so many lies so little time
A list of lies we were fed.
Débuté par
Dreez
, mars 18 2012 10:09
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#577
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 08:08
ZombifiedJake
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SalsaDMA wrote...
I can Hackett wrote...
jspiess wrote...
Awsome, but what was the yellow ending
Marauder Shields saves you?
Sneak preview of DLC ending.
#578
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 08:27
Mazandus
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Elhanan wrote...
While I am not fond of a Visitor approach, it is certainly plausibe in the Sci-Fi setting. And it could be worse; could have chosen to look like Emily Wong, Conrad Verner, or a Volus....
Actually, if instead of Starchild Shepard ended up talking to that Volus arms dealer from the Citadel and you find out he sold all organic life out with the stipulation that he would be the last organic harvested, it would have been ****ty, but it would have been BETTER THAN STARCHILD. (And rather than reinventing the whole mythos of the series in the last 5 minutes it would have reinforced a major theme, ie, people do dumb **** and Shepard can't be everywhere, all the time.) Regardless, it WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER AS THE VOLUS ARMS DEALER THAN AS STARCHILD.
#579
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 09:12
Mazandus
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As I try to sort this all out, this is the best summation I can come up with.
Most games do not give the player any choice in how the story progresses, the player controls their character, how they battle through conflicts and solves puzzles. Sometimes, in BW games especially, there are dialogue trees. The player is often at his/her leisure to complete the story objective at their own pace, unless its some kind of timed mission. Go play COD and then GTAIV and then ME2/ME3. Then go play Batman and Little Big Planet and WoW and Skyrim. Then think about the rest of this post.
The actual "choice" a player has over the outcome of the game is incredibly small. Often the only "choice" is whether or not the player will invest the time/effort into beating the game or acquiring the highest score or best items or whatever, and that's it. Sandbox or on rails shooter, the story of the game is almost always out of the player's control in how the story will progress, the only choice is if the player WILL progress the story. Lately we've been getting games with some small choice in how the ending of a game plays out.
Did Niko lose his cousin or his lady love? Did the dragon born side with the rebels or the empire? Did the Grey Warden choose Alistair to be king or not? The idea that modern AAA games are going to have multiple Maniac Mansion style endings is a bit out of touch with the industry for the past 20 years.
Buuuuuuut...no other game franchise made so much huss and fuss over "choice" and "decisions" and importing saves from title to title. This is where the problem lies.
On the one hand, no one with any reasonable expectation of anything would honestly think BW would create a hundred different endings to account for all the permutations of x character's fate and did Shepard do y or z or whatever. Nor would such an approach satisfy anyone, and it would take an extraordinary amount of work. That does not, however, excuse their decision to give us this Starchild speech and red, blue or green magic wave to go along with our crash landing cut scene. How BW thought this wouldn't be offensive to anyone who has played the previous titles, or how they wouldn't expect the "harshness" of the criticism when the ending is essentially a self ironic dig at themselves and a disdainful hack with a hatchet at us, I don't grasp.
And this is the problem. BW dug themselves into a huge hole, and since they couldn't figure out how to dig their way out, they used ye olde super powerful starchild to write themselves (himself) out of it. The ME3 ending is the equivalent of the Lost "we're all dead and have been for 5 seasons ending" the Dallas JR is actually alive "shower dream", any and every comic book character who has been killed and resurrected a hundred times, or yes, the olde standby "it was just a dream."
Its cheap. Its shoddy. Its unsatisfying to the audience and I can't imagine it was satisfying to the writer(s). So why do it?
Especially when BW has put such seeming "weight" into Shepard's "choices", the ending and TBH the game, just doesn't live up to the hype. Whether or not you saved Wrex in ME1, it means nothing. He will have some dialogue. Shepard will still decide on the genophage cure. Whether or not you blew up the Geth station in ME2, it won't make a difference, Shepard will still go to Rannoch and decide their fate. Whether or not Shepard saved the council or the Destiny Ascension in ME1, the council will still exist in ME3 as will the DA. The rachni queen alive? Dead? No difference save in the name this arbitrary character is given. No matter how many war assets you have, Shepard will still meet his fate when Harbinger blasts him. No matter how many multiplayer matches you win or how much time you spend space fishing.
