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."

Comments

Completely change the ending.

[Githaron]

If you feed someone crap with frosting on it, you are still feeding them crap.

Re:Completely change the ending.

[lattyware]

That's where you are wrong. It was never about 'liking' the ending - to have a 'Shepherd rides off into the sunset happily ever after' ending would be terrible, as it doesn't fit the games. It's about an ending that gives you closure, shows you what happened after and how the choices you made affected the world. That's what they are adding, and they are doing it right in that way.

An ending you don't like is a fact of any work - be it a book, film or game. An ending that doesn't fulfill is another thing, and that's what people have a problem with. It's the rough equivalent of Sam and Frodo getting to Mt. Doom and it just ending as the ring falls in. Sure, you know it ended, you know the main thing, but all of the little stuff surrounding it, the characters you got invested in, the places and events you cared about, you want to know how it all mattered in the end.

EA strangles another once great studio

[stewartjm]

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".

Re:EA strangles another once great studio

[Omestes]

just because you can whine really loud it doesn't mean you can dictate to a game developer how to make their games.

Why ever not? They make a consumer product, the consumers don't like it. They either fix it, or the consumers go else where with their money next time.

Works just fine. We're not talking about fine art here. EA can keep their "artistic integrity", but no one has to buy it; that also is a perfectly fine conclusion to this story. Outside of the fact that people won't give them money again, no one is forcing them to change their ending, or make their game in a certain way. They are free to make the worlds crappiest game, and I'm free to never give them money again.

I'm not one to talk though, since EA has been on my shit-list for a long time (over a decade now). I always think twice before giving them money, and generally wait for the first month of player reviews, if the game looks really solid (more solid that anything else made by a different company). And I will never, ever, buy their DLC. Further, I'm one of the only person who never really found Mass Effect terribly fun. The first one was okay (outside of being forced to hide behind walls 90% of the time). The second one took away everything I liked about the first, so I never really gave two shits about the third one.

Re:EA strangles another once great studio

[LateArthurDent]

just because you can whine really loud it doesn't mean you can dictate to a game developer how to make their games. anyone who thinks the difference in endings is the cut scene color wasn't paying attention to the story at all.

I don't have a problem with the endings not being different enough (although I do have a problem with the difference to the endings essentially boiling down to a last second decision. You should be locked down to an ending based on choices you've made throughout the series).

What I do have a problem with is the lack of a satisfactory ending. Hollywood has historically placed happy endings everywhere they don't belong. People understandably complained about this because when you stick a happy ending on, for example, The Count of Monte Cristo, you just removed the entire moral lesson intended in the novel. Unfortunately, the result of this backlash is that people now think that emotionally complex endings where not everything works out in the end is "artistic" and we should just plop that everywhere. That's the exact same thing Hollywood has been doing with the happy endings, except that you're wrapping everything up with a bow of a different, sadder color.

The ending of a story needs to fit a story. For Edmond Dantes, he needs to accomplish his revenge masterfully, destroy all of his enemies exactly as he planned, only to find his life empty when all is said and done. For Shepard (s)he needs to do what (s)he's always done: beat all the fucking odds and accomplish the mission. If you're playing a Shepard that has sacrificed much along the way via the renegade route, that means a lot of bodies pave the way to final awesomeness. If you've been playing the game by taking the time to save kittens from trees, that means absolutely everything works out, synthetics are saved, organics are saved, the cycle is ended, and the mass relays are intact to usher in a new era of collaboration in the galaxy. Why? Because that's what your audience has invested all this time to achieve. Mass Effect isn't some literary masterpiece, it's an escapist reality where you get to be a badass. It's an action story in a sci-fi world. You don't play the game because you want to know how it ends, you play for the journey, and it better end exactly where you were planning to take that journey.

That's how the other two games operated, and maybe you want to pretend that wrapping a story that had absolutely no depth to it in an ambiguous ending increases the artistic value of the thing, but the rest of us see it as a cop-out and a bait and switch ploy. Those of us who just wanted to shut our brains off for a few hours were forced to turn them back on, and once you turn your brain on to try to figure out what the hell just happened you start asking questions such as *WHY WAS THE NORMANDY INSIDE A MASS EFFECT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE FOR EARTH?* Not only is the ending NOT the artistic masterpiece EA is claiming it is, but it's poorly thought out and cliched.