355 réponses à ce sujet

[The Razman]

Darkeus wrote...

The Razman wrote...

PresidentCowboy wrote...

I was very confused about the endings at first. Not angry, not upset, just confused. Now I'm sort of upset but only because what happens evokes such a strong emotional response from me. It's harrowing but there's hope in there too. But what happens just makes makes it hard for me to even consider playing one of the games again. Too painful knowing how things end up.

I think this epitomises a lot of the feelings which people have towards the endings. A depressing ending retcons your feelings of hope and happiness towards the whole series. It's unfortunate ... but in effect, it shows how the ending has been effective.

Or how bad of an ending it truly is....

Goes both ways man...

Not really. Even something which leaves you feeling depressed as hell isn't bad. Take The Butterfly Effect ... they had to change the ending to that movie just because the ending was so depressing it actually made audiences distraught watching it. But does that make that ending "bad"? No.

[PanzerDivision]

Lord Aesir wrote...

PanzerDivision wrote...

The Razman wrote...

PanzerDivision wrote...

a_guy_on_teh_interweb wrote...

Most people are mad that there is no "happy" ending. Each option involves major losses.

I personally am not a fan of them, but i'm not really that mad about it. It could have been better, but it could have been worse.

That's not the point, I'm totally OK with desperate and depressing ends, but I wouldn't mind a proper epilogue showing the outcomes of my decisions, and there's none. Just fade to black and credits rolling, with a lot of unanswered questions.

So ... because it leaves us with some questions unanswered, that makes it a bad ending?

There's no sense of closure at all, yes, this makes it a bad ending.

And your decisions throughout the game don't really matter at the end, it's just a poor and lazy mechanic of "push button, recieve ending"

You can see pretty much every ending with just 1 playthrough, just  need reload... That simply remove any reason to replay with another Shepard. Choices don't matter.

That's like saying there wasn't any reason to play ME1 again just because the endings relied on the council choice.

I think you're forgetting that ME1 was the first installment of a trilogy, and your choices in that game was supposed to matter on the long run.

[Heimdall]

akasheppy wrote...

Dark I could handle. Depressing I could handle. Heck, I pretty much expected Shepard wasn't getting away with a happy ending. I mean, I hoped she could, but all I was really doing was hoping. What I wasn't expecting was for the culmination of all my choices in all 3 games to lead to the same ending you got, or some random other person got. I thought my journey was supposed to be special, unique, or at the very least tailored to the decisions I had made. But no, we all get the same bleak endings regardless of what we have done. We all get the same deus ex machina sort of plot twist out of nowhere that hasn't even been alluded to in the slightest. We all get the same ambigious attempt at an epilogue that poses more questions than it answers.

So yeah, in my opinion, it is that bad.

I thought it was clever.

Come on, we've been repeatedly confronted with the impossibility of defeating the Reapers conventially.  No solution has ever been alluded to.  A deus ex machina type solution was somewhat unavoidable.

Your choices, thoughout all three games, have always had only minimal effect on the ending save for the last mission.  I was quite happy.  I shaped my Shepard as he lived.  In the end ME3, I was able to shape Shepard as he died.  That provided some contentment to me.

[Shinwolverine]

umm yeah it is pretty bad. Ive put so many hours into the mass effect series and ive been nickle and dimed by bioware because I want the best possible experience. But then to find out that none of that **** mattered and that the ending comes down to 3 choices none of which are good at all. All of them leave you disappointed. Its like they just got lazy or something. I could think of a million better endings that actually make sense.

[Heimdall]

PanzerDivision wrote...

I think you're forgetting that ME1 was the first installment of a trilogy, and your choices in that game was supposed to matter on the long run.

Nonsense, the point was that playing ME3 was pointless because choices throughout ME3 did not have a large imact on the ending.  The same was true of ME1.

[Darkeus]

The Razman wrote...

Darkeus wrote...

The Razman wrote...

PresidentCowboy wrote...

I was very confused about the endings at first. Not angry, not upset, just confused. Now I'm sort of upset but only because what happens evokes such a strong emotional response from me. It's harrowing but there's hope in there too. But what happens just makes makes it hard for me to even consider playing one of the games again. Too painful knowing how things end up.

I think this epitomises a lot of the feelings which people have towards the endings. A depressing ending retcons your feelings of hope and happiness towards the whole series. It's unfortunate ... but in effect, it shows how the ending has been effective.

Or how bad of an ending it truly is....

Goes both ways man...

Not really. Even something which leaves you feeling depressed as hell isn't bad. Take The Butterfly Effect ... they had to change the ending to that movie just because the ending was so depressing it actually made audiences distraught watching it. But does that make that ending "bad"? No.

