30 réponses à ce sujet

[CBGB]

This thread isn't about the ME3 ending in particular: there are dozens already, from the massive
So We Can't Get the Ending We Want?
to the alternative
How Would You Have Ended ME3?

This about 'dark' endings in general and how ME3 fits into them, or doesn't. Bioware established a track record with dark endings with DA2, so why does this one stand out?

It's not because people want rainbows and ponies. They might  (I personally do like rainbows and can tolerate horses), but audiences show time and again that they'll embrace 'hard' endings when they fit.


People Aren't Afraid of the Dark
Many of my writing students remember the first books that made them cry (often Charlotte's Web, The Day No Pigs Would DIe, or Where the Red Fern Grows) and yet they still love them. The same is true for adult fiction, from Of Mice and Men to Childhood's End to 1984. Audiences screening an early version of Casablanca with a happier ending - Rick flew off to be with Ilsa- actually protested it, demending real sacrifice. People don't want stories to coddle them.

But they do want endings to fit. We accept the loss in The Once and Future King or Flowers for Algernon because the story demands it, and though that may leave us sad, it doesn't leave us feeling sucker-punched. A sad ending suits Romeo and Juliet as much as a happy one does the first Star Wars film. In that movie, it simply wouldn't fit to close with the message that "actually, neither the Force nor your friends offer much against superior firepower. Sorry."

So how does that apply to gaming?

A Good Ending Fits the Story
For Bioware in general and Mass Effect in particular, a good ending must make your choices matter. The ME series thrives on choice: which companion to save, which to romance. Whether or not to continue the genophage.  Whether the geth and Rachni can be trusted. Few other series can match the fan devotion to saving a file - or multiple files - of their best decisions, and they do it because they feel their choices affect future events.

'Dark' or 'Rainbow Brite,' a good ending for ME3 needs to reflect your choices. You matter.


A Good Ending Fits the Character
Commander Shepard's tale is an against-all-odds story. Despite all the challenges, roadblocks, and setbacks encountered, Shepard perserves to show that one person can make all the difference. In fact, that's THE driving belief behind the entire story of ME2: "Despite everything, one person can make all the difference."

It's also an essential element for single-player RPG's. I never felt cheated by the successful outcome of Half-Life or Fallout or even DAO, which had more than a serving of bleak elements. When gamers don't care about being The One, they have plenty of MMO's and non-story-based games available. In a single-player RPG, you should matter.


A Good Ending Offers Hope
Stories don't need rainbows and not even necessarily happiness. Orson Scott Card, writing about the duty of fiction writers, notes that people always have suffering in their lives, to varying degrees, and while respecting that doesn't mean always offering happy endings - in fact, readers wi'll reject a falsely happy turn - it does mean that there must be hope.

In the first thread above, some people share fairly personal wounds reopened by the ME3 endings. You can argue that  ME3 is "just a game," but that belittles what games and stories can bring to our lives.



What's Next
Bioware knows story matters. Ten years ago, I spoke with folks there about a writing position that I eventually decided not to pursue because my family wasn't ready to relocate to Edmonton, and I was impressed: few gaming companies even had their own staff writers - most were hired on outside contract - and even fewer under one roof. Though my information is out-of-date (I'm still a professional writer, but no longer in the gaming industry), I expect Bioware remains an industry leader with its emphasis on good storytelling.

So I'm going to follow my own advice and keep hope. It's hard to imagine a rewriting of ME3, though such things have happened before.

After publishing The Floating Opera, author John Barth responded to backlash of his bleak ending by taking the criticism to heart. He changed the ending to a more hopeful version not because of the pressure but because he was convinced the new one was better, and that's in editions published today.

For ME3, the equivalent would be a patch allowing achievement of a more hopeful ending. In practice, that's a hard thing to achieve -gaming production costs now rival those in Hollywood - but possible with enough incentive. A paid DLC just might do it.

Or a new Mass Effect story, some years from now. The current ME3 ending offers few obvious routes, but in a world where a dead Shepard can be revived, anything is possible.


Or at the very least, another good Bioware game with smooth gameplay, an engaging universe, a riveting story, and a strong sense that your decisions matter.

That's worth a good bit of hope.

Modifié par CBGB, 09 mars 2012 - 12:45 .

[KRAETZNER]

I'm hoping for the dlc route.

[JrSlackin]

This is incredibly legit and well said.

I understood the ending and why it happened. I wasn't expecting a "happy ending" the dreams Shepard has, and the outline that there WILL be sacrifices etc, made it obvious that things weren't going to be happily ever after.

