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BioWare Announces Free DLC To Add More To the Mass Effect 3 Endings
An anonymous reader writes "The battle between angry fans and BioWare has been raging since the game's release over several issues, with the biggest being the disappointing ending. BioWare have stuck to their guns and stated that they won't make a new ending, but will release free DLC to add clarity to the existing ones."
If you feed someone crap with frosting on it, you are still feeding them crap.
It's not just a disappointing ending. It's an ending that was obviously duct taped onto the end to shove it out the door 6-12 months before it should have been released.
And the only response from BioWare is typical PR spin, with wonderful PR phrases such as "we value our fans" and "artistic integrity".
...the distinction is clearly not important to EA or what's left of Bioware. I can honestly say that given this news, I have -zero- desire to play the series again as-is. This was a journey best not taken at all, and it has made me reflect on all the time I've wasted playing games in general. If I am being told a narrative, then it should do so - if I am part of the narrative, don't yank the control of it from me at the end because you don't like the possibility I will chose something you don't want to do. Also, you don't go all 'werewolf' and torch everything in the end - it makes people's investment a fruitless one. Until game makers figure that out, I am done with 'interactive fiction' titles - ESPECIALLY from these two.
Bah, looks like they haven't had time to create a good ending before the Release date. Doesn't matter here you can buy it for some additional $ as DLC.
Riiiiiight. They'll be raking in the cash with their nefarious plan to release this DLC for free. Sure, they lose money on every copy, but they'll make it up in volume!
Really? You can't even be bothered to read the title of the article? Here, let me quote it for you:
BioWare Announces Free DLC To Add More To the Mass Effect 3 Endings
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Read the fine print. What the hell are they going to do, start charging extra for it after 2 years?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's terrible that Bioware did what they did. The determinism of it is moot - I keep hearing about this "god card" that was pulled and that's BS - a "god card" and true deterministic ending would mean that you'd have NO choice at the end and the result would be based on your previous actions BUT I'M SPLITTING HAIRS. The ending sucked. Everyone's made such a big deal about it. But was there really a way to end it without pissing everyone off? And all the loud noises that everyone is making... is there REALLY anything that can be done to please everyone at this point in the game? The real sin was making people feel that even if they played it through again, they'd get the same ending no matter what. An offense that will ultimately cost Bioware money... but not something that you can slap a bandaid on or make a DLC for.
I have the hiccups.
Most people never finish these games and they know it, so why spend a lot of time on a great ending? For return customers? HAH! when you're the only game in town, you don't need to worry.
The second part is they really only care about the first couple months of the user experience. They put just enough effort into the game so they can still make high volume sales before anyone has a chance to get the shitty parts where they "duct taped" stuff on. By the time anyone figures it out, they've already made a ton of cash on it.
I just quit buying the new titles until they are a year or so old.
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Just have me wake up after being hit by the beam in ME1. It's a horrible way to think about it, but at least that ending will have been erased. It then puts you in a nice recursive replay loop, and that I can accept.
...it's the way the ending was implemented.
Battle Readiness high or low? Doesn't matter, same cutscene.
Geth or Quarians alive? Doesn't matter, same cutscene.
Rachni queen alive or dead? Doesn't matter, same cutscene.
Renegade or Paragon? Doesn't matter, same cutscene.
Regardless of plot holes and deux ex machina, what pissed me off was that the last 10 minutes of the game was antithetical to the way the entire series - hundreds of hours of playtime - functioned up to that point. The whole frickin' point of Mass Effect was that your choices mattered but ultimately they just didn't. And the fact that choosing control, destroy or synthesize only ended up changing the color of the explosions (okay plants had circuit boards in their leaves if you chose synthesize) was a fart in a bathtub.
I had a Paragon save and a Renegade save from Mass Effect 2 and played the Paragon first. There is no incentive whatsoever to play the Renegade save. I'm not even interested in any DLC because it's all pointless.
The ending to Mass Effect 3 was nowhere NEAR as annoying as all the whining about it.
