[quote]100k wrote...
[quote]jamesp81 wrote...
I would seriously consider not buying the game. I played the previous two games to score a big win for Earth and even the possibility of a tragic ending for humanity's home is disgusting to me. I get enough tragedy in real life; entertainment is intended to take our minds off of it.[/quote]
I'm sorry to hear that you've been having some tragedies in life. I am. But if you want entertainment where the good guy wins hands down to take your mind off of real life's problems, then you should never have started playing Mass Effect in the first place (no offense). Mass Effect is about sacrifice, struggle, and character development--along with third person action/shooting. Minus the shooting element, these traits are one of the reasons why many of us like Mass Effect. We get to make tough decisions, and sympathize or stand against characters in its universe.
When Tali's dad died in ME2, I felt really sorry for her. Now, I recognize that it is a game, but if my mom can cry at the end of the static series of events that make up a romance drama movie, then I feel justified in feeling bad for a video game character whom I'll be spending 20 hours developing.
On top of that, in ME2 Shepard can die permanently. Would you have not boughten the game knowing that there is a possibility of the protagonist dying?
[quote] This is one reason I loved Lord of the Rings and didn't care anything about the new BSG. [/quote]
I don't know anything about BSG, but I can tell you that LOTR's ending (perhaps one of the best in literature) isn't about good conquering evil. LOTR's ending is about how much you sacrifice to preserve the things you love, and how, in sacrificing yourself, the value of what you are preserving changes, because you change. The Hobbits went back to the Shire, only to find it butchered and ruined. When they restored it, Frodo realized that it just wasn't the same. To him it was "like going back asleep, again".
[quote]If there is a tragic "you lose" ending it will depend on how it's handled whether or not I'll buy the game. If it's one of those "all endings are equally valid" kind of endings, I'll probably pass on ME3. If it's something like "Earth blows, then Critical Mission Failure" that's different, obviously.[/quote]
Why should your ending be any more or less valid than the ending that someone else gets? We've all been developing our Shepard's for years now, and we're finally coming to an end. There is no canon in Mass Effect, so if Earth blows up because you wanted to save another star system first, you've got no one to blame but yourself and you'll ALWAYS have the option of playing the game over again to get a different result. [/quote][/quote]
Multiple issues here. I think we're talking past each other on the definition of "tragic". In my mind, some of the your crew getting killed isn't tragic; the destruction of the human race is (and seeing how Earth represents roughly 98 to 99 percent of humanity in this game, that's what Earth's loss means). Maybe my perception is off, but I didn't see ME1 as being enormously tragic. The Virmire sacrifice was not unexpected. Soldiers that sign on the dotted line know what they're getting into and what may be asked of them. ME2 had potential to be extraordinarily tragic, on a personal level only, if you played it that way. The Collectors were annihilating entire worlds, and even in the "Shepard dies" ending, you still stop them, which was the main goal of the game.
As for ME2, I got it for free in an interesting deal (legit, I'm not a damned pirate. A vendor I do a lot of business with offered me some freebies so I went with ME2 as my freebie, and then picked up ME1 on Steam and played it first), so I didn't have to pay for it anyway. Furthermore, regardless of what BW says, the "Shepard dies" ending doesn't strike me as being "valid". If it truly was, then what BW is telling you is "don't bother buying ME3 if your story ends in ME2". Now really, they're in the business to sell games and make a profit, not give players an excuse to not buy the final title in a trilogy. That ending in ME2 is pretty much invalid because no one is going to choose it except on a lark just to see the cutscenes. You can't even import those save games into ME3 anyway.
Furthermore, Bioware has made noises about possibly doing something with Mass Effect after ME3. This presents a problem if the endings, with respect to the overall political situation only, are radically divergent. If the endings are hugely divergent (save Earth/don't save Earth, or "Turians Survive but Asari are extinct" vs "Asari Survive but Turians extinct" kind of endings, for example) then Bioware either 1) shelves the franchise forever (damned shame if they do) 2) do prequels (ugh, you can keep them) or 3) they declare certain decisions as the "real" decisions and base future content on that. This is essentially establishing a canon history and retcons everyone who didn't make the "real" decisions and, to be fair, I've been told BW has done this before so it's a possibility.
I enjoyed the atmosphere of ME1, being able to do the whole explore strange new worlds kind of thing. I'd like to see further titles in the franchise get back to that dynamic, but that requires establishing what "really" happened in ME3 on a lot of issues.
And I'm also sick of the hipster type story telling where you "lose even if you win". Probably my most hated trope.
As for LotR....
Frodo did achieve, mostly his "ideal" outcome. Bearing the ring scarred him severely, which is why he shipped out with the elves...only they could make him whole again. It was a very, very long road for him but reached the end of it in due time. Yes, his home did get roughed up pretty bad, but even this passed with time.
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