What I didn't like was...
-Illusive Man just popping out of no where near the end. How did he get there? Etc. With ME1 we at least knew how Saren gets to where he's going.
-The people on the Citidal.
-Normandy
-Mass Relays being "destroyed", we saw what happens when they blow up in ME2.

I think people get what I'm saying. There was no real closure with the ending. I'm not saying I hated it, I'm saying the lack of "this is what happened". Instead we get a very vague look on your choice, then the Normandy randomly leaving the scene getting knocked out and crashing who knows where, then a child talking about how great a story an old man just told.

Personally I was sad this was the end of Shepard, but the ending didn't get me to the point of going "god I hate them" I loved the rest of the game by far, but if there's a chance Bioware can do something with the ending with some sort of patch or anything, I'd love it.

[SumoPanda17]

Yeah, i agree with Jr, When the mass relays blew up, it made NO sense. Remember the Batarians? Dead. So i guess the whole galaxy is dead now? it didn't make sense. I don't want a "Magic Bannanas" ending, but something better than what happened. I don't feel cheated by Bioware, im not angry at them, i just with the game ended better. Thats Al.

[Dean_the_Young]

SumoPanda17 wrote...

Yeah, i agree with Jr, When the mass relays blew up, it made NO sense. Remember the Batarians? Dead. So i guess the whole galaxy is dead now? it didn't make sense.

Unless all relay destructions are the same, which they aren't... no.

[Vikali]

SumoPanda17 wrote...

Yeah, i agree with Jr, When the mass relays blew up, it made NO sense. Remember the Batarians? Dead. So i guess the whole galaxy is dead now? it didn't make sense. I don't want a "Magic Bannanas" ending, but something better than what happened. I don't feel cheated by Bioware, im not angry at them, i just with the game ended better. Thats Al.

Throwing a meteor into something isn't the same as overloading it.

[Fenwich]

SumoPanda17 wrote...

Yeah, i agree with Jr, When the mass relays blew up, it made NO sense. Remember the Batarians? Dead. So i guess the whole galaxy is dead now? it didn't make sense.

FFS i made a thread explaining that these explosions are OBVIOUSLY not the same as the ME2 explosion (HINT: THEY ARE DIFFERENT COLORS).

So many people keep posting "Oh the relays are esploded so everyone dies." Cause energy can't be released in different ways ever. That last sentence was sarcasm, if you couldn't tell.

Back on track, I really enjoyed reading the OP. I agree that it's not about whether the ending was happy or dark, but a good (as in well done) ending definitely needs to fit the story.

Modifié par Fenwich, 09 mars 2012 - 01:15 .

[Faraborne]

CGBG, downright excellent post! You elucidated many of the same thoughts I had going on in my mind very astutely. Everyone at Bioware should read this!

[Qutayba]

Well said. Particularly in this last chapter of ME, there were a lot of shared features with the newer Battlestar Galactica, which, no surprise, deals with many of the same themes. In their last season, they did a very brave thing (SPOILERS!): the fleet finds Earth and finds it a lifeless radioactive husk. In many ways, that could have been a very fitting end to the story: but it sent viewers into a state of panic

BUT, that was only halfway through the season. The rest of the season was spent with the question: What do you do when your hope or your faith proves utterly false? Despair, suicide, bickering, and self-destruction? The final episodes of the series try to turn that around. There are lots of contrived elements in the finale, and it doesn't all make sense, but the humanistic tone was just perfect: That the sacrifices were worth it, even for the life of this one child: for a future we may never get to see - even if there is no Earth or no God (or rather if Earth and God are not what we thought they were).

I don't hate the ME3 endings completely, but the tone is all wrong. As the OP suggests, bleak stories need to end on a sense of hope, either for the main character or the friends he sacrificed himself for. The ME3 ending isn't completely hopeless, but the faint echo of hope does not counterbalance the despair: There CAN be no galactic peace, you CAN'T get along together after all, and you DON'T deserve the relays. All you can do is survive as an individual or as an isolated species cut off from the universe, but that's about it. I'm not sure that's a future worth fighting for, and it actually undermines so much the series had to say.

[Raxxman]

I just wanted to say your choice in literature to make the point is fantastic.

It's just a shame that the majority of people here wont of read half the books you cite; I myself have never read A day no pigs would die. But I think everyone should read Flowers for Algemon; it's possibly my fav book.

[Carmen_Willow]

Well said, OP.