Should say "whether or not the ending is disappointing" rather than "the disappointing ending," because I wasn't disappointed by it. I felt it was a perfectly fine ending to the trilogy, and a very large number of people feel the same way as me. The difference is that those of us who enjoyed the ending aren't necessarily going to be vocal about it, whereas the goal of those who dislike it is to make as loud of a shout as possible so they can try and get their way. As much as people think they want a different ending (by and large they want a hollywood ending as opposed to the artistic ending, which is what their real problem with it is), sacrificing the integrity of the art for the sake of consumer demand is a far worse crime in my opinion.
Translation:
EA believes we've spent enough money on an ending. We're getting dinged on fan review sites like Metacritic so we're going to throw another bandaid on it for as little cost as possible.
"Powers. I have them."
until there's a steam-only drm version available, i ain't buying this anyway.... since that won't happen, fuck off bioware.
Bioware should leave it alone. There are many gamers such as my self that found the game fine as is. Of course ,the ones disappointed are going to be the vocal ones.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Everyone who is going on trying to defend the ending and BioWare's laziness is missing the point. If I go to an art gallery, I want artistic integrity. If I buy a game, I want entertainment. It's not that the two can't overlap, it's that the place to express your inner postmodernist isn't at the end of a mainstream entertainment product where you promise the players (and they are players, not participants in your interactive art project) that their choices matter only to say "haha, I lied" at the end and swat them away like annoying little philistines while you gleefully burn their world down. I don't see how anyone who played the first two games (especially having played other games from the same studio in the past) could have predicted that this would be the sort of ending they'd get in the game. It's not that the end was sad or dark that bothers me. It was lazy, incomplete, and a ripoff of the Matrix's Architect mixed with the endings of a typical Deus Ex game.
This is on top of the fact that there is a fair amount of evidence (if only by repeated anecdote/rumor) that the ending was rushed and that it was literally a case of Casey Hudson and the lead writer writing the ending without requesting any feedback from the rest of the writing team with whom they'd collaborated up to that point. It certainly appears to have been written by someone who did not play and love the series as a game and saw it as a chance to be controversial for its own sake.
A real letdown. This was one of my favorite series by a studio I previously would buy titles from without a second thought, but the utter, utter laziness at the end of this game combined with the painful rush job that was Dragon Age 2 means I'll probably never buy another BioWare title new. I'd rather pirate them and decide first if it's actually a fun game or if it's yet another case of some "artist" jerking off.
</rant>
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The best ending mechanic for RPGs is the fallout method.
They had single image and short voice over for EVERY major quest. How hard is it to knock out 40 or 20-30 second voice overs along with maybe 15 still images? Easy. Do that.
Mass Effect players tweaked their games endlessly to get a perfect ending across THREE games one into the next all culminating at that final point.
And after all that it turns out that all that tweaks was totally wasted. Why import the ME2 game into ME3 if ME3 won't do anything cool with it? It was bullcrap.
And the three endings were pathetic. The whole Red/Green/Blue thing was just insultingly lazy. Maybe they ran out of money... Fine. Do voice overs and stills instead of animations then. We just wanted closure. You play an RPG mostly for the immersion and the story. Just tell us what happened to our characters.
We'll see what this DLC look like but I'm assuming they're not going to change the stupid ending. So I've made up my own ending. I seriously just stared at the screen, invented a new ending, and then believed it instead.
I do that with lots of books that end poorly so why not for a game with a rip off ending.
Sorry if this harsh Bioware, but I was with you guys through three titles and you screwed me on the ending so I'm not feeling terribly charitable. I'm not blacklisting or boycotting you. You still make good games. Just don't screw the gamers again like that. It really makes us very unhappy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
*SPOILER ALERT*
So the over arching story in the ME universe is, of course, "Stop the Reapers, save the galaxy." That's what the major theme is. Even when you think it has deviated, it in fact hasn't. The Reapers are the baddies, we don't know why and maybe we can't even understand (Sovereign says it is beyond our comprehension). also a big motivation behind this is the connection to the characters in the game. It features a lot of sitting and talking, and the reason is you get to know and care about your characters.
