133 réponses à ce sujet

[CrasVox]

BellaStrega wrote...

Actually...

you've never been involved in creating a long-term project with multiple installments, I see.

You lack of creative involvement is more obvious than his.

When telling a story, the first thing you do, if you are worth your weight, is know the end.  You must know where the story is going to go.  Multiple installments or not, if you do not know the end, then you cannot possibly plant the cues, the themes, the motiff, to build the foundation for the climax.

If the ending is only apparent in the final installment, then as a writer you did not do the best job possible. 

Could you imagine how odd it would have sounded if the original ending stayed in, this ending about dark energy, but there was no mention of such thing in ME2 (let us just ignore that the writers have no clue what dark energy actually is or what it does, or how it works).

That you get to the Crucible and star child says, We are the reapers, we are doing this to save the galaxy from Dark Energy.  

What!?!

Oh my goodness, that ending would have failed as bad as what we got.

But you know the end game, you can plant the cues in the story.  You can have Soverign act in a way that will not contradict the reaper's true purpose.  You can make sense of why Reapers want to build a new reaper in human form, we hear dark energy being whispered on several occasions, and in one big example with Haestrom.

You build it, and if you build it well, it will be subtle, it will be seemless, and the watch, player, reader, will have an expectation, hopefully close to the climax, of what is going to happen in the end.  Then when the reveal comes, it is that much more satisfying.

It is storytelling 101.  Know the plot, know the theme, and stay true.  It is when you deviate, it is when one installment does not blend with the next, that the story becomes disjointed, muddled, and the writer has done a poor job.

That is the case here.  The writers and production staff did a sub-par job.  Their development was not concise, the story was not consistent, and they did not stay true to the original plan, and it shows.  Leaks or not.

And if the artistic integrity of the game, and of the ending is so important, why should a leaked script be ground for a total re-write, but player criticism not be?

[spirosz]

I respect him and the writers, but from all I've gathered, there must of been some form of "pushing or force" aka being rushed to meet the deadline. Think about it, the stock photos from two important scenes, which one is optional (Tali's face), while the other happens after the credits. How certain ME2 crew was handled. How come in Shepard's flashback, it's all the same for most players, even if those characters weren't important to THEIR Shepard? The face import issue... the copy and paste endings, with minor differences at best. I'd even go as far to say that some of the re-used tracks from ME1 and 2 can be seen as being rushed because I don't remember any track from ME1 being in ME2 - now there was Vigil's song and a bit or Saren's, but those were mixed into something different, they weren't the exact same tracks. Now, there was one track that had an appropriate theme for being used - seeing David from Overload, that was beautiful, but the other one's seemed overused IMO.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game and there's going to be bugs here and there, but some of these things you just can't ignore.

[Total Biscuit]

Abisco wrote...

No, the leaked script came out. As such they had to change the ending. That's why he was making a new ending... he was rushed for time due to the leak.

Nope, the ending in the leak is the ending we ended up getting. Nothing changed. I've been complaining about it for almost 6 months now, depressingly.

As such the ending must have been written before November, since that's when the Beta leak occurred. There was an older script in the files too, from earlier in the same year, which didn't have any endings in it at all though, so itcouldnt have been that old though. Few months at most.

[Militarized]

Total Biscuit wrote...

Abisco wrote...

No, the leaked script came out. As such they had to change the ending. That's why he was making a new ending... he was rushed for time due to the leak.

Nope, the ending in the leak is the ending we ended up getting. Nothing changed. I've been complaining about it for almost 6 months now, depressingly.

As such the ending must have been written before November, since that's when the Beta leak occurred. There was an older script in the files too, from earlier in the same year, which didn't have any endings in it at all though, so itcouldnt have been that old though. Few months at most.

Interesting, did they say they were changing it? That seems to contradict the Final Hours App a little bit... though if it leaked and it's the same ending then wtf did they push it back for? We would have had the same crappy ending anyway. 

[Silveralen]

Stanley Woo wrote...

This is a reminder that disrespecting
our developers is a severe violation of our forum rules. Most of the
posts have been okay, but there are some that cross the line so please
be careful of getting too hyperbolic in your comments. Thank
you.

