bioware clearly has the ability... they just seemed to be taking a more 'novel writing' approach. ME3 felt more like a book/movie than ME2. Like any good book or movie, it definitely produced emotional engagement, but the tone of ME3 was clearly different than ME2, and is ultimately not what I enjoyed the series for.

[Submariner]

It would be funny if they suddenly come out with paid DLC (unlocked, already in game) to change the ending J/K

[gmcleod]

Meh. It was fine.

So the relay network is down? They'll build another one. The protheans sort of did.

Choice A, B & C were at least better than in Human Revolution, and we've all forgotten about that.

As stated in the article, the entire game is about closure. By the time the crucible is ready everything has been sorted, and the only thing they did was introduce a plot device nobody would have guessed based on limited foreshadowing during prior conversations with reapers.

So your choices didn't matter at that point? Why the hell would they? Does the crucible have to do something different based on whether you punched the reporter or not? That's obviously not a good example, but I cant think of anything Shepard could have done in the past that would make the entity at the end act differently. It only mattered that Shepard was there, and for obscure reasons, there are just 3 options.

The fact that bioware didn't want to give everything away strongly suggests that they're preparing for the next evolution of the setting. And for that, I'm just a bit excited.

[Marius]

So your choices didn't matter at that point? Why the hell would they?

Which is exactly why deus ex machina is soundly criticised in storytelling circles as a poor ending device.

Quote from wiki...

a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

Hence how

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Shepard couldn't get the Crucible to fire until the god child thing miracullously appeared.

A deus ex machina is generally undesirable in writing and often implies a lack of creativity on the part of the author. The reasons for this are that it does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is often so unlikely that it challenges suspension of disbelief, allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, though perhaps more palatable, ending.

Does that sound like criticisms of the end? If so, the criticisms of the end of the ME3 storyline aren't exactly new. They're criticisms that people have been making of plots for two thousand years.

Here, deus ex was used to make the ending more palatable. But ironically, by trying to resolve things so much (freedom from the cycle) they actually caused more closure problems. Deus ex never achieves the intended goal of closure, because closure requires plot consistency.

[gmcleod]

So nothing new then lol

Even as a massive deus ex machina, I think they pulled it off in an epic fashion.

[Black Patriot]

So nothing new then lol

Even as a massive deus ex machina, I think they pulled it off in an epic fashion.

Epic in scale, if not in quality.

[Angeredsoul]

not happy with the ending. Possible spoiler below as to my true thoughts.

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over 3 games, fought and killed over eleventy billion enemies, then killed by a small explosion on a space station. fking sigh

[PURITy Kin]

Honestly, if you're not convinced about ME3's ending being bad watch Angry Joe's 10 reasons we hate ME3's ending.

I finished the game today and I was like "OK, Ending is weak but not bad. But after watching this thing I'm more dissapointed than anything. The ending feels rushed. How can it feel rushed when the storyboard would have been completed long before the actual software was being created. It's just plan lazy. Far below EA's standard, let alone Bioware's standard.

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I'll agree there are 16 endings, they are anything but vastly different. There are 3 endings which can be described as different, the others don't even make sense. Not that the overall ending makes sense in the first place. The places where the 16 variants can be placed are more relating to which character appears in cut scene.

As for the total ending, A, B, and C choice is exactly correct as mentioned above. There are exactly 3 endings. And the only variation between them is the colour. As I said, it's cheap and just plane lazy.

Deus ex mechina.

If you're tossing up as to whether or not you should buy this game, by all means. The 40 or so hours I put into it were a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with this game up until the last 5 minutes. But because of those 5 minutes I cannot recommend you pay full price. Wait till the price goes down or a DLC included edition comes out. It's not worth it in it's current state.