Then, in the last 10 minutes of the game, in 14 lines of dialogue, all that is changed. Now we are supposed to accept, from a character we've never met, that the Reapers aren't evil, and that we can't stop them or save the galaxy really, we just have to make a completely out of context choice. We are now supposed to make a decision about the value of organic and synthetic life, something that has never been part of the series.
Now such a change could happen validly in a story. You can have something going one way and then change... but not in the last 14 lines. This shit would have needed to happen shortly after ME3 started, you discover that all along your goal was the wrong one or a false one or whatever. You have time to come to terms with that, learn about it, and then work towards the new goal. That is valid in story telling. Not just completely changing shit right before the end.
Also there's the fact that you feel that absolutely everything you've done amounts to precisely nothing.
It wasn't as though they just had all that forced out of them by EA completely. ME3 had plenty of good implementation in it. You had story lines that differed depending on who was alive coming in to ME3, and the choices you made. You could have some real different experiences and outcomes.
Like man was the Tuchanka mission beautiful. If both main characters had died in previous series (and probably not coincidentally both were easier ones to lose) it could be kinda shitty, you really felt compelled to take the asshole option because it was the best of a bad situation. Still a good story, but one you couldn't help feeling was bad because you fucked up.
However if they were both alive, it could be a great story arc. You saw a wonderful case of redemption and sacrifice, a rebirth of a species, and the beginnings of a new peace. Your work and decisions mattered and the outcome, though not perfect, was a good one.
So clearly they have it in them, but they just decided to throw it all away with Priority: Earth. The final mission is garbage and the endings are worse. Very frustrating. Hell if it was a matter of resources cut the Tuchanka bit entirely and put the resources to the end. Would be a much better game that way, and you could re-add Tuchanka in DLC.
I don't know what the fuck happened.
I have seen many good deconstructions of why the ending is a bad one from a literary point of view, cinematic, story telling, logical, and so on. There are tons of faults and I've seen them talked about at great length and with solid backing.
Everyone who says they liked it can't seem to elaborate. It was just "a good ending and you people are morons for hating it." Personally I think the reason id they fall in to one (or maybe more) of three categories:
1) Bioware fanboys. They think everything Bioware does is great and thus this must be great. A Stockholm Syndrome of sorts. They defend it because the need to feel that Bioware has done right be the series and didn't fuck it up, not because that is deep down how they feel. Their defense is reflexive.
2) Emo kids and wannabe ITGs. I've seen this with regards to movies and shit where people claim to hate "happy endings" and so on and act like the more things suck the better it is. They believe "dark" means "good". Of course they are usually fooling only themselves and you find if you examine the things they like, there are plenty of happy endings in it. They just play tough, or are pulling the emo crap.
3) People who don't really give a shit about RPGs. For them Mass Effect was just a shootie like Doom with more talking. They space through cutscenes, ignore dialogue, and so on. They are all about the action. So they have no real investment in the story at all, and thus the ending is fine. "Oh hey I blew a bunch of shit up! Go me! Good ending!"
I would think if the ending was truly so good, at least one person would be able to provide a competent defense as to why. Showing the things that were done well in terms of telling the story, providing closure, and all those kind of things an ending is supposed to do. That they can't well that tells me a lot right there.
A definite plot hole and lack that will certainly get no help from this DLC is the fact that there was no fighting within the Citadel at the end. The endgame of ME1 established that the Reapers don't have any sort of 'kill switch' to clear the Citadel, and it's a huge city with a large population and a well-trained defense force (well-equipped, too, if you do certain side missions). They might have taken the indefensible central tower easily enough as in ME1, in order to close everything up, but taking the Wards should have been a real fight.