Any chance you can ban some of the developers for
not respecting the fans enough to be honest with us? That'd be really
appreciated.

Militarized wrote...

Total Biscuit wrote...

Abisco wrote...

No, the leaked script came out. As such they had to change the ending. That's why he was making a new ending... he was rushed for time due to the leak.

Nope, the ending in the leak is the ending we ended up getting. Nothing changed. I've been complaining about it for almost 6 months now, depressingly.

As such the ending must have been written before November, since that's when the Beta leak occurred. There was an older script in the files too, from earlier in the same year, which didn't have any endings in it at all though, so itcouldnt have been that old though. Few months at most.

Interesting, did they say they were changing it? That seems to contradict the Final Hours App a little bit... though if it leaked and it's the same ending then wtf did they push it back for? We would have had the same crappy ending anyway. 

I thought the push back had nothing to do with the ending? Gah, now I'm confused.

[Militarized]

What's that Biscuit just said isn't it? Or did I read it wrong? Either way, my OP still stands true I think. He shouldn't be writing notes about an ending that late into development. At that point it should all be polish polish polish.

[Militarized]

Has anyone received any new information from the Final Hours App relevant to the writing/process coming up with the ending? I'd really like to know and see if it changes my original feelings/OP

[The_Crazy_Hand]

 Not to mention, walters had the final boss fight removed because it made Mass Effect 3, a video game, feel too much like a video game.  That's not the train of thought I expect from people who develop video games.   It feels kind of like we got gyped of a final boss because he just felt like it.

[AJ2324]

"As far as Muzyka’s apology goes: It’s better than nothing, but any
apology with a “but” at the end should be taken with a hefty spoonful of
sea salt... Basically he is saying,....Look how exceptional our game is! We appreciate your concern and we are listening, but by the way did you notice all these perfect scores we just received? You’re delusional, but we care.”

Forbes on Ray Muzyka's tone during his so-called apology.

Source: http://www.forbes.co...ending-sort-of/

[Byrdman]

Guys for fraks sake keep it somewhat civil, we don't need Stanley patrolling our threads removing justifiably awful comments now do we? (not saying anything about you man, just that it sucks you have to do this). We'll win through civility, by being the better shep/femshep. Don't give the people that want to discredit us ammo

[Reign762]

I think Walters was just in over his head. I think he's best suited for character roles or assisting others on writing a larger whole of a sub-plot. Clearly management at BioWare saw something (after all they work with him) that he was capable of greater potential. I think in the end it just took him out of his element and the ME3 game suffered from it.

To me, ME3 was too linear in scale and choice really didn't matter at all. I think Walters would be a good novelist, but for a game about choice and choose your own adventure, he just wasn't right for the job.  (As lead writer)

Modifié par Reign762, 22 mars 2012 - 03:07 .

[AJ2324]

Byrdman wrote...

Guys for fraks sake keep it somewhat civil, we don't need Stanley patrolling our threads removing justifiably awful comments now do we? (not saying anything about you man, just that it sucks you have to do this). We'll win through civility, by being the better shep/femshep. Don't give the people that want to discredit us ammo

Not sure if your speaking in general or to me but I was just quoting Forbes:

Source: http://www.forbes.co...ending-sort-of/

As long as they make it right, I really don't care. I don't any of them from a hole in the wall. However when we are continually classified as some type of separate fan base that is disconnected from reality I feel that they are taking shots at us. I think Forbes feels the same way in our behalf.

[DemGeth]

Sequin wrote...

I don't believe Hudson lied about anything. I believe what he told us was true... from a certain point of view.

This pretty much exactly.  

[Vasparian]

Stanley Woo wrote...

This is a reminder that disrespecting our developers is a severe violation of our forum rules. Most of the posts have been okay, but there are some that cross the line so please be careful of getting too hyperbolic in your comments. Thank you.

How do you define disrespecting in this case? I mean I get the obvious, but when I call certain people liars, I am not being disrespectful.. I am being truthful.

Modifié par Vasparian, 22 mars 2012 - 03:09 .

[tomcplotts]

I actually don't blame the writers for this. I don't blame any of the creative team for any of this. If you play this game, there are some fairly obvious "ending seeds"--Liara's time capsule, for one--that are put into the game at strategic moments. That indicates that branches were being laid out for a variety of endings.