Shepard is an "against all odds" character, and I was profoundly disappointed when she didn't make it through at the end. After all her trials, suffering and loss, why couldn't she walk away from this final battle to have a little bit of a normal life? I don't care that she "saved" organic life from the Reapers. What did that mean for her? She's dead. To quote another Bioware character, "Only the living know victory. Fight well!"

Shepard knows nothing now, she's cosmic dust. And she does not know her victory. I find that very depressing. Not sad, depressing. And underneath that depression lies anger. When does Shepard reap her reward?. In real life, crap happens, and some times you don't get rewarded for the good you do. In real life sometimes you die for the good you do. We all know that. I didn't need to be reminded.. I play games to get away from real life for awhile. I really wanted by happy-ever-after ending for her.

[Tashakov]

Hats off, TC. You really tore open this game's ending in a strict and decisive manner, showing us all the inner workings of how it is *wrong*, not "bad".

The real clincher for my disapproval is the bait-and-switch of the tone. Transhumanism (I think that's the term?) was never a part of Mass Effect's main story. It was a space opera, and focused on the idea that one person can make a difference, no matter what. Shepard's sacrifice, while depressingly sad, could have been a hallmark of gaming if it were done right. Perhaps she chooses to sacrifice herself for the good of the galactic community, or even takes on a harsher role in sacrificing others in the war effort?

But what we currently have is a random Aesop that only pops up in the last ten minutes of the game, with nothing to convince Shepard of which choice to make. You can destroy the Reapers and sacrifice yourself, but it ruins so much; not only does Shepard die, but so do the Geth that you may have brought about to a peaceful resolution with the Quarians. Oh, and the Quarians? Yeah, they got back their home. But the Flotilla is stuck at Earth with no relays.

The Krogan can be written off, since we've been told time and time again that they are so few in number. Even with the Genophage cured, I'd imagine that the majority of males were sent to Earth to stop the Reapers, and are now... Yep, you guessed it; stuck there. That'll end well.

And the Asari? Doomed. They have only themselves to breed with now, and that means Ardat Yakshi numbers will sky-rocket. Trapped on their ruin of a world with sociopathic psychic killers being born every day? That won't end well either.

Turians; Most of them are trapped on Earth. Yeah, you know Earth? The place where they can't eat anything we have? Food supplies only last so long. Doomed as well, unless maybe Palaven made off better than they implied. Likewise, the Volus and Elcor no longer have Turian support, leaving them defenseless and without any real sort of government.

Only the humans and salarians get off decently. Add to that Shepard's pointless sacrifice to "preserve galactic peace" by seperating everyone into corners of the galaxy, suddenly becoming The Illusive Man despite claiming all the way through the game that controlling the Reapers was too dangerous,(not impossible, which is the only revelation provided by the Catalyst), or suddenly choosing the merge synthetics and organics, which came so out of left-field that it feels like a literary gut-punch. Organics and synthetics can never have peace? Ever? What about the 300 year war I just stopped? Why should I believe the boss of the Reapers on what that actually will do?

In the end, the conclusion just left a sour taste in my mouth. It suits a game like Deus Ex more than Mass Effect, just because the tone/theme is all wrong and like you said, there is so little actual hope left to counter the despair, despite all that Shepard has sacrificed (including her life.)

[CorvisRex]

This is far better composed than I could ever hope to produce, and also true.  I don't NEED an ending where Shep and Liara ride off into the sunset, I don't need a hollywood ending.  But I at least need an epilogue that shows me, that all the sacrifice was worthwhile, one that answers our questions.  Do the Krogans errect a monument to Mordin?  Do the Geth and Quorian successfully rebuild there home world? 

I would have no problem with Shep dying if there was a scene in the epilogue where Liara is holding a little blue baby shep, looking up at a monument to shepard's sacrifice.  That would make me feel like something was accomplished.

Granted, I would prefer an ending where shepard could tell the catalyst to bugger off, that there is some other answer, and that the catalyst was wrong.  No matter how HARD such an ending would be to get, people would go out of their way to get it.  But I would be more accepting the endings as is, if there was an epilogue that gave some closure.

But the ending as is makes the player feel helpless, and that things are, essentially hopeless.  It is never a good idea to make ones viewers/readers/players feel helpless, unless you lift them back up again.  Never make them feel that it is hopeless, unless you offer them some glimmer light at the end.

[BBK4114]

CBGB wrote...

So how does that apply to gaming?

A Good Ending Fits the Story
For Bioware in general and Mass Effect in particular, a good ending must make your choices matter. The ME series thrives on choice: which companion to save, which to romance. Whether or not to continue the genophage.  Whether the geth and Rachni can be trusted. Few other series can match the fan devotion to saving a file - or multiple files - of their best decisions, and they do it because they feel their choices affect future events.

