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As I type these words, a barely contained fury and a deep sadness course through my veins like a poison, burning from my heart to my fingertips. It is as if a member of my family just was killed and the murderer was given an executive pardon with no justice or damages paid. I pride myself on being a very reasonable man, possessing a more than fair sense of judgment, loyal to a fault, and tolerant of most things that would send any other person into a very justifiable rampage. With that said, I am somewhere between utterly depressed and raging mad with the ending of what was perhaps the greatest science fiction trilogies and franchises to have ever graced the gaming community, Mass Effect 3, and in good conscience cannot keep my thoughts to myself. Perhaps this sniffer full of brandy will dull my thoughts by the time I am done writing this article.
Hell, for anyone who's like me who on many nights looked up to see the brightly twinkling stars of the Orion Constellation and silently ponder, "What's out there, and are they looking up at me? What are they like? Will I ever see them? Will we be the best of friends or the worst of enemies?", the story of Mass Effect was a godsend of an epic undertaking that I have no doubt made the likes of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert universally raise a glass to toast in salutation and respect from the afterlife, while George Lucas cries himself to sleep every night into his Jar-Jar Binks pillow. I can remember a time barely a decade ago when it seemed like science fiction as a whole was a dying idea. Star Trek had just been taken off the air permanently for the first time in almost 15 years, Star Wars fanboys rampaged on internet forums after watching their beloved universe melt in front of their very eyes, and with the likes of Halo still well in its infancy, the future of the science fiction genre seemed bleak, very bleak. Even the concept of space itself and mankind’s manifest destiny to see what was out there seemed in jeopardy as many of my fellow countrymen, indeed citizens of the world, shed tears watching the burning remnants of Columbia fall from the sky and uttered prayers that those seven brave souls would find peace in the afterlife. Many said that space was too dangerous, irrelevant and simply too expensive in not only the cost of money, but the precious costs of life, and that pointless daydreams of adventure on this new frontier were a costly distraction from the harsh realities of a world plagued by terrorism, social unrest, disease and violence. Sheesh, is it any wonder why more than a few of us would like nothing more to get off this rock? I would give all that I own for the opportunity, and I would be hard-pressed to even look back (or down if you insist) because so many don’t even look up in wonder anymore.
Fast forward a few years and the painful conclusion of the Star Wars having been completed and a distant memory, a complete reboot of Star Trek with a fresh perspective in the making, and Halo providing to the younger generations what Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey were to me and my parents respectively. Best of all, the shuttles were flying again, and mankind seemed to have regained a sense of focus and creative imagination that had appeared lost, or perhaps had simply been overtaxed. I confess my introduction to the original Mass Effect was entirely by chance. On a rather inconspicuous day in 2007, a random popup advertisement on a website that I was browsing appeared, and for no other reason than it just seemed interesting, I clicked it. To say that I found the concept interesting and the story compelling was an understatement, and in fairly short order I had already zipped down to the local Best Buy, grabbed my copy and was eagerly playing through the single player story.
Mind you that this was hardly my first experience with a Bioware RPG, I had known the name well back from when they had created KOTOR, one of the few pieces of Star Wars lore that I found not only palatable but outright enjoyable. Still, for me at the time the company was an unknown relatively speaking, unlike Valve or Blizzard, and I could tell that they hadn’t had much experience with the first person shooter aspect, and it showed in the game mechanics. The controls were clunky, the combat was anything but balanced, my Shepard had the grace of an aging elephant covered in Astroglide on a smoothly polished linoleum floor, and I won’t even dignify the handling characteristics of the Mako vehicle we were supposed to use for planetary exploration. Yet, despite these shortcomings, there was something alluring about the entire universe, something special, a certain type of magic that many writers and imaginaries that possess vastly superior writing and orating ability over me work their entire lives for, and only a few ever reach them. You know some of them, I gave you the short list in my second paragraph.
To Bioware’s credit, when it came time for Mass Effect 2, almost all of those criticisms were faithfully addressed either in the game proper, or in DLC. Most game developers talk about listening to their fans and responding to their customer base, some do or do just enough to sate the vocal minority that we all know and universally hate, but true to their word they did. Shepard now moved smoothly, the shooter aspects felt much more like a shooter, more balanced game mechanics blah blah blah, all the cosmetic crap that everyone flaunts around in the newest game, without ever actually giving all that eye candy a solid foundation to build on, a great story. What they kept and absolutely expanded on was the mind-staggering story and universe that you got to play in. Mass Effect rapidly gained popularity and what had been at least initially an oddball RPG that nerds chattered about while huddled in a basement hyped up on Mountain Dew, now was commonplace. Books and other forms of merchandise could be found stacked by the dozens at the bookstore, and walking around town in my N7 hoodie, hardly two blocks could be passed without someone stopping me and saying, “you play Mass Effect? What’s your Shepard like? Did you save Wrex or not?” Bioware had struck a chord, a very personal chord. The way that you could make your Shepard, as good or evil as he or she may be, to be literally your avatar in the game. From changing appearances, to dialog choices, you felt like you really were Commander Shepard. We all felt special, and each of our characters were special. Created by tireless efforts from the artisans, programmers and developers up in Edmonton, to the hundreds of hours that any player of Mass Effect would have gladly invested in making that literal extension of themselves seem more real. As far as I’m concerned, my Shepard is as much a part of me as my right hand. In short, Bioware created a universe that while most of us will probably never fly any higher than a jetliner cruises, we could get out and explore the galaxy and be there, not simply watch from afar with envy.