Actually, it does make the ending bad.  If it had to be changed, then it was not up to snuff.  Causing an emotional response in someone does not make teh ending good, especially if the response is hate and revulsion.  Conjuring sadness and hate and vitriol is not a good ending my friend.

It is a bad ending that usually creates those emotonal responses.  Sad ending?  Whatever, it was never a good prognosis for the galaxy.  Shepard dies?  There was always the possibility.

But that has nothing to do with poor writing, plot holes, lack of resolution, lack of effect from all of your choices and the other myriad of issues people have with teh ending that has nothing to do with if it was a sad ending or not.

Modifié par Darkeus, 13 mars 2012 - 02:15 .

[LeTtotheC]

 I was like "Fine", than I was pretty "Waaaah?", and no I'm just angry about it.  Why?  Because it deserved a much better ending than this half arsed job.  Though it's not quite as bad as the Mcguffin of an ending in nu-BSG, ME3 betrays the emotional investment of the player.  It would have been far better to have an ending or two which were far more positive than this one.  But then that would have required a more indepth diecussion and reasoning behind the Reapers, and a total re-write of the last 4 to 5 minutes.  

Whilst the game was centered around Shephard, it was equally about the characters who fought alongside him/her against the Reapers.  There's no closer as to what happens to anyone left behind.  The ending really does feel like the writers tied themselves up in knots trying to figure a satisfactory ending, and gave up because of some looming deadline imposed by either EA or bioware.  My honest opinion is that the game needed another six months of development, maybe even a year to get it right.  It's a franchise that deserved to get it right, but ended up getting it wrong, and all in order to rush out a product that needed more work doing to it.  (The glitches alone could of taken another couple of months to iron out).  

In short profit came before storyline and polish.  

[Mx_CN3]

Wuppie wrote...

My fav ending to any story - Blade Runner! Is he a replicant? You cannot say for sure and I love that.

Inception is a close second for similar reasons.

Ending without full closure are fantastic, the problem with that kind of ending is ensuring enough closure of the right kind is given and that the right questions are left hanging,

I fear with ME3 whilst I quite like the endings (apparently I am a rare beast according to this thread) BioWare may have not got the balance quite right.

See, that's fine to like endings like that.  The problem with ME3's "question ending" is that we were told by BioWare that we would get closure.  Yet instead of closure, we got questions.  I agree that Blade Runner had a great question ending, but Blade Runner was not Mass Effect.  It was not the end of a 100+ hour trilogy (though there are more Blade Runner books, right?), and it did not routinely give the viewers the opportunity to alter the story, then suddenly tell us that no matter what we chose, we'd all get the same ending.  They also didn't completely change the story in an incredibly dramatic way that completely changes everything we thought we knew about bad guys (i.e. "it turns out that there are no humans, we're all Replicants!"  But even worse than that, because that would probably fit in the Blade Runner universe somewhere).

I also think that the endings didn't get the "balance" right, but that's a little to subjective to argue.

[Heimdall]

Shinwolverine wrote...

umm yeah it is pretty bad. Ive put so many hours into the mass effect series and ive been nickle and dimed by bioware because I want the best possible experience. But then to find out that none of that **** mattered and that the ending comes down to 3 choices none of which are good at all. All of them leave you disappointed. Its like they just got lazy or something. I could think of a million better endings that actually make sense.

So you played the game for the ending?  I thought you said you wanted a great experience?  I enjoyed the endings for the lack of perfect results.  I loved the message that the war for survival demands sacrifice of us all, Shepard being no exception.

[bleachorange]

Wuppie wrote...

The Razman wrote...

Darth Malignus wrote...

The Razman wrote...

PanzerDivision wrote...

a_guy_on_teh_interweb wrote...

Most people are mad that there is no "happy" ending. Each option involves major losses.

I personally am not a fan of them, but i'm not really that mad about it. It could have been better, but it could have been worse.

That's not the point, I'm totally OK with desperate and depressing ends, but I wouldn't mind a proper epilogue showing the outcomes of my decisions, and there's none. Just fade to black and credits rolling, with a lot of unanswered questions.

So ... because it leaves us with some questions unanswered, that makes it a bad ending?

No, but when pretty much ALL questions you'd might have about the characters you've teamed up with or met in the 3 games are unanswered, then it's a bad ending.

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't care less about how many kids Garrus has 20 years after the final showdown or if EDI and Jeff get married. But some closure of ANY kind would be nice.

The future is pretty uncertain for the whole galaxy by the end.

We had closure just before the final mission. More would just be fanservice. In fact, a lot of the game was already fanservice, showing us where the characters from the series are now and where they're going in the future. What more do you want?

Clearly they want their hands held and get walked through each companions "life after them reaper thingies". Something some people dont.
The ability to read-between-the-lines is a lost art. Unless it is subtitled and captioned its crap nowdays (yes I am over 30yrs old and a gamer, with children, and a spouse - the HORROR!)