'Dark' or 'Rainbow Brite,' a good ending for ME3 needs to reflect your choices. You matter.


A Good Ending Fits the Character
Commander Shepard's tale is an against-all-odds story. Despite all the challenges, roadblocks, and setbacks encountered, Shepard perserves to show that one person can make all the difference. In fact, that's THE driving belief behind the entire story of ME2: "Despite everything, one person can make all the difference."

It's also an essential element for single-player RPG's. I never felt cheated by the successful outcome of Half-Life or Fallout or even DAO, which had more than a serving of bleak elements. When gamers don't care about being The One, they have plenty of MMO's and non-story-based games available. In a single-player RPG, you should matter.


A Good Ending Offers Hope
Stories don't need rainbows and not even necessarily happiness. Orson Scott Card, writing about the duty of fiction writers, notes that people always have suffering in their lives, to varying degrees, and while respecting that doesn't mean always offering happy endings - in fact, readers wi'll reject a falsely happy turn - it does mean that there must be hope.

In the first thread above, some people share fairly personal wounds reopened by the ME3 endings. You can argue that  ME3 is "just a game," but that belittles what games and stories can bring to our lives,

Your whole post was wonderful, but this is what has me feeling bereft -- the bolded parts are what Bioware seems to have forgotten.  That we - the players - matter.  

Every day we see/hear about: atrocities man commits against man; war; famine; loved ones dying; friends getting hurt; futility; depression.

Is it really too much to ask for the chance of some hope, or a marginally happy ending in a video game? 

[Penguins]

I think the biggest problem with the endings is we see no real impact of what Shepard chooses to do; something which arguably should be the most important choice in the game. We get a slight graphic swap in the merge ending, and then all scenes funnel into the same epilogue.

The Normandy crash is perhaps the strangest part, as it adds nothing and really isn't explained.

I honestly think Bioware didn't really think the endings would be taken this way. They assumed it was enough just for Shepard to live in one ending, and to have the Normandy "protected" [from the earth destruction variance] by crashing on a random planet. The 'darker' endings were to make it more emotional. And if it had been done right, it could have been.

Instead it was pretty much an exercise in how 'not' to write a downer ending.

[Dracotamer]

The OP has it down dead on!

[Raxxman]

adrianlocke647 wrote...

Hats off, TC. You really tore open this game's ending in a strict and decisive manner, showing us all the inner workings of how it is *wrong*, not "bad".

The real clincher for my disapproval is the bait-and-switch of the tone. Transhumanism (I think that's the term?) was never a part of Mass Effect's main story. It was a space opera, and focused on the idea that one person can make a difference, no matter what. Shepard's sacrifice, while depressingly sad, could have been a hallmark of gaming if it were done right. Perhaps she chooses to sacrifice herself for the good of the galactic community, or even takes on a harsher role in sacrificing others in the war effort?

transhuman is correct, and you're right but underplaying it.

Every example of transhuman/speices is potrayed as pervese and evil. Saren, Project Overlord, Grayson,  TIM, Cerberus, collectors, Husks + all other reaper biomods (the list actually goes on). Yet at the end we're to accept that changing every being in the galaxy into a merger of man and machine repesents the best ending? The only singular exception to this Mass Effect rule is Shepard.

The problem is, it's not like I think transhuman is a bad sci trope, it's just that ME1 and ME2 clearly do. That ending pulls a complete U-turn on an entire branch of philosophical message behind Mass Effect; which incidently seems to of been lifted from one of the primary background traits of Dune.

[aim1essgun]

In b4 lock that doesn't care how good this post is.

[Kastien]

Great post. I hope it's read and considered. We need to see a patch or some DLC to fix this, pronto.

[Voods07]

Fantastic read, OP. In a sea of posters who cant distinguish between "there", "they're" and "their" its good to see solid thesis development, commitment and execution.

[Clarian]

Superlative post, CBGB.  This may be going off on a tangent, but I wanted to say it somewhere, so might as well be here.

The thing that really impressed me with the ME1 story was the scale of the threat that they established.  The magnitude of the cycle across time, the nigh-invincibility of even a single reaper, and Sovereign's promise that their numbers would darken the sky of every world.   

I'm no longer able to suspend disbelief or get quite as immersed in fiction as I was when I was a child.  My fascination has turned more to observing the ingenuity of the authors.  I'm on the edge of my seat thinking, not "How will Harry Potter get out of this?" but rather, "How will Rowling get Harry Potter out of this?"

