Why is it so ******* hard to make a decent ending?

[Gizmo1990]

If it's any consolation the same problem afflicts a lot of books and tv shows. IMO a good ending has to be planned out from the very start.

Christopher Poalini had planned the ending of the Inheritance series from the start(Eragon goes away forever) and it was still stupid. Maybe it is because he was floundering for a reason why. Seriously the ending was horrible.

He actualy changed alot of thing about half way into writing the 3 book. None of the characters had the same ending as what he originaly planed. This hurt the story alot imo as it ment that any clues and setups in the first 2 books had to be completely ignored.

OT:
I have no answer to this question. Last year was a really crap year for endings in books, tv and games. But my biggest problem with games right now is that for some reason, nothing can have a happy ending any more. I get dark, realistic endings can be effective and can work very well when used in the right context but I play games for fun. I want to have a ending where everyone lives and is happy till the day they die every now and then. Life can be bleak and depressing enough as it is, why must entertainment, something designed to entertain!, be as depressing?

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

It's not difficult to make an ending at all. Video game writers just really suck at their jobs. By far videogames are the lowest end of the writing spectrum(well sorry fanfics are usually lower but games are pretty bad.) They tend not to self check that story points make sense, that internal logic holds together, and their dialogue is far and away either generic or just plain bad.

Because you are involved in the gameplay or other points that videogames are good at, you often miss how terrible the writing is because you are distracted. The ending usually has a cinematic and your mind is now fully focused on only the story, allowing you to see how terrible it actually is.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying all video games or video game writers are like that(Troika and Telltale have both done some pretty good work.) But the vast majority completely suck(Bethesda is generic and boring as humanly possible and Bioware is generic and constantly contradicts its own internal universes rules.)

 

[Mr.Squishy]

I was going to make a thread about the Far Cry 3 ending, but you beat me to it, so gg...

About the ending though, it's not entirely bad, the double cross part I saw a million miles away.
The good end was bad, but wrap up the game for release, the bad one in the other hand...

Spoiler

You have sex with Citra after killing your friends with were innocents in all this by the way, them she wants to get pregnant from you and she kills you...

First of all, lady, one night of sex =/= baby, wouldn't make more sense if you are actually 100% sure before you kill the guy you want to get pregnant with?
And if you manage getting pregnant doesn't mean the kid will grow up with the same natural talent for guns that Jason had, and if he does, still doesn't mean we will want to lead you stupid tribe.
Citra plan is full of flaws that a 5 years old could see.

Would be much better if it show that Jason ruling the island and becaming the same type of madman that Vaas and Hoyt were..

The good end would be better if:

Spoiler

Ended like Halo Reach were you end up in a fight you can't possibly win, just to buy enough time to your friends escape the island, thus giving Jason Brody his final redeeming act.
That would be a good ending in my opinion

It's not really "Why" is it hard. It just is and it's one of those things you just have to accept.

In my entire life of watching reading and playing stuff I've only experienced 6 endings that I conciser to be Good. (Meaning the most satisfying conclusion given the current state of the narrative)

The end of Fight Club
The end of Code Geass
The end of Avatar: The Last Airbender
The end of Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog
The end of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
and most recently the end of Spec Ops The Line

Now human emotions are a careless fickle thing, that don't seem to operate by any system of rules. and writing a narrative is a cold meticulous process where everything has to be planed out and make sense, (be free of plot holes and star children and multicolored explosions, but I'm getting off topic) The emotional climax is the peak of the action and it would follow that everything after that is all down hill, hence why so many endings disappoint us.

There's always snap ending right after the climax, but the effort the writer has to put into making the narrative succinct enough to pull that off is insane.

Alternate to that after the climax they will try to engage the audience with a something unexpected to go out on, but that is usually what we in the biz like to call an "ass pull" which usually raises questions and leaves the audience unsatisfied.

Leaving things open to interpretation is risky, and when it's done in the stead of actual closure it's just plain dumb.

Sometimes convoluted stories will get mushed into a remedial structure (Like The Phantom Menace or Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy being told in a 3 act structure, what the fuck?) then multiple plot threads force quit at the same time leaving everything muddled and confusing.

The key to a satisfying conclusion is to understand the structure of what you're writing. With games that's incredibly difficult, even more so in open world games like Farcry 3 or Skyrim because the structure is completely dependent on how much dicking around the player does. I always thought games like that should have a time factor so the ending varried based on how long you spent doing side quests and spanking tigers. But the heft of the blame lies with writers who don't know what to do with the character after the goal is accomplished. (I haven't played Farcry 3 to the end so I don't know how bad it was)

A hundred internets to the both of you.
OT: Didn't Yahtzee say something about writing the beginning first, then the ending and filling in the middle after that? I fully agree with that. So many endings have left me with a bad taste in my mouth and soured the whole experience for me in a bad (I.E. Non-spec ops/silent hill way, which was the good kind of bad taste). The game industry needs to understand that good endings create incentive to actually buy their next game, especially if it's a sequel. Sequel-bait isn't necessarily bad, after all.

 

[Brainwreck]

Writing's hard, you know, and people always have high expectations for endings.
So endings inevitably suck.