What I'm getting at here, is the problem of choice. The illusion of choice, if you will. The player cannot decide if Shepard saves the galaxy, what he/she can decide though is which of a hundred different flavors of bagels and cream cheese he would like to eat, (to paraphrase George Carlin.) and then the player gets to top it off with the ultimate decision, does he/she want red, blue, or green food coloring?
That's the huge let down here. And, like I've said in other threads, I actually wouldn't mind the ending, if it wasn't executed so horribly, and if the way it was presented was more in line with the rest of the series.
I would have preferred Harbinger to Starchild. Anytime a writer has to invent a brand new character to deliver the final conflict and reinvent their whole mythos, well that writer should probably just leave the writing to better writers, because it's not something you should ever do, especially when you have previous characters who would fulfill the same role.
I would have preferred more exposition on Shepard as synthetic throughout ME3 leading up to the final choice considering the sheer amount of dialogue that covers every other issue in the game, (Especially considering synthetic vs organic is the "core issue" of the series. since when I'd like to know? in the last 5 minutes, yes, otherwise...not...so...much...), rather than one line of throwaway dialogue which somehow justifies the whole end proceedings.
The sad fact is the game, as we have it, appears to come from people who care less about their IP than we the consumer do, and that is never, ever a good place, for either party.
Most games do not give the player any choice in how the story progresses, the player controls their character, how they battle through conflicts and solves puzzles. Sometimes, in BW games especially, there are dialogue trees. The player is often at his/her leisure to complete the story objective at their own pace, unless its some kind of timed mission. Go play COD and then GTAIV and then ME2/ME3. Then go play Batman and Little Big Planet and WoW and Skyrim. Then think about the rest of this post.
The actual "choice" a player has over the outcome of the game is incredibly small. Often the only "choice" is whether or not the player will invest the time/effort into beating the game or acquiring the highest score or best items or whatever, and that's it. Sandbox or on rails shooter, the story of the game is almost always out of the player's control in how the story will progress, the only choice is if the player WILL progress the story. Lately we've been getting games with some small choice in how the ending of a game plays out.
Did Niko lose his cousin or his lady love? Did the dragon born side with the rebels or the empire? Did the Grey Warden choose Alistair to be king or not? The idea that modern AAA games are going to have multiple Maniac Mansion style endings is a bit out of touch with the industry for the past 20 years.
Buuuuuuut...no other game franchise made so much huss and fuss over "choice" and "decisions" and importing saves from title to title. This is where the problem lies.
On the one hand, no one with any reasonable expectation of anything would honestly think BW would create a hundred different endings to account for all the permutations of x character's fate and did Shepard do y or z or whatever. Nor would such an approach satisfy anyone, and it would take an extraordinary amount of work. That does not, however, excuse their decision to give us this Starchild speech and red, blue or green magic wave to go along with our crash landing cut scene. How BW thought this wouldn't be offensive to anyone who has played the previous titles, or how they wouldn't expect the "harshness" of the criticism when the ending is essentially a self ironic dig at themselves and a disdainful hack with a hatchet at us, I don't grasp.
And this is the problem. BW dug themselves into a huge hole, and since they couldn't figure out how to dig their way out, they used ye olde super powerful starchild to write themselves (himself) out of it. The ME3 ending is the equivalent of the Lost "we're all dead and have been for 5 seasons ending" the Dallas JR is actually alive "shower dream", any and every comic book character who has been killed and resurrected a hundred times, or yes, the olde standby "it was just a dream."
Its cheap. Its shoddy. Its unsatisfying to the audience and I can't imagine it was satisfying to the writer(s). So why do it?
Especially when BW has put such seeming "weight" into Shepard's "choices", the ending and TBH the game, just doesn't live up to the hype. Whether or not you saved Wrex in ME1, it means nothing. He will have some dialogue. Shepard will still decide on the genophage cure. Whether or not you blew up the Geth station in ME2, it won't make a difference, Shepard will still go to Rannoch and decide their fate. Whether or not Shepard saved the council or the Destiny Ascension in ME1, the council will still exist in ME3 as will the DA. The rachni queen alive? Dead? No difference save in the name this arbitrary character is given. No matter how many war assets you have, Shepard will still meet his fate when Harbinger blasts him. No matter how many multiplayer matches you win or how much time you spend space fishing.
