Dragon Age Origins Lead Designer speaks out against ME3 Ending
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Planescape: Torment is a perfect example of what Mass Effect 3, by all accounts is not.
PS:T's ending was at best bittersweet, but as it was the ending you had been working towards the entire game, was entirely within the flavour of the game, and was narratively satisfying.
Whilst the ending itself was the same however you played it, the ending itself emphasised just how important the choices you had made throughout the game were, as well as giving you further choices right at the end, consistent with the game's entire approach.
Brent Knowles's comment seems to essentially be: make the ending consistent with the game (I actually don't think he's necessarily calling for a happy ending, just one that is consistent with the rest of the game and its tone). PS:T's was. It doesn't sound like Mass Effect 3's was.
I've also seen a shot which seems to suggest that the very final screen before credits is an 'invitation' to buy DLC. Does this not induce rage in anyone else due to its crassness?
PS:T's ending was at best bittersweet, but as it was the ending you had been working towards the entire game, was entirely within the flavour of the game, and was narratively satisfying.
Whilst the ending itself was the same however you played it, the ending itself emphasised just how important the choices you had made throughout the game were, as well as giving you further choices right at the end, consistent with the game's entire approach.
Brent Knowles's comment seems to essentially be: make the ending consistent with the game (I actually don't think he's necessarily calling for a happy ending, just one that is consistent with the rest of the game and its tone). PS:T's was. It doesn't sound like Mass Effect 3's was.
I've also seen a shot which seems to suggest that the very final screen before credits is an 'invitation' to buy DLC. Does this not induce rage in anyone else due to its crassness?
No. No there is not.SajuukKhar said:
The relay in Arrival is different only because the Reapers chose it as their arrival point. In no other way was it at all more powerful. The only relay in the entire galaxy you could make the argument for being substantially different is the Citadel, and even that is iffy at best.
Your second point is potentially valid, and I'd be willing to suspend my disbelief enough to buy it if they made even the slightest effort to address that plot hole.
Beyond that though, that doesn't address the other issue I brought up, which is potentially even more damaging. The fact that the galaxy-wide wave o' space magic is sufficient to severely damage the Normandy, probably the most well-protected and advanced ship in the galaxy, means that it will be sufficient to ravage the surface of every planet and take down just about everything less than a dreadnaught.
Meaning nobody has any ships, ship yards, or even most buildings anymore. As a consequence of that in particular, galactic civilization as we know it is dead. At absolute best, galaxy-spanning technology will be re-created within half a dozen human lifetimes, and by then the Council era will have been forgotten, except as a dream of a Golden Age.
Who else thinks that the lead designer of Dragon Age of all games, should be the one to talk about this...
I mean, none of Dragon age's story was particularly well written... The ending? Less so.
I mean, none of Dragon age's story was particularly well written... The ending? Less so.
I don't think this is a question of "good writing". If gamers got angry every time a game failed to employ "good writing" we'd be in a permanent state of revolt. Dragon Age Origins was in many ways a silly story, but the ending was emotionally and thematically consistent with the game that preceded it. The bad writing/sloppy presentation in ME3's conclusion is only compounding the problem, it's not the problem in and of itself.Robert Ewing said:
I disagree. I get the strong sense there that he's talking about being able to end the game as the hero, which doesn't preclude a sad ending. You can easily have the player, or even their whole squad die the heroes. Maybe even lose Earth entirely or some other major world in the process.DustyDrB said:
And obviously, such a heroic ending shouldn't be the only option depending on how you did throughout the game, but that also leads to the other major problem with the ending in a game filled with choices of galactic consequence.
Watch again, they're creating explosions that are visible from well outside the galaxy, suggesting a level of destruction that massively exceeds a single solar system.PercyBoleyn said:
EDIT: ...and I have no idea why it quoted you both twice in the same post...
Actually watch the cutscene againStarke said:
Those "explosions" are the energy pulse that enacts whatever choice Shepard makes, and given how they completely unaffected even buildings on Earth, which was near the citadel and the largest explosion they weren't all that damaging.