They obviously don't want harm to come to the structure (otherwise why bother moving it to Earth? Just blow it up: Crucible problem solved.) Thus they wouldn't be able to directly attack the Citadel the way they do planets, they'd just have to send in ground forces. I was expecting a fight once I got to that transport beam, a battle of attrition between forces constantly being dropped from some number of Reapers that had shut themselves inside the closed Citadel, and the CDF/C-Sec. Yet another place where Bioware failed at "your actions have consequences." Didn't do any CDF side-missions? Have fun grinding through streets littered with corpses, with no aid. Did all the missions? See the CDF holding their own. Buuut no.
The London mission as final gameplay was lame, it felt like a bad Modern-Call-of-Battlefield-War-Duty clone. Very disappointing, even before the rest of the craptastic ending.
Brown shooter of the year didnt bother to flush out story and will now charge stupid fanboi's for appropriate ending found free on troll forums.
They dropped the ball completely on amny thigns (beside the fact we don't know anything as epilogue on what happens to the races/friends/etc...).
:
A MUCH better way to handle the 3 endings would have been
1) you are paragon/renegade indicate which ending is openned (blue/green para ; red/green/renegade)
2) who you let alive as species and the battle readiness indicate whether you get the basic ending of your type (red/blue) or ALSO the green one. Or whatever.
But an ABC choice at the end ? That was.... Pityful.
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Because other people want to change what I got out of the game into something else.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I was never asked to use some poll. It's not representative.
That's your opinion, not mine, I thought it was brilliant.
I've found a lot of people are mad because they couldn't change the larger storyline, just the smaller bits, as always been the case in the Mass Effect series, then suddenly now people are mad for a variety of reasons, including not being able to change the major storyline and citing Mass Effect 2 and original Mass Effect as examples where you could, but actually couldn't.
People are also mad because they don't get their happy ending. Let's not forget the fact that they are mad that it's actually ending, there is no more story so they feel a huge sense of loss - That's good story telling.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"We fucked up royally" needed further clarification or elaboration.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Are you sure? I, like pretty much everyone else I've read with criticism about the ending, don't care if the ending is happy or not: it's been made clear through all three games that Shep is willing to go as far as is needed, including sacrificing him/herself, to protect the galaxy.
Yes, it'd be nice to have Shep knocking back beers with Garrus, raising little blue children with Liara, or settling down with Tali in her house on Rannoch...but that's not why fans are mad -- they're mad because the ending makes no sense. Who is the Catalyst? Why should Shep trust them? How did your final squadmates make it from the final charge to the beam back into the Normandy? Why is the Normandy fleeing instead of fighting? (The ship and crew were always the tip of the spear in all the previous major conflicts in the entire series, including the suicide mission in ME2; it's unlikely that they'd chicken out now.) Why do all of your previous choices (Geth vs. Quarians, cure the genophage, etc.) not have any effect (even if the effect is a simple line of dialogue)? What happens to all the dextro-amino people in orbit around the devastated earth with no relays? Do they starve?
A Fallout-style epilogue slideshow that summed up your choices, actions, and their consequences would have been satisfying...but a blatant deus ex machinima followed by an internally-inconsistent ending with no sense of closure (and, adding insult to injury, was followed by loading your save from before the assault on the Cerberus station and a note to buy more DLC)? No, that's a crappy, weak ending no matter how you spin it.
(As an aside, the almost total lack of side missions in ME3 was also a let down and made the universe seem much smaller than the previous games. The main plotline was excellent and well-done up to the ending, but all the side missions were "overhear some conversation on the citadel, go to a planet, launch a probe, return to the citadel" which got really boring really fast.)
If you search for 'Indoctrination Theory' on youtube, you'll find a 20 minute video that addresses the plot holes and stuff that just makes no sense at all. It not only changes the ending, it changes how I looked at the game.
But if it's true—and it might very well be—then BioWare failed at ending presentation, because it was too subtle for most of us to figure it out without referencing a video on youtube.
I'm on my second playthrough, and I've decided that the Geth are the thing that makes the least sense in the game. Why do Geth ships have hallways and railings? Consoles to type at? Guards? Why bother with any of that stuff? And the 'renegade' options near the end of that mission-line are stupid. They present a false dichotomy. You can be a renegade, but not only do you throw away a potential war resource, but they're no danger at all to the Quarians if you pick the paragon options. It's infuriating.
