Aaaand the light went out in the worst moment possible, nice. I will try to keep it short and i will start by saying that you have my vote on doing The Walking Dead (as you suggested) instead of Mass Effect.
Now, lets resume the masochist tango once again, shall we?
DeadpanLunatic said:
Well it's the one part that now usually gets the "choices don't matter" complaint (as in, not at all) and arguably the only part where it can be applied with good reason.
arguably? ME2 makes the "difficult" choice we had with The Council on ME1 pointless in the grand scale of things, and it goes downhill from there (if the fact that the pointless death and inmediate resurrection of Shepard didnt tip you off on the opening). How can a series that presents itself with "choices have meaning and weight" end up doing absolutely nothing meaningful
3)I didnt play the series. I observed the ME3 fiasco to see what repercutions would it have in gaming as whole because of the so called "Gamer Entitlement that is destroying games as art for changing the ending and blah blah". Nevermind that Fallout 3 and Prince of Persia Reboot ALSO had their endings changed and no one complained (i guess Bethesda and Ubisoft dont count as artist)
You say this as if it's a point in favor of your perspective. Also, unrelated, unrelated.
Unrelated? you mention that "fans" are "irritated" with the ending, and i go ahead to mention that one doesnt NEED to be a fan nor be emotional invested on the work to know that something is very wrong with the series. In the same way that i dont need to be a chef to tell another that their food is pure poison.
How is it not related?
Like the fact that people were bitching about it before as if there's not always somebody who does? Or that the company has been bought? Or that
Dragon Age 2 and
The Old Republic have been objectively proven to be worse? And still, unrelated.
And dont you find weird that a company that was once the vanguard of good storytelling in games since 2000, has now become a tyrant that needs to lie in every turn of a page? whose failures are so abysmal that people make entire channels to point them out? We are witnesssing a fall from grace in their quality writting that the fans have to assume that IT WAS ALL A DREAM to understand the ending they saw.
Now, i know that they are NOT the only people working hard on making good stories (Obsidian comes to mind) and there exist already games that had the Save Import that affects the plot, so its not like Bioware made something completely innovative:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OldSaveBonus
4)If this is a "planned trilogy" then why there are retcons EVERYWHERE?
Keep in mind that virtually any new intellectual property these days is "planned as a trilogy". Hell, my super secret novel idea is intended to cover three books. That doesn't mean those will ever see the light of day. That's why you see so many games with vague, open endings, just in case it turns out to be a financial success and the publisher decides to let the developers make another one. Doesn't happen that often.
So while it's good not to give this some thought and not write yourself entirely into a corner, it would be ludicrous to plot out all three hypothetical games in detail instead of pouring all your energy into the one you're definitely going to make, that will determine if you get to make those others, too. That's how the business works sometimes. Not ideal, but one should keep the circumstances in mind when analyzing its internal consistency.
Good point, but there is a problem: Why would Bioware lie to begin with?
This isnt some unknown company that NEEDS to lie all the time in order to bait potential fans into their products, nor is a "Used Cars Salesman" that tries their best to sell us something that may explode as soon we ignite the motors. This is Bioware, they ALREADY made their reputation out of well writting plots and games, if they say that they have a "planned trilogy" people would have believe them because we know they are profesional enough to pull it off........but didnt happen. Why scrap the botton of the barrel with such action?
And if you think about it, even if one CANT pull the planned trilogy ahead of time, then what was stoppping the other writers from continuing what was left on ME1? they had everything in place to expand the overarching plot and didnt, ME3 had to do what ME2 didnt care to in the first place.
You would think that it would have paid off in ME3 where your choices during all the series eventually reach a conclusion (hense the words of the developers "It would have 16 different endings".)
Nope.
Are you saying that
Mass Effect 3 should have concluded all the choices in the series but didn't in an effort to show that this is not about the ending? Cause it's not helping.
No, why would you think i said that? i am saying that they said that they would ONLY make the 3rd game to have a branching narrative feature because otherwise it would have been a nightmare to code, and yet that didnt happen either. All we have is the "select your favorite colour" endings followed by total galactic annihilation because of the Relays exploding (apparently the writers just forgot that solar systems are destroyed when a Relays are destroyed as shown on the Canon "Arrival DLC")