Beyond that no visible star loss is noticeable despite the energy waves reaching a far greater distance.
Nothing got destroyed.
I'd rather not, if only because I don't want to put up with the two hours of mind numbing, pointless, and erratically hideously lethal combat to get back to that point to watch it again.SajuukKhar said:
Though, off the top of my head, it occurs to me that the wave you see coming off the citadel isn't exceeding the speed of light by some hideously high margin, while every other detonating relay is, so you're right, Earth may have been saved, but every other cluster is good and royally fucked.
Except there is nothing that hints that the citadel's pulse wave is any different from the others. The difference in speeds is easily explained through an artistic speed up because it would have been dull to watch it slowly move across the galaxy.Starke said:
Also as I pointed out before THERE IS ZERO LOSS OF STARTS DESPITE THE PULSE WAVE HITTING LARGE PORTIONS OF THE GALAXY.
Your theory would have merit if there was any destruction of anything shown, but there wasn't.
I agree with you, but only partially. Yes, it could have had a bleak as hell ending and worked, and yes Mass Effect 3 was spiralling deeper into this 'bleakness' with every minute, but Mass Effect 2 made a large deal of the fact that any one of your crew members could die in the suicide mission, and a great deal of effort was necessary to let them all survive. Mass Effect 3 doesn't 'need' a happy ending, but it doesn't 'need' a bleak ending either. As I see it, taken from the more constructive and legible arguments floating around, Mass Effect 3 'needs' an ending that actually allows the player's choices to make a difference. Even small details in Mass Effect 1 could be seen in Mass Effect 2, whether a person on a certain side mission contacted shepard through his/her private terminal or otherwise. Throughout the journey Mass Effect 3, even, many of your choices come back to haunt/help you in your mission, but in Mass Effect 2, these decisions had a definable impact on the ending, whether your squad, or even Shepard, lived. Here, no matter what decisions the player makes, no matter how many allies or friends he/she brings with him, death is inevitable, and even the small sliver of hope in not knowing the fate of your squadmates is offset by the unbelievable amount of ambiguity in the whole thing. So yes, if shepard is going to sacrifice him/herself, it shouldn't be 'just because'. Nor should it be that shepard HAS to sacrifice him/herself, because the games up to this point have always presented the hope, the dream that beyond all odds, a happy, survivable resolution is actually possible.DustyDrB said:
You can find the scene on youtube, too.Starke said:
And yeah, my first take upon seeing this scene was "wow, those explosions are going significantly faster than the speed of light," followed by "wow, the light from those explosions is going significantly faster than the speed of light," followed by "wait, given the inverse-square law, that is a shit-ton of photons coming off those explosions. Even given that all the EM radiation emitted by them happens to be in the visible spectrum, it seems to me like that would do really bad things to anything near them."
considering Mass Effect has proven not have the same laws of physics as ours with its whole "magical levitation" sorry I mean "biotic levitation" I dont see why you would assume that would be true.Kahunaburger said:
It takes a lot less energy to kill everything on a planet (or glass a planet, or even to atomize a planet) than it does to destroy a star. I don't even know if it's possible IRL for stars to be destroyed through being hit with energy and/or subatomic particles.SajuukKhar said:
#OverthinkingMassEffect
I find this statement hilarious because a lot of the JRPGS that get ported over seas use the same character archtypes and the same story rehash, and lots of them are shoehorned into an ending, remember the first time you finished FF7 and no one was sure what the fuck happened?Hyper-space said:
Admittedly all the "should the relay explosions do X" conversations are overthinking as you pointed out.Kahunaburger said:
I just say we slap a Star Trek Heisenberg compensator on our teleporters and beam out of this particular topic.
It's space magic. It doesn't have to make sense.Kahunaburger said:
Personally, I like to think that if the endings are the true, final endings, that the Crucible doesn't function like it's supposed to, and instead detonates every single relay like the Alpha Relay in Arrival. So the Earth is about 30 minutes away from an explosion that dwarfs even a supernova.
Nice job breaking it, hero.