-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Bioware responds to Mass Effect 3 ending controversy
- Thread starter WARP10CK
- Start date
Cause Shepards choice overwrites everything? No matter what you choose you dont know what happens to the Galaxy / your Crew member afterwards, you reset everything (in one case you even wipe out all Geth.). At least explain why the Normandy was present in the Ending (everybody was on earth) and what everybody does without MR.
Rebel Leader
THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
I unlocked more endings changeing my TV's tint
Jake Tower
Banned
Why do you need that information? The whole point of that information is to leave it up to your imagination.
Shepards choice doesn't negate everything that came before it. It still happened, you still have the resolutions / choices you made. Why does everything need to be in a happy little bow?
It would've been fine if they ended things right before the white light, everything you said would be true und most would be fine with it. But no, instead of a resoluation all we get is more questions.
The Anti-Monitor
Banned
I have a newfound respect for EA.
"I am the vanguard of you favorite series' destruction"
heliosRAzi
Banned
We would like to be able to see how our squadmates are doing and what our choices accomplished. With the ending they gave us, we have to read LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE. There should've been a proper epilogue to the series.
dragonelite
Member
If it adds anything sure why not.
What if the ending was we failed with stopping this cycle.
I would like to know what the next cycle races are?
Did they find liara time capsule? How far into their cycle are they.?
What happened to humanity and the other races did we turn into reapers.?
Or collectors kind of slave machines. Or did we become the citadel janitor race?
Maybe end the epilogue off with a view into deep space and Harbinger Eyes glowing up for a short amount.
Again, difference of opinion. I don't understand the hate. I thought the ending (while inconsistant and simply written) worked.
It doesnt need to be happy, like i said everything would be fine if they ended things 5minutes earlier. But they did open themselves up to all those question and all we want is answers. Just read the spoiler / speculation thread.
Right. I like the questions. I like wondering what happened. I can make up anything I want until BW releases DLC that overwrites them.
Some aspects of it worked. The
self-sacrifice, the Mass Relays 'sploding and Citadel gone, the general bleak outlook on life post-Reapers
What didn't work was the
Catalyst, and the silly conversation you have with him. If they were going to go that route the dialogue should have been significantly more fleshed out. What also didn't work was the final choice you make, since it was ultimately meaningless and led to roughly the same ending.
Lifejumper
Member
Post by a Bioware employee on the forums
Jarret Lee said:
GrandHarrier
Member
I believe him. And if they are taking it seriously then ill be content with whatever happens.
There's no way that DLC is going to change the ending.
Based on where your save game puts you after you complete the ending, clearly it's going to involve content prior to the ending. They're not going to force you to replay the last couple of missions over again just to access the DLC.
Based on where your save game puts you after you complete the ending, clearly it's going to involve content prior to the ending. They're not going to force you to replay the last couple of missions over again just to access the DLC.
Nah man, it really isn't that, and I think few people are getting why people are upset, or at least critical of the endings. Deus Ex Machina endings get this kind of negativity because they are usually uncreative solutions to the problem(s) you were presented with, and they come with the added excuse that things are left up for interpretation, thus they challenge you intellectually in a negative way because then if you are unsatisfied with it you end up feeling like you didn't get it, when in fact that is not the issue. I think these kinds of endings take a mastery to them that BW surely doesn't possess.
Of course people think then, what was the point? It's not that Shepard isn't presented with a choice to culminate the reaper threat, it's that it makes little sense within the boundaries of the fiction and in the end it is just an uncreative way to solve convoluted problems that only really say they had to solve the issue, but didn't know how. The thing is not about tying everything with a neat little bow, is about having people asking themselves the right questions in the end, and the most prevalent question right now is what the fuck was that?
fabricated backlash
Member
Also the ending in this particular case makes the whole journey, everything you've done up to that point meaningless. Many stories that come up with a Deus Ex Machina device still manage to at least keep it within the stories fiction and premise, as well as tie it in with previous events.
The ending to ME3 is completely detached from everything in the rest of the series. It's the complete antithesis to Shephard being a character that was formed by the players. One can argue about how much people were ever allowed to influence the character, but the ending in ME3 could've been done by anyone, even a normal Volus or Rachni.
The mythos they wanted to build up to basically disipates within a single cutscene.
I think no one would want the game to end with Shephard going to Disneyland, but at least offer an ending that isn't insulting, or trying to go for some arbitrary philosophical strains that are introduced in the last 2 minutes of the game. The ending completely fails on it's own ambition. Spectacularly so. ME2s ending was horrible due to the lack of a proper closure, and some cringeworthy plot developments, but ME3s ending is simply incompetent, pretentious and horribly executed.
It's like Michael Bay trying to do 2001 a Space Odyssey.
Jaffaboy
Member
Haha, this this this! Goddamn, this is soo going to happen!
Escape Goat
Member
New DLC - Shepard quantum leaps into Marauder Shields and has to stop herself to set right what once when wrong.
It seems tenfold here because Mass Effect is supposed to be an RPG that's all about choice (lol, I know) so the nature of the medium, at least in my opinion, requires that the gameplay also be honored with the culmination of your story. It's not only about the narrative coming to an end, but the fact that the ending is only a scene that goes against the character that you have been building all along, the central gameplay mechanic, the capability of choice and survival she has demonstrated and the journey he has taken to get there. It is an ending that tells you as a fact it didn't really matter if the Illusive Man won (another character that was written to be a sort of villain in the third installment in a very convoluted way), but it is also asking you to believe it did matter because they say so and nothing else. The choice is not really a choice, but a slight variation of a canned cinematic. There is a lot of buildup but very little pay off, essentially. Your last comparison is really apt, after all the cinematic action, set pieces and explosions, it tries to be philosophical and deep and whatever at the expense of everything else that happened before, and especially everything you did and you are in a way.