So I was intrigued with Mass Effect, because the writers had given themselves such a monumental challenge.  Ideally, the resolution has to be not only satisfying, but convincing.  The happier an ending you want to acheive while maintaining believability, the more ingenuity you need.  And that's what I wanted to see.

(That, and your 'Dark Isn't Deep' title, remind me of a quote from Joseph Campbell on the comedy of fairy tales: "These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.")

Yeah...that, and, given that it's an RPG, it would have been nice for the endings to have gone off in all different directions depending on your choices.

Modifié par Clarian, 09 mars 2012 - 04:04 .

[thordreen]

Great post. All excellent points CBGB. Its too bad Bioware's location didn't work out for you, I think they could use you.

To the relay destruction points mentioned in the thread, I disagree that an explosion would not occur even when the damage was different(ie impact vs overload). The same cascade failure occurs in the animation(you see them breaking apart, so containment of the massive element zero core would still fail and produce a supernova like blast.

[Mfinn3333]

The energy in the Mass Relay's was what destroyed the solar system, not the impact from the asteroid. If they overloaded the Mass Relays then they let all of their stored energy out and really the only way was kinetic energy.

Otherwise the energy is still there and they just have to switch out the freaking capacitors to get things moving again.

[yummysoap]

The game itself was fantastic but the endings were awful. It made me feel bad for complaining so much about terminator reaper and frog Saren.

There's no game series to date that I have been more emotionally invested in and that's why it's almost like losing a loved one to see it reduced to three barely different choices, all of which leave the galaxy in complete turmoil, offer no closure, and trivialize the entire effort Shepard made throughout not only the 3rd game but the entire series.

So we're introduced to some supernatural ethereal Reaper boss at the end who reckons that the only way to preserve organic life from the dangers of synthetic life is to create giant, synthetic robots that embark on a galaxy-wide mission of slaughter for all organics. What in the everlasting ****? The Catalyst (or citadel) also supposedly has the power to merge organics and synthetics across the entire galaxy; it can kill all synthetic life and create a galaxy-wide technological Dark Age, or it can allow an organic to disseminate himself and take control of the aforementioned giant synthetic robots - but it can't do ANY of that without a deep heroic sacrifice from Shepard.

None of this makes any sense. It's all overwhelmingly contrived and what's worse is that it's in direct contradiction to just about everything in the games that had been leading up to it. Synthetic life is inherently destructive? Tell that to the peace treaty I just brokered between the Geth (who NEVER initiated conflict with their creators) and the Quarians. Tell that to EDI, who's been on my side despite everything. The only synthetic life that's ever been openly destructive in the Mass Effect universe is the synthetic life that the Catalyst created in order to impose order on the chaos of synthetic life. How did Bioware not see how absurd this is?

And yes, the endings are tragic for reasons already stated in this thread. No matter what you do, everything is basically ****ed. Shepard will be dead and your friends are stranded on some random planet without any way off. And you know what? I wouldn't even mind such a horrific ending if it had been justified, but it wasn't. Bioware introduced this deus ex machina, the Crucible, for a reason, and it WASN'T to see everything crash and burn at the end. At some point they probably realised that it's cheap to have a giant weapon that kills Reapers just conveniently appear in the third game, so they took it and tried (and failed) to go deep.

If Shepard and his crew and the destruction of the relays were, via decent writing and reasoning, a necessary sacrifice, then I wouldn't complain, but what we got was an unexplained plot device that gave us a pitiful explanation (one that only ended in more questions) and three completely obtuse and lore-defying options that came out of nowhere and don't really resolve anything. Say what you like about Battlestar Galacita's ending - you might think it was awful (and it was) but at least the ending coincided with the religious and anti-technology themes of the show. At least Lost was already interwoven with enough of the supernatural that its baffling supernatural finale was consistent with the rest of the show. I can't remember ever being quite so disappointed with the ending of a series I've been emotionally invested in.

If Bioware listens to no other criticism offered by its fanbase, it should be this. Don't do this to your next IP.

Modifié par yummysoap, 09 mars 2012 - 06:08 .

[Jonathan Shepard]

both OP and yummysiap have written extremely profound posts. I believe I'm going to start consolidating the strongest arguments I find, along with all of the suggestions for new/alternate endings. Wait, no, that'll just be redundant to the "how would you have ended it" thread. Darn.

Well. If Mr. Gamble is indeed speaking the truth about things planned for ME3 soon, hopefully we'll get answers to our questions and in=game content that actually gives closure to the series.