It's not a lost art - Frank Herbert was one of the greatest ever at writing and 'leaving it to the reader to read between the lines'. And look at what he accomplished, even incomplete until his son finished it. No, my complaints did lie in the fact that Bioware completely eschewed choice in the endingand lost all sense of resolution; and unless your war score is high enough and pick the right choice, you don't get the true true story that's hidden behind the scenes.

[akasheppy]

I'm still holding out hope that the "end" wasn't the end. The rest of the game was too amazing for them to have fallen short in the last ten minutes. As it is, it almosts feel as if they'd dug themselves into a hole. They'd created this wholly unstoppable being and were then faced with trying to find a way to stop it, and I think they failed. But again, simply stating my opinion~

[Psychlonus]

Time travel and parallel universes cure all ills. A DLC time travel mission is what is needed. Sci fi fans usually complain that there is too much of this in sci fi. But ME needs it now.

Modifié par Psychlonus, 13 mars 2012 - 02:19 .

[Wuppie]

Mx_CN3 wrote...

Wuppie wrote...

My fav ending to any story - Blade Runner! Is he a replicant? You cannot say for sure and I love that.

Inception is a close second for similar reasons.

Ending without full closure are fantastic, the problem with that kind of ending is ensuring enough closure of the right kind is given and that the right questions are left hanging,

I fear with ME3 whilst I quite like the endings (apparently I am a rare beast according to this thread) BioWare may have not got the balance quite right.

See, that's fine to like endings like that.  The problem with ME3's "question ending" is that we were told by BioWare that we would get closure.  Yet instead of closure, we got questions.  I agree that Blade Runner had a great question ending, but Blade Runner was not Mass Effect.  It was not the end of a 100+ hour trilogy (though there are more Blade Runner books, right?), and it did not routinely give the viewers the opportunity to alter the story, then suddenly tell us that no matter what we chose, we'd all get the same ending.  They also didn't completely change the story in an incredibly dramatic way that completely changes everything we thought we knew about bad guys (i.e. "it turns out that there are no humans, we're all Replicants!"  But even worse than that, because that would probably fit in the Blade Runner universe somewhere).

I also think that the endings didn't get the "balance" right, but that's a little to subjective to argue.

I am somewhat confused as to what closure people wanted in general. Each of the companions story arcs get resolved in some way prior to the final mission. The final mission itself provides closure for the Shepard v Reaper arc... What more did you want (specifically)?

I am at a loss to think of a major story arc left hanging? Whether Garrus goes home or not is not closure, its epilogue that is not neccessary. The sniper scene on the CItadel seemed like closure for Garrus. Tali very much gets her story finished up nicely. Did you want to be told what city she lived in? What for? Miranda gets mega closure. Kaiden (and I assume Ashley as they seem interchangeable in ME3) comes to understand Shepard.... What am I missing?

[LeTtotheC]

Urdnot Grim wrote...

Shinwolverine wrote...

umm yeah it is pretty bad. Ive put so many hours into the mass effect series and ive been nickle and dimed by bioware because I want the best possible experience. But then to find out that none of that **** mattered and that the ending comes down to 3 choices none of which are good at all. All of them leave you disappointed. Its like they just got lazy or something. I could think of a million better endings that actually make sense.

Well, about only two of the writers who'd been working on the story up to ME2 remained when ME3 started going into development.

Well that just about explains everything - from the drop in the quality of the general script, to the "What the...?" ending.  Look, you need someone with either vision or to have the whole thing planned out in advance if you want continuity in your storyline.  Take for example the 90s show Babylon 5.  It's one of the few sci-fi shows to have kept a consistent story arc going, mainly because it was the brainchild of just one guy who had planned it out roughly before hand.  Yes the acting could be ropey, melodramatic and the sets were cheap, but it made up for it with one hell of an emotional punch - things mattered and had huge repurcussions.  ME1 & 2 felt like that, that it was building to something epic.  Only they didn't.  They built towards a somewhat messy and pieced together third act that made a mockery of the story telling up until then. 

[Millmedda]

When I fnished , I was like

d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/2442999_700b.jpg

[Wuppie]

bleachorange wrote...

Wuppie wrote...

[Clearly they want their hands held and get walked through each companions "life after them reaper thingies". Something some people dont.
The ability to read-between-the-lines is a lost art. Unless it is subtitled and captioned its crap nowdays (yes I am over 30yrs old and a gamer, with children, and a spouse - the HORROR!)

It's not a lost art - Frank Herbert was one of the greatest ever at writing and 'leaving it to the reader to read between the lines'. And look at what he accomplished, even incomplete until his son finished it. No, my complaints did lie in the fact that Bioware completely eschewed choice in the endingand lost all sense of resolution; and unless your war score is high enough and pick the right choice, you don't get the true true story that's hidden behind the scenes.