LightofRohan
Member
Ah, I feel bad for most of the Bioware employee's. 99% of those guys did an amazing job crafting this Universe, a decision of the writer/higher ups fucked it for everyone.
No surprise about the dlc bullshit (I have never bought dlc for any game, and I won't start now). Although I didn't use gamefly, I pretty much got the game for free as I can use my credit card "points" to get best buy gift cards. So I am not as pissed as others.
However, I am not going to let the last few minutes completely ruin the entire series for me, and that is why I started playing me1 again - now I remembered why I fell in love with the universe in the first place.
Yeah, I feel bad for the rank-and-file guys who got screwed by Mac Walters and Casey Hudson.
There are several reports that this ending fiasco are solely on their heads, and in fact several other writers were not fans of the endings at all.
This. "Shepard's ending" being death wouldn't be bad if there was a better resolution and reasoning for his death.
FunkyPajamas
Member
A mod should edit the thread title, adding a comma after the "3". Just for irony's sake.
I'd buy that.
I'd buy that.
LightofRohan
Member
People defending PA on their forums of course.
We have 100% the right to be upset, it's not about "It's too sad!". This perfectly illustrates why we are upset, the executive producer says, "The game wont end with some dull A, B or C choice" and it ends EXACTLY with that AND A, B and C are exactly the same.
Exactly the problem I had with what he says. This was not planned...
We have 100% the right to be upset, it's not about "It's too sad!". This perfectly illustrates why we are upset, the executive producer says, "The game wont end with some dull A, B or C choice" and it ends EXACTLY with that AND A, B and C are exactly the same.
Exactly the problem I had with what he says. This was not planned...
Fixed that for you.
fabricated backlash
Member
Since I didn't buy the game after ME2 dissapointed me, I only go from what i played in ME1-2, and peoples accounts that the 3rd game actually was great. That makes this ending even more incomprehensable.
If they were going for a more philosophical route, an underlying theme of ultimate sacrifice and so on, they should've gone with that much earlier in the games to support such an ending.
Even then, the dialogue for the translucent child, that was supposed to reflect Millions of years of accumulated knowledge, the outcome of countless simulations and all they could come up with is : Organics will allways create Synthetics and Synths. will always kill Organics... In the end their solution was to create Synths that would just forcefully wipe out organics to merge them into space squids, instead of having them being wiped out by synthetics...
What a crock of shit. The logical fallacies in that one dialogue exchange alone made me cringe.
I think the decision to let a child represent this kind of plot revelation is indeed very fitting, as only a child, bound by it's dichotom black and white, good and evil, world view could be convinced by such a proposterous premise.
Ultimately what the ending does is it completely deconstructs the Reapers, their whole premise and leaves the hero of the game with only one real choice: "Fuck this shit, I'm out of here"
None of the choices in the end matters, there is literally nothing that connects them to the experience and history as experienced by the players, and is inconsistent with the established fiction at best, and downright insulting to both the players intellect as well as their time investment.
br0ken_shad0w
Member
Now I'm looking more and more forward to redlettermedia's take on the ending.
Yeah the fact that people on message boards know how to make games better than Bioware does is pretty sad.
Well, you're forgetting the fact the bioware mods also delete posts/threads and ban members. So what you see from the bioware forums are often only what bioware allows you to see.
So in essence, bioware only listens to themselves and whoever they let inside their bubble.
And they ban anyone who gives actual criticism, simultaneously banning them from all EA games.
The latter due to it justifying the former (at least when it's frequent enough to lead in polls about why you don't like the ending), albeit with some conditions. I don't think it's as bad if it's more a feeling they want a more positive ending PERIOD for all their work in trying to get the best, it's mainly a problem if they want some 100% cheerful ending that's closer to the PA comic than what an appropriate end to the trilogy should be. I don't give a damn about
Shepard surviving so long as the way s/he dies makes sense (and for the ending it would have, no matter what)
EDIT: Marked spoilers to be on the safe side. Not that I'd risk coming into a thread directly related to the ending without beating it first, but whatever.
Jibbajabbawockky
Member
The problem is that in part there is no reason that there should be only one ending. Its a freaking RPG which is supposedly predicated on player choice and consequence. There should be multiple variations on the ending
with Shep living or dying or maybe choosing to live but having some tradeoff. Or let Anderson blow the Citadel up letting Shepard live.
The ending needs more variety, in addition to at least trying to make a bit of sense.
LightofRohan
Member
Yea, like I've said before -- sad ending is not a bad ending. The sad part is, when you realize Shepard dying in ME2 had a much longer/impactful ending. And only a handful of people get that...
Why Linkin Park?
bigace33
Member
You know what? I can respect this guys post. This doesn't seem like a lot of fluff or smoke blowing. The guy seems transparent and really, that's all you can ask for. Good job, and I do respect Bioware, and thank them for such an amazing game series.
People slam on the bioware social forums all the time, but there's been good criticism made there (it's also where the indoctrination theories got their start, but I digress).
"Penny arcade and the NYT liked it, so shut the fuck up, nerds! Also, DLC lol!"
Its like everything this company says makes them seem like bigger and bigger assholes. Obsidian games might not have worked right out of the box, but at least they didn't come off as condescending assholes when people tried to talk to them.
Its like everything this company says makes them seem like bigger and bigger assholes. Obsidian games might not have worked right out of the box, but at least they didn't come off as condescending assholes when people tried to talk to them.
You are then thrust in to battle to defend no man's land! Despite wanting to aid Shepard rather than fight him, you are presented with three options:
1. HOLD THE LINE
2. HOLD THE LINE
3. HOLD THE LINE