I've been reading this thread since I finished the game Friday night, I stayed up till 4am just reading how everyone was feeling like I was...Empty and with a feeling of things left unfinished. And thats just it, from a game designers standpoint this ending is completely unfinished. It is buggy, cut up and completely lacks the tone of the rest of the game. So now I'm going to use my 60,000 dollar degree in Video Game Design and review the ending but only on a few points I don't want to take an entire page just for one post or anything.
BUGS: This is suppost to be a finished product once it hits the shelves of the stores, minor to no bugs that will break the game. But on my playthroughs and from reading numberous posts on here and other sites, the ending mission on Earth is riddled with bugs that cause your system(PC, XBOX, PS3) to crash or freeze. The cinematics not starting and leaving you with either a blackscreen or allow you to run around with Shepard while the sound of the cinematic playing in the background. This happened to me after I shot the Ellusive Man, I walked forward as I heard that they were bringing in the Crucible. I thought, "Wow I get a front row view of this massive weapon attach itself to the Citidel? Awesome!" But no, I just fell through the world and falling in the Citidel till the game forces me to the menu and reload the mission. These may be just annoying bugs that fix themselves when reloaded, but this shows that the ending was rushed, untested (So most likely unviewed by a focus group) and just forced out by EA. Which is sad, I would gladly have waited till later to play the completed game and get the ending that was complete.
Inconsistencies: I don't think I need to touch much on this topic, we all have read in the thread about the Dark Matter part of the game being scrapped, and how the Citidel God-child's logic is so circular you could fit the citidel through it. But I'm talking about the ending, when your crew gets off the ship on the unknown planet, in my playthrough I brought my LI along to take back Earth, so Tali died with the Reaper beam. But She, Garrus and Joker all get off the ship. This too has been brought up many times and it just screams that is just a dream. Or something similar. But on the off chance it's not, then there is something in the programming that sets a random, or seemingly random 2 group members to come out of the ship with Joker. Maybe it is set by how much you talked to them, or just your LI is always getting of the ship. No one would take their LI into the final battle right? Yea...no. So it is possible that the coders got rushed, I keep hoping that this is what happened, cause if they ment for the to occur then they just got Lazy. (Just like Tali's photo.) But I hope laziness isn't the case.
Speaking of Laziness, the cinematic when you first show up to the battle for Earth and Joker is reading off the list of allies that have come to help. This could have been so much better, but they would have to make the movie longer to do this. Where are all the extra alien ships and armies that I recruited throughout the game? The bloodpack to charge ahead and take on enemy fire while the tanks moved ahead, the Elkor's "Tanks" that I was promissed for saving their civellians? The mechs from the Eclipse and special forces from the blue suns? Or even the kindof all out firefights in the street like in the take back Earth commercials? They drop the ball on what the climax of this game could have been. Having less is not always more. And I know there are other battles going on, as shown when you talk with Jack, Grunt or James. But that still leaves all the Alien forces you aquired, making it feel like the humans are still in this fight alone. Which the entire game is all about, getting help! Again, could be that they were forced to rush it out, but a little less likely here.
Choices: What happened to Mass Effect 2's choices when it came down to splitting up the tanks in the final push? I was expecting to have to pick 2 for myself and leave the rest to gaurd the other tanks, and depending on how large of an army I gathered how many of my squad would die. Before the game came out we were told that we might not be able to save everyone, but acording to the ending I did. I was expecting hard choices that if I didn't do something right I might be the only one making the last charge, or last stand on Earth before I was over run. I went through the game thinking I would be loosing squad members left and right if I messed up. But besides Mordin and Thane dieing, it was almost all sunshine and rainbows for me. I was ending a thousand year grudge between 2 bitter enemies, bringing peace to a 300 year war between machines and their creators (which snips the balls off of the God-child's theory right off) and amassing an army that the Galaxy has never seen! Where are my choices of who to send were? I'm Comander Shepard, Comander, I comand things. Let me assign a squad member to a group of soldiers and if I make a bad choice, like sending Tali off with the Bloodpack. They get slaughtered; or if I send say, Grunt, with them they tear the enemies to shreds. For a game about choices, the last section of the game was extremely lacking in them.
Conclusion: For me 90% of this game was completed and just what I expect from Bioware. An amazing game that plays smooth and fits with the theme they place on the game. And Mass Effect 3 excelled at this very idea, till that last 10%. It didn't feel like the same team that worked on the rest of the game, like the outsourced it to a 3rd party developer or something. What happened? I know from experience that when you are finishing a game you are usually up almost every night, sometimes not even sleeping to get everything done perfectly and fix every bug that you can. But still this seems like it was just part of the ending, missions and all. In ME2 we had several missions within the Collector's ship. The hacking pipes, the bugs, then the floating stages to the Human Reaper(I feel like I'm missing one, let me know if I am). But with ME3 we have, get the radio working, protect the tanks and shoot the Reaper. Through all of those we kept the same team, even though the whole crew was on the planet with us. From a designers point of view I see the ending as a mess that was rushed by EA to meet a deadline that shouldn't have been there. But I hope against hope that Bioware will come through with a patch or free DLC that will show how great of a game company they really are. Here is my fingers crossed and a bow to a wonderful game....till the last mission.
~Keelah se'lai
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wondering if people have ever worked a day in a code developer role (I do it by occupation). I completely understand and support the zero-day DLC being on disc even. The game was pushed out 4 months, and they're trying to recoup some of that, it's expensive paying salaries. However if a product isn't done, I don't try to slap something together at the last minute and call it finished.. Especially if my project was as polished and incredible as the 99.5% of the first part of Mass Effect 3 was. I'd say "Give us a month"... or even a week.. I honestly suspect there was a citadel mission missing due to time constraints, I suspect the cutscenes at the end were pieced together from ones they had because they didn't fit without the missing content in other areas, and I suspect they made something up to fill in the gaps.. something that really didn't, and shows.