What I'm getting at here, is the problem of choice. The illusion of choice, if you will. The player cannot decide if Shepard saves the galaxy, what he/she can decide though is which of a hundred different flavors of bagels and cream cheese he would like to eat, (to paraphrase George Carlin.) and then the player gets to top it off with the ultimate decision, does he/she want red, blue, or green food coloring?
That's the huge let down here. And, like I've said in other threads, I actually wouldn't mind the ending, if it wasn't executed so horribly, and if the way it was presented was more in line with the rest of the series.
I would have preferred Harbinger to Starchild. Anytime a writer has to invent a brand new character to deliver the final conflict and reinvent their whole mythos, well that writer should probably just leave the writing to better writers, because it's not something you should ever do, especially when you have previous characters who would fulfill the same role.
I would have preferred more exposition on Shepard as synthetic throughout ME3 leading up to the final choice considering the sheer amount of dialogue that covers every other issue in the game, (Especially considering synthetic vs organic is the "core issue" of the series. since when I'd like to know? in the last 5 minutes, yes, otherwise...not...so...much...), rather than one line of throwaway dialogue which somehow justifies the whole end proceedings.
The sad fact is the game, as we have it, appears to come from people who care less about their IP than we the consumer do, and that is never, ever a good place, for either party.
#580
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 09:26
abaris
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Mazandus wrote...
Its cheap. Its shoddy. Its unsatisfying to the audience and I can't imagine it was satisfying to the writer(s). So why do it?
For their sake I hope theys weren't satisfied.
But why do it? Because it's the easy way out when you painted yourself into a corner. Because they hoped with all the actiony bits and multiplayer, players wouldn't notice or mind. Because someone fancied himself as the new Kubrick going all psychodelic with a new Space Odissey.
In fact, I fear, that's one of the motivators for that kind of approach. It's only we're not writing 1969 anymore.
Modifié par abaris, 26 mars 2012 - 09:28 .
#581
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 09:31
tsd16
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thunderhawk862002 wrote...
Nice topic. You should also list the dates of the quotes to know where in the development cycle the product was at the time. Claims made in the month before release should be viewed differently than ones made a year before release.
It doesn't get any more true than this. I am a software developer, and alot of times things just don't go as smoothly as you would like, some things just get cut. (although, generally we do deliver exactly what our client wants, it just may be further releases down the road).
But we plan and say alot of things in the initial stages of development that may not happen. It doesn't make me a liar. Things change, something that seemed like a good idea or feasible 6 months ago may not be so now.
Its a totally different story if they said this stuff when development was wrapping up.
#582
Posté 26 mars 2012 - 09:38
abaris
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tsd16 wrote...
Its a totally different story if they said this stuff when development was wrapping up.
And they did exactly that. There's an interview floating around, given about a week prior to release where many things posted in the lie list are actually confirmed.
I think it's in the spoiler forum.
#583
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:35
chengthao
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you call it lying . . . i call it marketing
#584
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:37
Siven80
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PR and marketing talk.
I personally ignore all that. They arent promises.
I personally ignore all that. They arent promises.
#585
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:37
Lunatic LK47
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Posted multiple topics on this, and look what good that did me. Keep fighting the good fight.
#586
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:40
Artemis_Entrari
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chengthao wrote...
you call it lying . . . i call it marketing
Marketing is hyping features that are in the game to possibly exaggerated degrees. So while those features may not be as super awesome as the hype suggested they'd be, at least they're present.
Lying is hyping features that aren't even in the game.
#587
Guest_aLucidMind_*
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:40
Guest_aLucidMind_*
Guest_aLucidMind_*
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It doesn't mean that it is not a fact that they were lying.chengthao wrote...
you call it lying . . . i call it marketing
#588
Posté 28 mars 2012 - 10:41
Chris Priestly
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They are not lies. This thread is closed.
LOCKDOWN!
LOCKDOWN!
