One Last look at Mass Effect 3.

[lord Claincy Ffnord]

-snip-

You appear to be arguing with part of what I said but ignoring the clarifications. Hype is hype, I even said it wasn't targeted at the main fans. But that the main fans weren't the only ones getting angry about the ending, not by a long shot. You are actually just saying roughly the same thing as I did except dismissing all the players who weren't diehard bioware fans as completely irrelevant. Though regardless of that I was referring to all the talk of how important your actions would be, how you would be deciding the fates of races etc etc, that was directed just as much at the fans. It's still hype.

Sooooo, this may be a shocker to you but MY opinions are also based on facts. ME2 was an enjoyable game with vastly improved combat, good characters and character development as well as an almost unique final mission (that was great up to the human reaper, that was a bit off at the time, makes more sense now but still wasn't that great) but a lackluster story. See, we both have opinions based on observations, I don't think mines any more valid than yours or vice versa but it *is* an opinion.

-snip-

Yes I am sure that his logic was sound. I've looked at it from both ways and did plenty of research on it at the time. It's logic is based off the assumption that sooner or later (without interference) organics would create synthetics that would destroy them. Based off that assumption his logic makes perfect sense. He was likely coded with that base assumption as it was exactly this that he was designed to do. Programs are logical, if it is programmed to have that assumption there isn't a problem. Even beyond that, standard procedure for proving/disproving something is to test it again and again and see what happens and the catalyst has been observing the exact same cycle of untold millenia. It's conclusion *is* logical.This doesn't mean it is the only logical train of thought on the matter but it is still valid.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/13006636

Read that and try to keep an open mind if you like. But at this point I doubt that anyone who thinks its logic is invalid is likely to change their minds and vice versa.

It's not that you need to have read/played other sci-fi to understand it, the logic is still correct without it in that AI's, being machines, will still be entirely logical regardless. That isn't a sci-fi concept, a program does Exactly what it is told. Having seen/read other sci-fi does help it make more sense but it isn't neccesary. However, the ending was horribly unclear about it meaning that it WAS hard to understand and I have never denied that this was a serious flaw in the ending.

Sorry but that flow chart is flawed. 'AI preserving organic life contradicts premise'.....no, just like not all people are mass murderers neither are AI's. It was never said that ANY AI that was created would inevitably rebel, simply that eventually there would be created AI's that would rebel and succeed. Also, the catalyst did not rebel against its creator's, it did exactly what they had told it too, finding the best solution it could come up with and going with it. Naturally its creators weren't too happy with its conclusion but it was far too late by then for that to make any difference. It still isn't a rebellion and that invalidates the bottom half of the flow chart.

As for the EC, sure the emotional impact isn't everything, again I never said that. But it also made the logic clearer which was one of the fundamental problems with the original ending.

The people who wrote it not directly coming forward was a serious mistake in my opinion. I agree that they should have. They fucked up at that point, but that doesn't really determine how badly they had fucked up before then.

For the whole last thing, the day1 DLC is a completely different debatable point. Releasing it then is not a nice thing on the part of bioware but morally there isn't anything wrong with it either. It was developed after the game went gold, so it couldn't be included in the launch edition. It would have been nice for it to be a free patch but they do need to pay for the development costs and it isn't inherently wrong to charge for it. Origin....is not a good service, but that's nothing new. And the 'real' ending was dlc? The extended cut did nothing but improve and expand on the existing one because the fans wanted it, and added a new ending because the fans wanted it. Now if they had set out to reserve the ending for DLC (even free DLC) from the start that would be an asshole move, not to mention fucking stupid.

Where did I say you were being paranoid? I openly agreed that it was a legitimate concern. The journalists and many reviewers 'let them get away with it' the community as a whole decidedly did not. You remember amazon's offer to refund the game? Have you noticed how it now costs roughly $30 less in stores than any other AAA title released around that time or in the year before? The number of people who have said they will never buy another bioware game? That is NOT letting them get away with it. Unless you expected people to riot and burn down their office or something.

Once again as I said before. Shared ownership. The game devs owe the fans yes, but it goes both ways. You are trying to tell me that essentially anytime fans didn't like something in a game they should be able to get it changed. This would firstly make games companies go out of business as the only way they could keep people happy would be to spend at least half their time trying to change everything for their fans. This would also drive a lot of people out of the industry. You could merrily wave goodbye to any innovative games. Because they aren't precisely what people already want. It is just as legitimate a concern as the devs waving stuff off with 'artistic integrity' and honestly I believe that in the case of ME3 the two dangers broke roughly even. The fans got some changes but the games company didn't just do whatever the hell fans asked for and at the same time the company didn't get away with their bullshit.

