Hello ME community,
Before I begin, I’m sorry this post turned out longer than I intended. Please feel free to skip it if you don’t want to read it, I won’t hold it against you.
Like many of you, I’ve been reading these posts since early in the movement, sympathizing and finding some comfort in similar experiences. Also like many others, this will be my first post on these forums. I wasn’t originally going to bother re-posting sentiments others had expressed better than I could, but I’d like to take a moment to stress an angle that seems to not be as common concerning the issue at hand.
First, as some brief background context, I am not exactly a supporter of the “video game player entitlement” movement. When the “day one DLC” rage spilled onto the internet, I was one of the people who lined up against it. It’s Bioware’s game, they can decide what’s core and what’s peripheral, even if you disagree. To extrapolate this more generally, I do indeed believe in an artist’s right to make his art whatever he wants. An author can kill off a character I loved in an epic novel series – I’ll be upset and probably disagree that it was the best thing for the book, but that’s the author’s vision. George Lucas wants to weaken Darth Vader’s character in his latest round of movie refinement? Hey, I think it’s ridiculous, but it’s his creation to ruin. Bioware wanted to make their second installment in a great series (DA) more of a personal focus that inherently requires too much content recycling? Clearly they don’t understand what their fans want, but hey, they are entitled to make their game the way they want to.
For all those examples, it’s OK in my mind because there’s a pretty big separation from the creators of art/entertainment and the partakers. As a video game player, I’m inherently on the outside – I’m invited to experience the end result, think of it what I will, and move one.
Mass Effect was different. And not only because unlike the other examples I truly felt invited into the experience as opposed to simply being on the outside looking in. No, the troubling situation of this game’s ending goes beyond the rich universe and the compelling characters that drew me in. It goes beyond how they allowed us to make the series our own with decisions big and small, only to have so much choice removed at the end.
What really makes this whole situation a betrayal is the fact that
they knew us. Bioware not only listened to the community its masterpiece had formed, but they actively listened to its feedback and incorporated it into the game.
Did I need to hear three “calibrations” jokes in the first 10 minutes of having Garrus onboard the Normandy? No more than I needed a bro-tastic excursion with everyone’s favorite sharpshooter that prominently featured one of the community’s favorite memes, but you damned well better believe I loved it. We didn’t need the community’s
fantasy EDI/Joker romance to be brought to life in an almost too-cliché, yet oh-so-amusing, way; nor did we need a Conrad cameo making light of one of Bioware’s more perplexing bugs from ME2. None of this was necessary. But they knew we would smile, so they put it in.
But it’s more than just fan pandering that showed me how well Bioware understood me. My favorite example is my Shepard’s conclusion of the Geth/Quarian conflict. They knew my Shepard would want to save the Geth and the Quarians both. They knew I’d let Legion do his upload. They knew my heart would race as the upload ticked up, with Tali’s desperate pleas making me doubt if I was going to be able to fix it all in the end after all. They knew I’d smile with pride as my Shepard shouted down centuries of hatred with pure Paragon conviction, saving the day at the last minute. And they knew my heart strings would be pulled with Legion’s final “Keelah se’lai”. Bioware played me like a fiddle, because they knew me.
And it wasn’t just that one instance; it was every damn part of this near-perfect game. Looking back it’s almost painful to see how perfectly the writers nailed it every step of the way. And in that last, brilliantly crafted forward operations base area, as every conversation created a lasting memory, I defy you to tell me that Bioware didn’t understand what its community, what
I wanted out of this game.
That is why the ending they gave us constitutes more than just something for overly-entitled fans to whine about. Hell, I’ll be honest, I even kind of like the “indoctrination theory” take on the ending, it makes for a decently thought-provoking and subtle-ish end to a sci-fi epic. That is
entirely beside the point. You cannot know your fans as well as the rest of the game proves and not know the ending we wanted. Bioware, you cared about us enough to make the whole game a perfect walk between pure fan-service and a wonderful manifestation of your own artistic vision. You cared, damn it – we can tell. And then at the last minute, you stopped caring and decided to give us something you clearly really liked, but that you
knew we wouldn’t. You knew many of us wanted to choose hope, fulfilling victory at great cost, and a self-determined future for this beloved universe you let us craft with you. And you just didn’t care. That's why this happens to hurt the community, and fans like myself, more than you might expect.
You see, Bioware, it’s not the ending itself that makes this such a big deal for us. It’s that you clearly knew the kind of ending we would want, knew how much it meant to us, and you decided to deny it. It’s that simple.
And if any Bioware employee should actually read this, please know this:
I will not forget how close you let me come to having a truly memorable video game experience years in the making, only to stop caring about your fans at the final moment.
And I WILL hold the line.
Modifié par Xelv88, 16 mars 2012 - 01:35 .
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