I think they were planning on much more for the end, and got slammed by the deadline suits, probably having some technical issues with making the ends they wanted to that was threatening the release date.

Too many narrative references through the game tell me that there really was the intention to deliver on some pretty tall promises but they didn't make it. They're not the first creative team to get crushed by the pressures of timelines and short staff, and they won't be the last.

Honestly, if the marketing promises were to be believed, this game needed probably another year or two to finish to properly deliver on them. Two years with split staffs (also dev'ing the Lucas evehicle, too) was probably too much to ask.

[Dr_Hello]

recentio wrote...

Having been involved in a few large-scale projects, I can tell you that it's not always the case that things will be rigorously and effectively planned in advance. If you have talented people, as BioWare does, you can often get away with it because your Aces will pull your a** out of the fire and sometimes come through with spontaneous brilliance that excessive planning might have stifled. By walking a fine line between careful preparation and on-the-spot execution, a team can reach (IMO) maximum potential. Still, this is a tightrope walk that not every project team should attempt.

Based on seeing patterns that resemble this before (or perhaps projecting because I think this resembles patterns I've seen before) I'm of the opinion that BioWare's ME3 team was harried with their backs to the wall at almost every level in the final months. Though something was scrabbled together, the fact that the influences jotted down "Brave New World" and "The Matrix [Revolutions]" are transparent in the final version imply to me that there was not enough time to fully develop the ideas that the ending juggles.

I feel this last-minute (by the looks of it) job is why the game does not build to the ending and hence why the ending does not 'fit' the game. Proper set up and continuity checking could have dealt with every plot hole and made this ending epically mind blowing. Instead the apparent thesis of the ending is not the same as the apparent thesis of the game.

Did they let it get away from them? Did they run out of time to do it right? I think so. Luckily, there's all the time in the world now. A six-month wait for a revised and expanded ending DLC would be welcomed with jubilee by a lot of customers. It's their chance to do everything they really wanted to do with it and blow us all out of the water. (Though I would suggest that "LOTS OF SPECULATION" is not a wise goal in a trilogy conclusion.)

Those are my thoughts looking on from the outside. Only BioWare knows what actually happened. I'm curious to know what stresses lead to this mess, honestly. It's probably an interesting behind-the-scenes story of its own.

Nods

If one wants to create a masterpiece, time shouldn't be a constraint but an ally instead because inspiration doesn't come on command. The leaked script must have caused setbacks also.
I shared the opinion made by Recentio, that the writing for the ending seems sloppy and, I would add its execution on screen cut and dry.

If that were a movie, not much could be done to resolve it after release. Not even a director's cut could be made if new footage needs to be shot.
Luckily Mass Effect is by medium a game, post-release content such as DLCs and patches can be created, distributed online, and seamlessly integrated within the original piece.

Modifié par Dr_Hello, 22 mars 2012 - 03:35 .

[Pain Train]

Your point is well stated. If the leadership did not have a meaningful idea of how to conclude this series as late as November, what where they doing the last two years? I have always felt the main dialog was weakest in this version and this might explain why - it was being written on the fly with no end goal in mind! That being the case, the endings we received were the only logical conclusions Hudson and staff could give us that would close ALL story arcs, everyone dies!

[Spectre_Shepard]

i think walters meant well.

look at the way other sic fi stories have ended. battlestar galactica. lost.

maybe he thought we wanted more of that. i don't know, but i doubt he was trying to screw anyone

[Xenite]

Ask the writer of Dallas, Lost and Soprano's what their self serving delusional Avant-garde endings got them.

Ohh that's right, fans said they all SUCKED.

[Dr_Hello]

Xenite wrote...

Ask the writer of Dallas, Lost and Soprano's what their self serving delusional Avant-garde endings got them.

Ohh that's right, fans said they all SUCKED.

I never thought highly of Lost, it's whimsical writing at its best, all throughout the seasons. And they overextended it. After season one, the writers admitted they have no idea how it will all end or why they are on the island. All they thought of was, let's have a bunch of people crash-land on an island and weird things happen to them, keep the mystery. Lost is basically a survival show.

Twin Peaks is a TV show which IMO has a great ending.