 

[Somebloke]

Call me whatever you want, but I'm still fully seriously hopexpecting that ME3's DLC cycle will climax, in a few months, with a concluding full third act, to the two you got on the disc (possibly already paid for, through that initial cost); that will begin with Shepard waking up in London, after resisting indoctrination, figuring out that the Reapers have been leading us by the nose the entire time, with the Crucible and then regrouping to find another solution - either all new, or by repurposing what we've got.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

This was well discussed at the time of the endings. Joker fleeing the system made no sense.

I'd grant you that save for the fact that the Citadel was exploding at the time giving fair cause to run especially in light of what happened the last time a relay exploded.

The fact your crew apparently was all with him made even less sense.

There is a span of time between the failed run to the beam and the rolling of that scene during which a resuce mission could have been launched. Given there are endings where those who explicitly accompanied you into the beam die seems to indicate this rescue operation took place.[/quote] The one inconsistent thing is that assuming the rescue operation took place, why no furter troops were sent into the beam. Those who were present not doing so because they were critically injured is perfectly reasonable.

I'm not sure how I'm constructing a straw man. I know "straw man" is a knee jerk accusation around here every time someone doesn't like the way a counterpoint is shaping up, but the choice to use "99.9%" was yours, not mine. To wit...

My problem is not with percentages but rather that you altered my use of the word "loved" and replaced it with "good". I never claimed it was objectively good, simply that it was well liked - a status you'll note can be assigned to things that are often very far removed from good.

As far as the percentages goes, that was a made up number but since you insist, here's the math. The common claim was that the last ten minutes were terrible. While absolute play times vary, I'll meet you halfway and assume a fairly rapid 20 hour jaunt through the last game. That means the offending piece was approximately .8% of the game. Assuming similar 20 hour play throughs of each of the previous, that equates to about .3% of the whole experience was offensive.

The point of this exercise isn't to construct a mathematical proof that something is good or not. It is simply to illustrate that the claim that the experience given was so terrible as to undermine everything that came before is a hyperbolic one. There likely exists an ending that is that bad. My argument is that the one given before the dlc was not even remotely close to that.

Your argument also appears to include assigning percentages. Apparently I liked 99.9% of ME, so I have to like the last 0.1%, or whatever weighting you've decided to give the ending in this hypothetical mathematical formula, or I run the risk of "hyperbole".

Again, you construct a straw man. If you liked 99.9% of Mass Effect, to claim that the last .1% was so bad as to retroactively ruin your enjoyment of the vast bulk of content that came before is hyperbolic.

I state again, loving a franchise and finding that franchise to be "99.9%" perfect are two very different things.

I agree. Fortunately, I have never argued against this point.

My suggestion would be not to bandy about percentages like this or accuse people en masse of "hyperbole" for reaching subjective assessments of how much they enjoy or do not enjoy pieces of entertainment media.

You are free to reach a subjective conclusion. Your personal conclusion may be that, in fact, that tiny fraction was so offensive that your enjoyment was ruined because any love you had was built upon the notion that you'd get more satisfying answers to a handful of questions. The problem is, it doesn't seem terribly likely that this is generally true for the population which leads to my point. How the discussion went from "not as good as it should have been" to "so bad it ruined the whole thing" the part that fascinates me. To describe this as hyperbolic is simply my way of expressing that the claim made popular by that discussion is irrational and thus likely not reflective of the true opinion of any particular individual in the group that generated that claim.

It's hardly unheard of for a bad ending to undermine the enjoyment of a piece of fiction. I'm not sure why people expressing that sentiment here constitutes "hyperbole", except that some people get very cross when folks hold opinions that differ strongly from theirs.

Yes, the ending can be terribly important. Yes, it can undermine what came before. But I'll simply say in brief that this isn't a compelling argument for the response to Mass Effect 3. The previous games were fairly self contained stories in their own right. Given the reapers were little more than a plot thread previously, that master in the shadows and all that garbage, the ending has very little power over the previous titles save for the fact that several fundamental questions were not well answered. That undermines a single thread of two previous games - I'll grant you that. But it does nothing to harm the big stuff that the previous two games focused on.

Rationally, the ending given does some harm to what came before but not so much as to destroy the bulk of what made people love them. Unless of course we are speaking of a person who's only satisfaction in the whole thing came from wondering about the Reapers. Then, sure, to get the ending given I can see how they'd be upset. Still, even in that extreme and unlikely case, the experiences one had in the past have already been had - getting unhappy context doesn't make those experiences any less enjoyable.

To take a different example, people decry the various edits made to the original Star Wars trilogy and finding that Lucas believed Han shot second does nothing to undermine the fact that by my recollection he shot first. That truth, just like the love one might have had for the ME franchise before the end, is beyond the power of anyone to destroy. Lamenting they did it wrong in the end fundamentally means they did something right before. Or else you wouldn't actually care, now would you?

