The feeling of disappointment, a Mass Effect fan's commentary.

[JoesshittyOs]

Yeah... just yeah. I agree.

I feel like they were trying as hard as they could not to have a run of the mill ending, and trying to say "Look at how big this choice is that you have to make", when in reality, all I wanted them to allow me to see the end. I agree with your sense of just dread and sadness. How with 15 minutes, they managed to take the game that you had been invested in for 7 years and completely crush everything that mattered to you.

I don't give two fucking shits if it was a cliche ending. I just wanted my game to end. I wanted it to show the sacrifices my squad had made. Basically, just what this guy on Youtube said.


"So where's the ending where I find the right key, fire the crucible, destroy the reapers, the mass effect relays don't explode, Joker isn't randomly running away, the Geth and other synthetics don't die, the forces I'd rallied win, they maybe find Shepard on the Citadel thus allowing "Continuing" and it then shows me how all my small choices affected the galaxy? Where is it Bioware? P.S Where the hell were my Volus Bombing Fleets!?"

-yuioppoiuy2 5 hours ago

Not only that, but the little fucking shit didn't even make it clear what decision you were making. He basically laid down some knowledge where I'm sitting there wondering "Okay, Okay, Okay- Look, can we just get to the part where I sacrifice myself for the galaxy and everyone goes home to grieve and pay their respects to my nobleness? "

So I ended up accidentally choosing the one the kills every single fucking thing in the world, thinking that mind control was gonna be the worse fate.

Oh, and something I think you forgot to touch on was how you basically had carved way for civilization to move forward. You just won Tali's planet back, saved Tuchanka and cured the genophage for the Krogans, only for it to all mean nothing.

Which is basically what happened. Your decisions meant nothing. I didn't even make it through the first person's name, I turned off my console and said "fuck this game". I even had my reservations about it, thinking that the ending was just expected backlash from people expecting perfection. That maybe they might have just not left anything open after your death, which I could have dealt with.

But no. I really hope that petition goes through. Please Bioware. Don't leave us with this mess. Please.

 

[JoesshittyOs]

For me personally, my main problems with the ending happened when the catalyst (god child) started speaking to you and explaining the purpose of the cycle.

That comes right the hell out of nowhere and it brings up a lot of questions.
I didn't mind the choice (Though I thought it was unnecessary) and I don't mind the fate of Shepard or the crew, I expected as much actually. Even the relays getting destroyed, I was cool with, in fact I figured it was necessary and thought that the relays were connected to the Reapers' lifelines somehow, beyond the symbolism in destroying their greatest technology, the one that makes the cycle possible.

Overall I like the ending, but that whole scene with the catalyst and the explanation of the cycle is really confusing and disjointed and it definitely damages the overall quality of the ending for me.

What especially stings about the ending was that if it were just 5 minutes shorter it would've been amazing.
That whole scene with Anderson, Shepard and the Illusive Man was fantastic; powerful, emotional.
If the game had ended with Shepard and Anderson looking out at Earth together in the final minutes of their lives, Anderson telling Shepard that he's proud of what his protege has accomplished and then watching the Crucible destroy the Reapers, that would've been the perfect ending.
Slap a few epilogue texts on that and nearly everyone would be satisfied.

Or this. At the moment where Shepard is bleeding out, and closes his eyes, my first thought was "This is what everyone is complaining about? That's not so bad. It's kind of touching".

And then shit hit the fan. I might have only despised the ending a wee bit if it hadn't been a little shit telling me what to do.

 

[Cranky]

At which point the conclusion appears, you and your mentor lie dying watching everything you worked for come to pass, and for the first time in your career as a spectre Shepard is completely helpless to influence the outcome. The curtain begins to be drawn, and suddenly pulls back as Shepard is raised on a lift to talk to a god who tells you that you have three choices and that you can do nothing to change any of them despite the fact that all of these choices are deemed unacceptable by most players. Causing a game about fighting impossible odds ends with surrender to the inevitable.

To make matters worse for me at least, I hated the child character from the get-go as he was a blatant attempt at emotional manipulation that fell flat on its face. If they wanted a final god monologue they could have had you talk to Harbinger, a character who already was well known to the players instead of simply inventing one for the closing credits. Also it's a damn shame that shooting the god child didn't cause a fourth ending because lord knows I tried.

So yes, they could have done a far better job even if they wanted to force you to make three hard choices, kill Shepard, destroy the relay network and invoke some sort of crazy deus ex machina, and lord knows that device was one.

Glad to see someone also shares my viewpoint on this ending. I thought that when Anderson watched with Shepard, the game was over. It would be a fitting and touching end. But no, they wanted to pull some kind of plot twist as if it was a requirement in the project.

And I also feel like a loser at the end of the game.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Becuase an ending were you destroy machines who murdered all ife in the galaxy every 50,00 years and destroying the chains that they used to bind galactic civilization, the mass rleays, thus allowing the races of the galaxy to self-determinate is a depressing/sad ending?

You're still doing this? You still don't have a fuckin' clue. Don't you understand that the ending didn't have a logical sense? That Reaper motivations lacked logic? They were supposed to be incomprehensible and yet their entire motivation for doing what they're doing is retarded. Not to mention the fact that your choices and what the game has been hinting you the entire time don't factor into the ending. And the game is an RPG not a linear storytelling. If it was an ending to a linear action game like Call of Duty it would be fine. But it's not. It's an ending to a trilogy that prides itself in making choices that matter. How could you possibly ignore that little fact?