[DadeLeviathan]

Walters is a good writer, even a great writer. The fact of the matter is, he wrote something bad. Every writer, no matter how good they are, write bad things every once in a while. It doesn't make them a bad writer, it makes them human.

I feel that either everyone on the writing team agreed with Mac/Casey on the endings, or Mac didn't have the writing team look over the endings and critique it. I am more willing to believe the latter, but the former is possible as well. In either case, it is still just a mistake. It is not even remotely fair to insult, berate or degrade anyone over a mistake.

Modifié par DadeLeviathan, 22 mars 2012 - 03:36 .

[SpideyKnight]

What's the purpose here? That they messed up? That they thought they were correct and weren't? Who cares? There's nothing to be gained here. Nothing further can be gleaned from this discussion. Assigning blame is meaningless.  Let's just get it fixed and be on our merry.

Modifié par SpideyKnight, 22 mars 2012 - 03:42 .

[Byrdman]

AJ2324 wrote...

Byrdman wrote...

Guys for fraks sake keep it somewhat civil, we don't need Stanley patrolling our threads removing justifiably awful comments now do we? (not saying anything about you man, just that it sucks you have to do this). We'll win through civility, by being the better shep/femshep. Don't give the people that want to discredit us ammo

Not sure if your speaking in general or to me but I was just quoting Forbes:

Source: http://www.forbes.co...ending-sort-of/

As long as they make it right, I really don't care. I don't any of them from a hole in the wall. However when we are continually classified as some type of separate fan base that is disconnected from reality I feel that they are taking shots at us. I think Forbes feels the same way in our behalf.

Nope, was talking about the guy on the first page that had his post edited by a Moderator because he might have made a death threat.  I didn't even look at the last post before I posted, I'm just trying to put on a friends face for the Retake movement to counter the trolls.  

[Dr_Hello]

DadeLeviathan wrote...

Walters is a good writer, even a great writer. The fact of the matter is, he wrote something bad. Every writer, no matter how good they are, write bad things every once in a while. It doesn't make them a bad writer, it makes them human.

I feel that either everyone on the writing team agreed with Mac/Casey on the endings, or Mac didn't have the writing team look over the endings and critique it. I am more willing to believe the latter, but the former is possible as well. In either case, it is still just a mistake. It is not even remotely fair to insult, berate or degrade anyone over a mistake.

I won't speculate whether he is a good or bad writer because I don't know enough about him. I'm now hearing he wrote the ending and was the lead writer for ME3.

The writing of Mass Effect series as a whole is excellent, I must say. It's a joy to listen to the funny, witty, heartfelt, philosophical and intelligible dialogues of all the characters in the entire series. And the stories (yes in plural) of ME are excellent too: complex, dramatic, emotional, expansive, intricate, interrelated, metaphorical... like a novel.

The ending of ME3 feels it belong to another game, maybe another game in another trilogy of Mass Effect.
If the ending was meant to somehow reboot Mass Effect for a possible future full game or trilogy, then I can see the logic and meaning in the ending. Nevetheless if that were to be the case, it'd be forced, counter-intuitive and an untimely thing to do, especially in the climax of ME3. As the ending stands right now, it disregards all the other stories (subplots) which carry the decisions made by gamer throughout the series, as if whatever gamer did do, decide, kill, save, love, hate didn't matter at all ultimately.
 

Modifié par Dr_Hello, 22 mars 2012 - 03:57 .

[Cosmar]

Dhraconus wrote...

I've been struggling with the fact that they apparently started ME1 without knowing where the trilogy was going. They honestly should have had the whole primary story arc, major plot points, and lore more or less planned out before ME1 shipped and stuck with it. This includes the ending of all 3 games, but especially the ending of the trilogy.

You don't start a major project with the plan "let's just wing it and make it up as we go."

Exactly. Especially with a story so intricate as Mass Effect. 

The "let's just wing it" attitude has been the bane of some book projects, like (the late) Robert Jordan's Wheen of Time series...great series overall, but if you read all the books, you can really get a feeling that he didn't really know where exactly he was going once you hit the middle books that seem to just kind of circle around and around slowly without really doing much. And now he's passed away, and a different author had to finish it... "just winging it" doesn't work so well with epic multi-volue franchises.