That's not a natural conclusion at all. This is a story, not a historical footnote. Stories get told for a reason. The story you're describing is "The Reapers came and killed everyone, just as they had every time before, and nothing of any real significance happened".

Boiling down a story to the abstract gets you nowhere. When we think about the odds consider simply that thousands of other empires with billions if not trillions of people fought vainly to stop the reapers. Most of the themes get shoved out the airlock there - courage, fortitude and strength of arms were not enough. They have never been enough. When the third game rolls around, there have been no special preparations of significance. There has not been a massive military build up. By the opening of the last game, literally nothing has been done that would offer a change in result and any possibility for such was squandered.

I imagine you're familiar with this debate by now, so you're probably also familiar with the irritated response to the presumption I want something "less grim". Anyone remotely familiar with my taste in literature or film or even games would find the prospect that I wanted a super happy funshine ending ludicrous in the extreme, but I appreciate you are not that person, so I won't make a big stink out of it. Needless to say, I do not want or require something "less grim".

That's the problem I feel with the whole thing. The end had two ways to go - Deus Ex Machina or grim and hopeless. By trying to up the stakes in each game, they fundamentally ruined any hope for the sort of ending that would be legitimately satisfying - where strength of arms, tactics, cooperation and all the rest that we've been dealing with up to this point would save the day.

Of course, after some thought I have considered a possibility for how it might have been different. Perhaps the cruicible would simply have destroyed some number of reapers such that force of arms was sufficient to win the day. But even then, that isn't a particulary satisfying conclusion given that those victors would, inevitably it would seem, be killed by synthetics of their own creation in time.

In an utterly meaningless show of conventional force that accomplishes nothing, except to get you a tete a tete with an AI that is quite clearly insane, whose lunatic conclusions you must accept as sooth if you don't want to get the special Fuck You Whiners ending included in the extended cut.

I'm not certain which conclusions are lunatic. In one, you destroy the reapers - literally the goal of those who participated in the construction of the crucible. In another, you take control over the reapers and thus fulfil the goals of the Illusive Man. It is only the synthesis conclusion that seems strange given we simply don't have the information we'd need to determine if that's the right call or not.

Husks aren't dead, they're just a new form of life.

Not really given they cannot reproduce independenty, and there is no evidence that they respire.

Shepard making a decision like that for every species in the entire galaxy seems a tad heavy handed to me, and quite a split from the "our strength is our diversity" theme they were exploring with Javik. But we're splitting hairs now.

I agree entirely with this. As I've said before, the problem with the end isn't in the little plot holes people love to point to but rather that they discard most of the major themes the franchise explored to that point.

Of course it's not devoid of tone or theme. The question is whether or not the tone/theme was appropriate, or supported by what came before it.

On the one hand I'd argue that it is supported by what came before both with respect to tone and theme. But on the other there is the fact that they chose an ending that ignored much of what came before in favor of a simple cut and dry solution.

It would be nice, for a change of pace, if I could hold that position without having people accusing me of hyperbole, or sour grapes, or wanting a happy ending, as if this was the first time in the history of creation a work of fiction was ever criticized.

I'm not accusing you of anything. You may indeed hold various opinions that I disagree with. Hell, I was never even criticizing you, I was simply calling into question both why and how the discussion about Mass Effect 3's ending turned from "It isn't good" to "it is so bad that it undermines everything that came before". An individual can come to that conclusion - differences in taste and all. But the ending simply was not so bad as to justify how that becomes the defining discussion.

That's the part that interests me. Not if you personally hated the game - I'm not going to generate an argument that will change that.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

snip

I have little patience for a lengthy discussion on this one so I'll simply point out several things. First, there does not exist any demonstrated mechanism by which Shepard could have been indoctrinated. Second, the fact that Reapers rely largely on thier formidable armies and ways in which they can rapidly build said armies means that this mechanism simply doesn't exist. Third, if Shepard was indoctrinated, it would have to have happened before the events at the end given the only opportunities came earlier which calls into question any choice player made in the third game thus robbing those choices of any personal meaning.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

-snip-

Both Halo and Gears of War rely upon Deus Ex Machina on more than one occasion. They intoduce elements and characters and plot points without any real justification for them and in the end people accept that. When Mass Effect did precisely that, people went bezerk. Yes, I'm aware that there is a reason for that; that it happened in this context is the interesting bit.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I like the idea of it being that last bit. Losing the ability to choose. having it potentialy stripped from you by a greater being than yourself. It's not just about choice mattering, It's about earning your right to truely choose. If you don't carefully build you support through the games you lose more and more options, more and more choices.. You lose Wrex at the beginning, you lose eve to the bomb, you lose a choice. Failed to work the tenious strings of the quarian/geth confict. You lose the right to choose them both. Failed to save your friends, explain your seeming betrayal when you could.. you might lose party memebers, friends, options, more and more choices.. without that backing especially on this scale your choice is meaningless as you've nothing to back it with. The games themes is about earning your right to choose the options that truely matter, to earn you happy ending. I think it'd make sense in the end that what you did truely means you earn the right to make your own destiny (or die trying) or to take that crutch and side with the god child to "Compromise" only for it to turn and reveal you sold you soul to the reapers for faultering in the face of hopelessness, to not get to truly choose but to just pick what's layed out before you. That's true choice. The option to take that 3rd option that's not always there. I think the indoc theory would fit nicely with that idea. (I had a whole thing fully typed out on a different page on here and at least in my mind a fun way to run with it to a playable epilogue/final level type deal on each "choice")

That's my two cents on what you said anyway.