(Disclosure: I worked for BioWare for many years. I do not work for BioWare or EA anymore.)
READ Read the news again. They're not fixing the ending, they're EXPLAINING IT...so basically Bioware doesn't want to admit having made a mistake and just want to act like its US that has made the mistake and just need it better explained to appreciate it. NO NO NO Bioware, this really isn't good enough by a long shot.
Right, it was really brilliant...lets throw everything away, have Joker be a coward, Shepard an idiot, all your choices not matter and crew members magically teleport across the galaxy.
You're right, what a brilliant ending. Some people like eating turds too, that doesn't mean major restaurants should serve turds.
And the whole point of Mass Effect is that everyone could have their own story line, which means it should generally be fit to everyones liking, not pander to a very small segment. Btw, I didn't vote on that poll either, so our votes cancel eachother out and it still stands.
If you don't want to wait till summer, there's the Unofficial Mass Effect Epilogue Slides to tide you over.
Endings aside, the charactes itself lacked any depth. In previous mass effect games, you could talk *a lot* with every character, get to know them very very well, even Dr. Chakwas. Now, every time I try to talk to most characters it's "Hey Shepard!", except for very scarse dialogs on very counted occasions.
Since when did your choices matter in the mass effect storyline? You could never really influence larger events, just the smaller things.
You clearly didn't play mass effect, because that was not the point. You didn't get to influence the larger story line stuff by much, you made decisions in them, yes, but the overall outcome was never that largely different depending on what choice you made.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Actually, most people aren't mad because the ending is sad/tragic. Way to buy into propaganda. If you bother to read what everyone has said or listened to the countless youtube comments, there's one united message:
The endings are discontinuous in flow from the rest of the games.
It's not that people die. Most people are okay with people dying. It's that the game shifted from one which choice mattered and character endings were explained concisely to one in which there are more questions than answers. For instance, why were my crew, whom were completely loyal to me through the games and fought to their bitter ends on every other mission... suddenly running from battle? Especially the squad mates that were with me on the ground battle, charged with me to the citadel matter stream, saw me get cut down.. so what? Joker flies the partyvan by and tells everyone that it's time to peace out? That kinda personality change is very inconsistent. Every single person would continue fighting until the job was done. You don't ride in with every races' best ships to war just to chicken out when it counts.
It's not that people are yellign about inability to change a major storyline. To teh contrary, people are upset because the major storyline WAS changed, in the span of 14 lines of dialogue delivered by a 11th hour new villain who has the power to end it all and leaves it up to you, Neo, to rejoin the source. Really? A last minute super villain that supplants the existing villain armada? That's introduced in 14 lines?
Cool story, bro.
My advice? Stop reading Bioware's interpretation of people's anger and actually read what people have to say. What's funny is that despite BioWare saying that they are listening, all the angry people are saying THE SAME EXACT THING, and yet BioWare pretends that they don't hear it. :)
You clearly haven't read them then. Most of them say the endings sucks and doesn't say why. A good chunk make stupid comments like "Why Shepard has to die in the ending", which clearly shows they didn't really play through all the possible endings and just assumed the ending they got was it.
I am just seeing people getting on the band wagon here for the sake of it.
Sorry. I very rarely see this honestly in comments. The biggest thing I see when it comes to complaints is "choices", in a game that didn't really offer you the ability to change the larger point of the storyline significantly, ever. I'm not going to pick and choose which things I see only, going by the majority here.
Also, I didn't assume they were running either, I just assumed it would be something unlocked in future DLC, and lo'behold, they are coming out with new DLC that is going to clarify that. That was sooo hard to guess, really.
I don't see the problem here? I really don't. I'm not sure I would have liked to have a 'villain' introduced over 14 lines, let alone a thousand lines.
Your advice is flawed, you didn't read the majority of stupid comments, your judgement is clearly compromised as to understanding the nature of the crowd reaction since you appear to have ignored the majority.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.