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Darth Suetam wrote...
Just a theory, food for thought.
I still think that it could have been a version of the "empty box" campaign from the first SW. Since they had a deadline for making a gazillion money on Christmas with SW toys, but they weren't complete, they sold the box with a coupon inside. You would get you toy in a couple of months.
Of course, there are huge differences between the cases, but I think that BW can very well thought about something similar, but they just missed the right way to do it. They had to release it on March (fiscal year deadlines?), but the end will actually be released later. I think they just thought that people would buy the endings, or at least not have so passionate a response, so they could come with a "real ending", a "what really happened to Shep and his merry band", or something. And everybody would cheer and think that it was a genius move by the company.
If only they had done it right...
It lacked communication. They could have put a real advise, or a cryptic one at the end, so people would get it. They would have been hailed as "genius" by some, other would say that it was a nice touch, and some wouldn't like. But not as passionately as we see everywhere.
The only problem would be making money later with it. Maybe they thought that by doing it this way, it would be easier to make money, since people would be desperate for the good stuff.
It's only a theory. But somehow I think it makes more sense than the endings being "it".
The end of the fiscal year is the 31st of March, so yes releasing ME3 before then makes financial sense as even if the game was very badly recieved the initial sales figures would boost the end of year report. I strongly suspect this is why Bioware wasn't allowed to push the release date back a second time - especially since EA/BW knew that SWTOR wasn't doing as well as they'd predicted.
The idea that Bioware was always intending to release an 'ending' DLC has been around since shortly after the games release, when rumours about a DLC called 'The Truth' surfaced. However as far as I'm aware this rumour has never been shown to have any evidence to support it - the closest Bioware ever came to denying its existance was on Twitter with the line 'Do you really think we'd call a DLC the Truth?'...which is the usual ambigous statement we've come to expect over the last month. The comment could be taken as 'No such thing exists' or as 'That was the working title, we're calling it something else now' depending on your hopes and dreams.
During the online chat earlier this week one of the guys at Forbes did say he suspected that the whole issue was a PR stunt by Bioware, if one that horrifically backfired on them. He pointed out that if it was a PR stunt, and they badly underestimated the reaction to the 'ending', they most certainly would not have come out and admitted to it. Since such an admission would have made things far, FAR worse than they already were at that point.
Of course such speculation might have more to do with people simply not being willing to believe that Bioware was capable of messing up this badly, let alone messing up their most important franchise. But there is some circumstancial evidence that *could* be used as a basis for thinking this way. We do know, as I said above, that they were working to a deadline that couldn't be changed. We know that after the original ending was leaked they decided to change it more or less at the last minute, and we also know that they ran into some serious technical issues regarding end game content which resulted in them being unable to implement it. This 'evidence' could, and I stress *could*, support the idea that maybe they decided to release the game with a 'placeholder' ending while they worked on finishing the 'true' ending. That the app notes released make no mention of this is hardly surprising. First because 'buy the game now, get the ending later' is hardly the best way to advertise a game (especially if the release date was set for the end of the financial year) since people would hold off buying the game until the ending was available. The second reason is that not only do the notes we've seen about the ending date from some six months ago, but if they DID intend to run a PR stunt they certainly would not have released information about their plans at that time.
Personally I'm nursing a faint hope that this was intended to be a PR/Marketing stunt. This is based on some comments from the BW writer who will be at PAX made on twitter. Something along the lines of 'Look forward to seeing you at PAX, we've got a lot to talk about
' (I can't recall the exact words). This, along with the apparent intention of broadcasting the Bioware panel at PAX online, would seem to imply they are very confident in being able to say something that will go down well...and unless they have entirely lost their connection to reality they must know that the only news likely to do that would be a new ending - Not a clarrification of the existing pile of crud, but a new one with more options and far more satisfying endings.We'll just have to cross our fingers and hope...because the alternative is that Bioware is about to commit suicide at PAX in front of the worlds media....
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