Well, in the end that's one of the big lies isn't it? You choices never really mattered much in the context of how the whole thing would pan out. I deliberated the fate of the Rachni queen for quite some time and in the end all that means is you get a small bonus to the crucible project. Yes, those choices matter when it comes to the narrative and defining who Shepard was in our particular play thoughs but in the end those few times the game made us take a long hard look at what we think is right (assuming you played Mass Effect from the perspective of making choice rather than always going Paragon/Renegade) didn't really matter.

Sure, what you suggest would have been the better way to go. But that was never the way the could go - if choices really mattered, every choice would double the complexity of the game. And even if you only consider those really big ones - the Queen, The Council, keeping the Station or Destroying it, the Genophage Solution, the Geth/Quarian problem - that suddenly means you'll have to account for at least 32 different things by the end. If you start including those minor choices, it quickly balloons into the thousands.

This isn't to say that impossibility excuses anything of course. Bioware built the whole thing on the notion that our say matters in the end - a claim they couldn't actually live up to. And they proved that twice before the third game rolled around.

 

[Kipiru]

OT: The Escapist is being a ***** right now and doesnt load the full page in order for me to post ANYTHING.
[/quote]

I guess even the site is fed up with your bullshit. I don't make excuses, but you sure are. You! Haven't! Played! The game! You can watch all the videos in the world on the subject and you still wouldn't have any idea what you're talking about. I can never explain to you anything, since you wouldn't know what I'm talking about, because you haven't played the game. The guy you talk about may not have bought the game, but he at least played it. I'm OK with someone playing and saying they don't like it, but you are clueless. Buy the game, play for a while, then come back and start arguing if you still feel like it. You cannot simply throw in someone else's argument in here, claiming you're building a defense of your point, because you wouldn't understand it yourself! You ARE a troll for criticizing something you have no experience with! There are no excuses for what you are doing and no logic to your behavior. Again, we are commenting a game, not a movie or a book. Games are PLAYED! Those videos you covet so much are the opinions of individuals and are in no way a substitute for the actual experience you will have. You are mocking everyone here with your actions, whether they liked or disliked the game.

 

[Obsidian Guard]

I think Mass Effect 3 was really just the last straw in a series of bad decisions by both EA and Bioware, mainly stemming from the abysmal treatment of their fan-base. They really have backed themselves into a corner with this ending. So far, the add-ons have added little to the narrative and fuck-all to the ultimate goal. It doesn't matter how many more secrets we uncover or new allies we bring to the table, we'll still be left with the same unsatisfying results. Unless they release an add-on that can change the ending players won't feel the urge to buy it.

 

[crazyrabbits]

You! Haven't! Played! The game! You can watch all the videos in the world on the subject and you still wouldn't have any idea what you're talking about. I can never explain to you anything, since you wouldn't know what I'm talking about, because you haven't played the game.

Given how most games these days are little more than glorified linear corridor shooters, it's not a bad thing to watch a game before playing it. You can certainly discuss the story or plot, but you don't have to discuss the gameplay.

Expecting someone to drop $60 on a product, and justify the bad word-of-mouth by saying, "Oh, you can't criticize it unless you've played it" is a classic fallacy. I don't need to be an editor to criticize the bad story beats of a film, I don't need to be an audio technician to appreciate good or bad music, and if I want to watch the plot of a game before I buy it, I can reasonably criticize the good/bad points of it.

 

[Icehearted]

Too many people focused too much on the ending, including EA, as if that were the only problem. Red herrings and loose ends abound, and promises made with the first game by it's own creators were unfulfilled. It's good to see people discussing more than the colors, as there was so much about the 3rd game that missed the point. This is all part of EA's grim cycle of destruction. I've blogged about this elsewhere, suffice to say they've done this more times than I can remember, but I can tell you that for me the big one was Ultima. It was ages ago, probably well and good before most of your time, but back then it was a big deal, and back then we all got our first taste in what EA would come to do through the decades that follow.

This will never end, because in another generation or so younger gamers than you will have no memory of this, really, and they will watch another great developer get swallowed up and their IPs shat out for a fast buck by EA, and this cycle will repeat itself again.