I suspect you missed my point. Writers still get the concept of reading bewteen the lines, toadys audience fail miserably with it. And if a story isnt wrapped up all nice and neat with a pretty pink bow, then clearly its ****!

[Mx_CN3]

Lord Aesir wrote...

I thought it was clever.

Come on, we've been repeatedly confronted with the impossibility of defeating the Reapers conventially.  No solution has ever been alluded to.  A deus ex machina type solution was somewhat unavoidable.

Your choices, thoughout all three games, have always had only minimal effect on the ending save for the last mission.  I was quite happy.  I shaped my Shepard as he lived.  In the end ME3, I was able to shape Shepard as he died.  That provided some contentment to me.

But most of the complaining isn't about the Crucible.  I actually thought the idea of the superweapon was handled very well, as it was introduced early on and was the crux of your plans the whole time.  That said, there could have been much better ones, such as the Klendagon weapon/the thing that killed the derelict Reaper from ME2 (I think they're the same thing?), which was already an established part of the universe.

And you are right about your choices not really having an effect on the final decision.  No matter what you do in ME1, you either save or kill the council.  No matter what you do in ME2, you either save or destroy the Collector base.  What I think people thought they would get is something like the outro to ME2, where your decisions end up with the possibility of somebody dying, and effecting what you see when the game is done.  And really, in a game that advertises itself as one where you make decisions, and they have consequences, doesn't it feel a bit odd to, at the end of an epic trilogy, have all of those decisions just... forgotten?

In regards to what happens to Shepard, I think that that is the only thing that anyone can agree on having closure on.  We know what happens to him/her.  It might not be what some wanted, but it is closure nonetheless.  What people want (again, I think) is that same kind of closure for the rest of the story.

Of course, I don't complain to be the spokesman for all Mass Effect players, but this is what I've felt, judging from these forums alone.

[Farbautisonn]

The endings are bad because they cant even be arsed to maintain the logic and lore of their own setting. People complain about "rageing fans" wanting a "disney ending" when in reality, the endings we are left with are more disney-esque in their naiive feebleness, than most anything the fanfic community could have come up with. It insults my intelligence that bioware thinks im stupid enought not to notice plotholes that could sink the titanic again.

[The Razman]

Actually, it does make the ending bad.  If it had to be changed, then it was not up to snuff.  Causing an emotional response in someone does not make teh ending good, especially if the response is hate and revulsion.  Conjuring sadness and hate and vitriol is not a good ending my friend.

Not if it was trying to make you happy, no. If it was trying to make you sad ... then it's spot on. If you're going to accept games as an art form, then you have to accept that they're not always going to pander to our emotional desires. And that's good, because that's what makes the best art ... things which make us feel things we don't want to.

It is a bad ending that usually creates those emotonal responses.  Sad ending?  Whatever, it was never a good prognosis for the galaxy.  Shepard dies?  There was always the possibility.

But that has nothing to do with poor writing, plot holes, lack of resolution, lack of effect from all of your choices and the other myriad of issues people have with teh ending that has nothing to do with if it was a sad ending or not.

I think people really want to believe that, you included. Because it being a sad ending simply isn't a complaint you can air ... the response is too obvious. So a lot of people are legitimising their feeling of disappointment and sadness with complaints about plotholes and such. If we had a happier ending ... I believe a lot of the complaints would've failed to emerge.

I'm not saying that complaints about plotholes and such aren't legitimate ... but it's not logical to have seen the Normandy at the end and immediately gone "OMG WHAT? THAT MAKES NO SENSE THIS IS A RUBBISH ENDING". It's simply not that jarring and inexplicable a factor ... it's not a massive leap of logic to explain why the Normandy is doing what it's doing, is it? The sheer ferocity of the complaints against the ending seem to be stemming from another place, an emotional one ... which comes out occasionally, in posts which suggest things like "don't ask for a brighter ending, ask for a more satisfying one" or ones which detail sheer unhappiness at not having proper "closure".

All I'm saying is ... the fact that you feel this strongly is a sign that the emotional aspect of the ending worked. How you channel that is your own choice.

[akasheppy]

I for one think the entire ending was one story arc left dangling in the air. Given what we know about certain elements in the ME universe vital to interspace travel (a fact proven in a DLC), there is a major glaring problem with how it ended...

[bleetman]

Wuppie wrote...

And if a story isnt wrapped up all nice and neat with a pretty pink bow, then clearly its ****!

I'd consider a story that ended with massive, sweeping changes to the very fundamental nature of life itself within that setting ending without any explanation of the consequences to have some serious fundamental problems with its narrative, yes.

Modifié par bleetman, 13 mars 2012 - 02:29 .