 

[TsunamiWombat]

Mass Effect has, since it's beginning, been an experiment into the concept of continuitous player agency - that is, that players will have the decision to make large or small changes to the story and it's details as it progresses along it's narrative arc, and that these decisions will be respected over the course of the trilogy. This has been the expectation from day one and thus far has been the most successful of Bioware's forays into continuitous player agency. Dragon Age followed a similar idea thread but did not center on a central character which the player maintains agency over, rather it is a set of different tales and different characters placed in the same World Setting in which player agency has ripple effects on that setting.

One of the problems of course, with any game that focuses on Player Agency, is that the same thing will mean different things to different people. People have expectations based on 'their' story, and the way you avoid stepping on 'their' story is to maintain player agency and give them the free will to choose their outcomes. This creates certain limitations on you as the author - you must maintain contingency plans for every player agency point you provide. Certain narrative and organizational devices can make this much easier, such as a binary 'morality' system (paragon/renegade points) and condition flags (companion loyalty/approval). This allows you to frame the narrative arc that your players will undergo while providing the illusion of complete choice. While this form of Player Agency is by design limited (your arc of control is more akin to 180 degrees than 360 degrees of movement, if you follow) it is an effective way of allowing your players to exercise their agency over the narrative while still establishing a general story arc which you can follow and plan for.

Over the past three games Bioware has done what, in my opinion, can be considered a masterful job of faithfully representing the continuity of player agency, referencing player choices in meaningful and meaningless ways via datapoints. Mass Effect 3 was the penultimate example of this, borrowing choices from the previous two games to almost completly form the narrative arc of the third - that is, your choices have finally become the definition of the setting (wether or not you saved the council, the rachni, etc) influences the characters that appear and how events play out in these games. Mass Effect 3 is exceptionally well polished (barring some frustrating bugs and annoying UI and quest tracking issues) and represents the continuity nerds wet dream - a universe of their own creation, the punultimate choose your own adventure.

However...

In the last 10-15 minutes of the game there was an abrupt genre convention shift (more in line with the metaphysical pulp sci-fi of the 1900's than the Space Opera / Military Drama we had thus far experianced), a fundamental violation of one of the tenants of the Writer-Reader contract. This abrupt genre shift has left fans feeling disoriented, confused, and dissapointed - which swiftly leads to bitterness and anger. Their suspension of disbelief and expectations have not been adequatly serviced, and thus the ending causes the story of Mass Effect - from beginning to end, from 1-3 - to fail. Many are now observing plot holes and inconsistancies - those plot holes were always there, but were forgiven. However a bad ending damns a story, it causes a blowback in the reader where their tension and emotional involvement does not achieve catharsis and they're left to take it out on the author.

And this is why, I, and many thousands of other individuals have been so upset by the ending to Mass Effect 3. Our genre expectations and player agency have been violated, the finale of the story is uninfluenced by the continuity of our decisions and follows an unfamiliar narrative trend.

 

[Tanakh]

snip

I refuse to read the thread because all the spoilers. Still OP, if you like the old school Bioware, I would reccomend you to go and give a spin to NEO Scavanger; when i'm having a hard time swallowing the cheese from the ME 3 lines, I go to NEO to remember how the good old days of RPGs were like.

Of course, I am not saying NEO is a better game because it's a small indie beta game in need of support, but i can see the potential there.

 

[Schuldrich]

My biggest complaint with the ending is I chose to kill the reapers/synthetics... and EDI gets out of the downed normandy. You just gave a grand speech about how all synthetics will die, including femshep for the parts implanted in her in the Lazarus Project, and you don't even remove EDI from the possible people getting off the ship? It seems lazy.

 

[FFHAuthor]

To be damn honest, with retrospect, I can completely and utterly accept the 'Shep dies' ending. Its good, it has emotion, but most of all, it feels fulfilling. It feels like there is a triumph, one that is bittersweet. You feel the pain and loss of losing your character's life, but you also sit there and know that you saved the people you cared about. If the game ended with my Shep's death, I'd have thought it a tragic yet incredibly powerful end, and I wouldn't have resented that lack of choice.

But giving me a choice after that where I chose to destroy everything I've fought for, go against everything I believe, or destroy the hopes of the entire galaxy, no...that's not giving you choice, that's making your players despise your options.

It's strange that the conclusion of Mass Effect makes you want to relinquish choice rather than embrace it.

 

[WinkyTheGreat]

I didn't expect a happy ending for Shepard. We all knew that this was the end of his/ her story and I fully expected him/ her to die at the end.

I agree that the ending was a bit too open ended. While I was glad to see that my crew survived, I couldn't help but wonder how long that would last. It's hard to tell what was on that planet.

The part that left a bitter taste in my mouth was the destruction of the relays. I spent 3 games helping to build a galactic civilization and in one move cut off ties to any other planets. And what of the Krogan, Turrian, Asari, Quarian, and Geth now trapped at Earth? What happens to them?

If alternate ending DLC comes out, I'll likely buy it. This ending didn't give me the closure I needed.

 

[Jadak]

Not only that, but the little fucking shit didn't even make it clear what decision you were making. He basically laid down some knowledge where I'm sitting there wondering "Okay, Okay, Okay- Look, can we just get to the part where I sacrifice myself for the galaxy and everyone goes home to grieve and pay their respects to my nobleness? "

So I ended up accidentally choosing the one the kills every single fucking thing in the world, thinking that mind control was gonna be the worse fate.

Glad I'm not the only one that had that problem. I heard him out on the options, looked around afterwards and saw what appeared to be the direction you were supposed to walk, and next thing I know I've unwittingly picked the synthesis option.