Second, fans don't "own" the game's content at all, they are entitled to hating whatever they want but players who think media are created to solely do what the fans want are dead wrong. That would just deliver plain old boring and forgettable work, becouse it will not surprise you in unpleasant ways which good stories need to do to stay interesting.
Third, I just wanted to post a different view on the ending to counter all the hatred, becouse I thought the ending was brilliant.
A good ending to a story isn't one that makes sense in every way and wraps up with everybody walking away happy. For me a good ending is one that makes you think and ask yourself: What did I see just now? This ending represents the essence of what the Mass Effect series is about in one last major choice. It blurs the lines of order and chaos, black and white, to convey its message of needed balance. It makes the story a shade of grey.
Storywise Bioware needed for it to be a bit vague after the reaper hit. By making it so that we do not know whether Shepard is alive, dead or harvested by the reapers, it lets us as players accept that Shepard is no longer Shepard. (some people call this "a dream" but I think it is more like a metaphysical reality) By now every character that shows up stands for a metaphor, with Shepard being the metaphor that stands for humanity, that has to make its choice regarding its own future. The illusive man is the metaphor that stand for renegade that needs order to accomplish its plans. And anderson represents paragon that needs chaos to accomplish its plans. The lines are blurred now but one thing is obvious, inevitably chaos will need order and order will need chaos. Making synergy, which provides the balance between both, humanities next (and final?) step in evolution.
There are three ways in which you can determine the fate of humanity and for all of them it is clear what they represent. One of the endings even ends with Shepard not dying. Yes the Mass Effect universe as we know it is at an end in all three endings, but that is not the choice we were asked to make.
The real choice here is the way in which you as a player choose to advance humanity, and all three options have vastly different consequences. It is as if people that hate this ending so much expect the choice to have major influence on how the end video looks, but most commenters don't even think for one second what theoretically the different endings mean for us as a species. It is a shame that so many people fail to reckognize that the lack of exposition is what makes the ending so good, this is what lets the players think about: What will happen now? What will come of humanity this way?
I really don't get the hatred for the ending. By literary standards it is so far ahead of other games. It is short, powerfull, wraps up the entire ME universe in one choice. And it left stuff to the immagination, which is something a lot of writers tend to forget. Sure you had your own ending in mind, but do people really want it to end on a bland happy go lucky note? Bioware wants us to think about this ending and what it meant, they said so themselves, and they achieved it.
I just really hope they don't change the ending, a lot of great stories have vague endings and sometimes it makes them all the better for it. To me, less (explanation) means more, with Mass Effect this is totally the case. The game has a thousand varriables and instead of trying to weigh them all in (which would have never worked) the writers chose to resort to our immagination which is, as most creative writers know, the best tool you have as a writer. Also, everything that happened after the big choice makes the choice less important. Bioware's writers cut everything to make the ending to the point and by doing so prevented it from becoming convoluted. This has to be praised, becouse writers writing within the Sci-fi genre and even within the Mass Effect universe itself have a risk to walk into this trap.
Some of the best stories in history enraged their audiences when first published. I think in retrospect the Mass Effect series will be seen as the first game that uplifted the medium to a digital work of literature. Good work writers at bioware, I am trully inspired by what you have accomplished with the medium.
Signed,
A fellow game designer
Modifié par Ryokun1989, 16 mars 2012 - 01:55 .
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just so incomplete for a series that involved the player like ME did and evolved characters like ME did.
the whole thing is so stupid, that im haveing trouble getting my thoughts in order
its not that 1 or 2 points are off, the whole thing is idiotic:sick:
