jdranetz wrote...
I reached the ending. I got over my disappointment. Most people don't have lives they are entirely happy with. The modern RPG creates an alternative life. MMOs have received most of the press about the negative consequences; job loss, suicide. The MMO is more dangerous than an A.I. driven RPG, in that in an MMO co-players drag up into all hours. With a stand alone A.I. RPG, your character is where you last left him/her off. Bioware has to realize that when you make an RPG so immersive, so to speak, you risk the chance that by killing off that character in the end, is like holding a person underwater until they drown in this immersive environment. It's a game, I get it, it has to end some time. This way, Bioware can continue on to new projects, rather than "typecast" themselves as the "Mass Effect" company, like Paramount and Star Trek. You want people to care for the characters, you want people to enjoy being Shepard, don't be surprised when people go through a grieving process when you kill off main characters and ultimately, Commander Shepard. I made my Shepard to look like myself, like millions of other players. A self, minus the potbelly, instead, looking like I did when I graduated college. My Shepard became idealized alter-ego of myself (I hope that wasn't too redundant). Things haven't been great for me, for a lot of years, it was nice to escape into the character, to fool myself into feeling I was actually accomplishing something. This is Psych 101, and the doctors running Bioware, Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, should know this. Please, I don't mean to be condescending, With so many people becoming Shepard, I'm surprised someone hasn't jumped off a bridge or stepped in front of a train dressed in full N7 armor, not unlike the laughable Conrad Werner, but in a much sadder and heart wrenching version.
Most people are not upset with this being the end of Shepard's story-most everyone understood that. It's the less than satisfactory way this one ended. One of the last things Shepard says is, "I don't know." Sharp contrast with what Mordin says to Shepard as he goes off to die or what Thane did that hastened his death. Shepard follows up those scintillating words with, "then there will be peace" a question about the Synthesis choice. The kid says, "the cycle will end". Ok, this is ambiguous. A cycle is 50k years, so does that mean they still might come back or not?
To reiterate a point many of us make constantly-we understood that Shepard's story was done. We accept that that might mean the high probability Shepard would die, but our choices should matter, and a happy, sappy ending should be possible just as much as a sad distressing ending should be probable. It just needs to make sense and so on.
I would like the chance to even see Shepard survive and see impending doom-failure. I would also like to see Shepard die and see the aftermath of his/her success. And everything in between and yes, yes, yes, I'd like to see Shepard live and everything is saved. Total win. Why not? What is so wrong with that? Some of these things seemed to be what I was working for in building up all those war assets and in making the decisions I made. But, you can't infer from that that the issues or sadness or anger that people have is because the game didn't have a happy ending (well, if that's based on Shepard living, it sort of did) or because it's the end of Mass Effect. Which is not even necessarily true. There might be and ME4, though it might be called something else.
Basically, there's not much, no strike that, there's nothing that makes sense in the ending we now have, and that's what's wrong with it.