RagTagBand said:
Starke said:
Or, you know, the time and budget that was given to Mass Effect 3 without the Kinnect bullshit, or pulling people off to go help rearrange deck chairs on TOR. You know, what people who actually had a grasp of the situation have been saying.
AHAHAHA No. A few extra months and the, what, few tens of thousands of dollars that would have been required to add kinect? That's what you think would have been the difference between what we have and, essentially, a game that's 1000 times more complex? You're either trolling or I'm amazed you managed to bang your head on your keyboard to write out that response and still remain conscious enough to hit post.
Then you obviously don't understand even the fundamental basics of how the game functions under the hood. Go play around with the save game editor, that might give you some insight into exactly what data the game does and does not store.
Making a game that was 1000 times more complex would require presenting the player with roughly 10 more choices, given the way the game already generates aggregate change. Now, if you're going into an office and saying you can do ten things but it will take you years and a tens of thousands of dollars to do it, I can certainly see how that would have left you with few avenues of employment.
I already explained the binary nature of the endings elsewhere, if you can pretend to write professionally, then you can pretend to do a lit-review here.
RagTagBand said:
To make every possible decision culminate into completely noticeably different endings and experiences over the course of a 90 hour trilogy would have taken an absurdly large amount of additional resources and time. Not a little, but a lot, A LOT. I don't suppose you would understand what I mean by "Exponential" or "Butterfly effect" so I guess this would all go over your head anyway.
Hardly, the underlying system is actually quite simple and elegant, and readily capable of accepting additional variables. Only a fool would try to program a branching narrative by individually programing each possible result individually and in isolation. The system itself, as you're fully aware is modular, dropping in chunks of dialog and extracting others to fit a series of Boolean states. Because, you know, this was programed by programmers, who only continue to get paid if they produce what's asked for.
As to programing a system to accept an entirely new control interface, especially when said request occurs after a project has already been budgeted and initiated is what programers call, feature creep.
RagTagBand said:
Starke said:
By which you mean, he/she/it was not successfully bamboozled by an unconvincing starchild and never railroaded into one of three prerendered cutscenes that had absolutely nothing to do with any decisions you'd made in any game in the franchise up to that point? Because, that sir, is truly the impossible. And by getting an actual ending you have achieved the impossible.
Why do you insist on forgetting the first 30 hours of the game and judging it by its final minute?
I don't, I judge it by the final two hours, the last fifteen fundamentally sabotage every element of Shepard's character, and trivialize every act the player has taken up to this point. I'm sure that I don't need to explain why to you, as you undoubtedly understand this.
RagTagBand said:
MY effect on the game was seen throughout, Right up until the final 5 minutes I was constantly seeing how I had affected the story and its characters. My teeny tiny decisions of "Did I sign Conrad Verners Autograph?" may have slipped by in the ending scene, And lo I will weep tonight not knowing if he did hang it on his wall, but the BIG decision didn't slip by.
It happened earlier, in a train wreck of poorly written exposition and increasingly arbitrary save state data from the original game.
RagTagBand said:
And honestly, what could have been shown? Most worlds are burned and destroyed, Billions upon Billions of people are dead, the entire galaxy, effectively, has been changed by the end of the War. Nearly every decision you made would have been trumped by the fact that everywhere you've been having been destroyed and (probably) everyone you've ever met being dead.
To produce a satisfying ending? Less. No Starchild bullshit. No pick your explosion color false ending bullshit. Blow the fuck out of the citadel and the reapers when Shepard collapses and call it a day. It's a better ending, a more satisfying ending. And even if it was an incredibly bleak ending, it wouldn't have come with the insulting idiocy of the Starchild.
RagTagBand said:
I would have liked more time spent on what happened to my crew but as I said the people I gave a shit survived and that's what I really cared about. I wanted Liara to Survive and I wanted Garrus to survive, everything else is a bonus to me.
Starke said:
Then, as a fellow professional, I can only say to you, best of luck on that, as your lit-rev skills need some serious work, and probably a dash of impartiality.
Ha, how quaint, I'm being lectured by a nobody on writing because I don't agree with his spoilt-brat opinions on a game ending, and being lectured on impartiality by someone who doesn't seem to understand what impartial means. Nobody here is impartial; Impartial people wouldn't give a fuck about the ending of this game enough to come froth at the mouth on an internet forum about it.
I'm sorry, I forgot for a moment, I was talking to an ex-spec ops guy who lead fifty three operations in Iraq before being sent home, having all records of his existence expunged, including discharge papers, and went on to become a best selling novelist of
edgy and
dark novels.
It's the internet. Don't bother linking to some poor schmuck's Amazon author page. You're a writer in the same sense that I'm the King of goddamn Norway.
For future reference, here's a quick scratch-and-sniff test for identifying a real, professional, qualified writer. They're not going to stand there and defend a train wreck like the Mass Effect franchise.
RagTagBand said:
2/10, it's the best I can give you.
Given that you see deus ex machina as a sign of a solid ending, I think that's a pretty fair self evaluation of your skills.