To say that the stakes were high, the expectations higher, and the excitement foaming at its rabid mouth for the epic conclusion to this juggernaut of a series was a gross understatement. Eternal wait though it may have been, launch night on March 5th 2012 came, and I along with the faithful, huddled outside our local Gamestop to see how this story would end. From the first surreal nightmare sequence right after escaping earth and the Reapers destroying everything in sight, I collapsed back into my chair, my 360 controller limply in my hands feeling like it had the weight of a brick, as I commented to nobody in particular on the obvious that was unfolding before my very eyes, “this **** just got serious.” Heh, oh man was I ever naïve. That was the first of many, from Ashley’s near death experience, Thane’s noble sacrifice, running about the Geth consciousness (which my dear friend Joe probably had about a 45 minute long orgasm playing), and watching Grunt kicking some very serious ass among many, many others that could easily take up the length of this commentary turned term paper that I have somehow managed to write. The total gameplay was easily longer than the first two games and all associated DLC combined by a considerable amount. The mechanics, improvements and balance all entirely improved and what they had been promised from day 1, and all of it centered and focused on the one event that we all knew was coming from the first game almost 5 years prior, stop the Reapers. The gameplay was everything Bioware promised. I felt without a shadow of a doubt that even Escapist Magazine’s own Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the utterly insatiable game critic who may as well be nicknamed “the Cat” for his penchant for finding even the smallest flaw and toying with it incessantly, would finally be wowed and shut the hell up for once and appreciate the beauty for what it is.
All this makes what I’m about to say and have put off saying until this point, just that much harder. The endings are a complete cop-out. They are as palatable as a dinner plate of cockroaches, as insulting as a public slap to the face in front of all your friends and family, and sting even more brutally. There is no “good” ending. Period. Shepard, my Shepard that I spent the last 5 years crafting and obsessing over, making him a part of me, simply ceases to exist, ripped from me more surely than a stray leaf is torn from a tree in the blowing winds of fall and seemingly as uncaring to boot. Perhaps the biggest pill to swallow that I find myself choking on, is the one thing I had always flaunted as the centerpiece of Mass Effect what made my Shepard as unique to me as we are to each other, and that is that none of the decisions I made up until that point seemingly mattered. A huge point that I always made about the game universe that nobody else up until this point had ever done, was letting your decisions, actions and consequences carry from one game to another, each providing a unique experience. Tragically, none of those decisions would have the slightest effect on the ending. Aside from a slight change in the color the Reapers make when you may either control them, kill them or merge synthetic and organic together, the endings are by and large the same. After that in all three the Normandy, your ever faithful mount, crashes on an unknown world where you see a couple survivors and that’s it, credits roll. No epilogue, no final goodbye, no finding out what happens afterwards. Do the Krogan and Turians get along after the war with the genophage wiped out, not even counting the whole Geth/Quarian situation, that’s been festering just as long and anyone who knows me understands that Tali is by far my favorite character. Oh and using a damn placeholder for the picture that lets us see what’s actually under the helmet as opposed to putting in some actual effort, like what so many of my fellow fans have done on places like DeviantArt, was simply too tall an order to fill.
The last 3 minutes utterly killed and destroyed a part of me that was years in the making, and the worst part is Bioware seems utterly unapologetic about it. My only hope, my slim hope, is that Bioware might release some DLC a la Fallout 3: Broken Steel style to completely change this bastardization of a conclusion. I have some hope, the game did make an autosave right before the final mission that you revert to after the credits roll so that DLC could be easily integrated, but I’m not hopeful. Right now, my eyes see wasted effort, my mind can think of only negative thoughts, and my heart feels only pain. I think I’ll log off now and do something else that had an infinitely more satisfying conclusion, perhaps the final episode of the Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica. 343 Industries, you are my only hope now and you can wake me any time cause I’m wanting to be needed at this moment.
Modifié par Outreach117, 09 mars 2012 - 06:08 .
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