This game is Art. And it's a blockbuster.
I know everyone is posting their thoughts and this thread will probably quickly get swept under the pages. I'll try to keep this brief and if any of the bioware guys happen to see, well, like the millions of us out there commenting, I would love of course to hear your honest thoughts. I know I won't (I shouldn't) hear any explanations and literary analyses, not from the BW developers, anyway, I doubt we'll hear much from them on that regardless. But on the concept of gaming as art and, what I have to say below, man, I'd love to hear thoughts:
The ending was poetic. It was beautiful. I sat and watched the ending with a feeling of satisfaction and, in a weird way, sadness. These feelings didn't come from the game alone; if I remove myself from the game a little, I realize that this “feeling” that I got from the game is the same sort of feeling I get when I finish a really great novel, or a poem, a great film, or amazing music. It's sort of an enlightened feeling. I've never had that happen before in a video game. Certainly not with a space opera, anyway.
There's a lot of arguments running the forums right now and both BW and EA are absolutely listening. I used to work at a big media company (in Chicago) and our VP knew a number of guys who worked at EA LA. The type of feedback, ehh maybe not from us here in the forums, but from the press and from things like the Child's Play drive, are definitely getting their attention. But regardless of whether or not this attention is going to convince BW
to create a new ending or some type of “happily ever after” comic remains to be seen.
But I can with confidence say that the endings we are presented with were crafted from the hearts of those crazies up in Edmonton, and they mean the best with what they made. These endings were important to them and they were made artistically, not a PR stunt, not a way to sell more DLC or anything along those lines.
The meat of what I want to get it with this: This is a blockbuster game, this is a huge franchise, and because of that, there's a very large number of players who fork over very large sums of cash to be entertained. Enlightenment is awesome, but to most of us, we really just want to be entertained. As do most anyone who loves to read or watch a movie or listen to great music.
So it's a tough call for the BW guys. Make an ending that's enlightening, or make one that's, err, entertaining! If we were playing Dear Esther (a little indie game from Scotland) we'd expect a beautiful, enlightening ending. But many of us don't want or expect such an ending for ME3. Because, to many of us (not all of us, I'm still torn myself) we just want something fun. I won't lie, I'm sad I never got to have that second bottle of Brandy with Chakwas. I never got my Shep to see Miranda again. Ah! It aches right now just to think about it. Wow, a video game has never
had that kind of profound effect on me as a player. And from the sounds of it, many of you too, fellow gamers!
Let's look at a movie as a metaphor: there's a little Austrian film called The White Ribbon, which has an ambiguous, difficult, and yes, enlightening ending that leaves the viewer exhausted. What would happen if Michael Bay's Transformer's franchise ended in a way like the White Ribbon ended (this is just an example, ANY movie that has an ambiguous and poetic ending could count)? It'd be catastrophic! Us viewers would hate it! We'd be profoundly upset! I doubt Paramount would change the ending, though. For one thing, history has shown thatin movies anyway, the press isn't kind to that (like Heaven's Gate in 1979—they changed the movie to catastrophic results). It could show the artist as being either weak or not having a full vision of his/her work.
BW probably knows that their franchise is much more akin to Transformers than to the White Ribbon. Again, ME is huge around the world. So, yes, the easy and perhaps even preferred way would be to give us the ending we want. We want to be entertained here as we do with Transformers. They know who their target audience is and they probably knew the ending we would have liked to have seen.
But we didn't get that, we got something...memorable. As Hudson said in that interview, it is memorable. But something else is happening too. A video game did what a movie can't do. Not now anyway. It's insane! Think about it, a video game blockbuster franchise stepped deeply into the arena of “poetic art.” What types of endings we'd only see in a game like Dear Esther is now, here, at Transformers level. That's a big thing. It's not a game about beating the reapers anymore. It's about life and philosophy and love and fear I mean the abstractions go on. Other games have tried this (I think Deus Ex HR tried it. Not well, it was dramatically and plot-wise weak) and failed. BW didn't fail at all; our anger and sadness is all a part of what happened in-game. I think
that's why so much passion is behind it, at least partially.
I don't think changing the ending would be for the best, but it could happen (like I said, I still want that brandy with Chakwas). I also think that we so badly WANT the ending we imagined we'd choose in our 30+ hours of playing the game, we're forming fabricated fantasies of what happens at the end. That's fine by BW, we can debate it forever; again, I imagine Hudson and the gang probably get a smile from that (as would any artist). But as we argue all this, think about it a little more outside the game, look at the industry and video games and look at what BW did here.
Again, this thread will probably quickly get swept over, but if you read it this far, thanks very much, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts. In a weird way, and again it might be the profound effect of the game on me, I feel oddly at peace now with my own internal struggle over that dang ending after having written this. So, yea: thanks BW, regardless how I feel about it, it most certainly is memorable (in more ways than one).
Edit: Sorry weird formatting issues had to fix.
Modifié par PeterG1, 15 mars 2012 - 06:09 .
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