After reading Mr. Muzyka's letter, I want to say thank you
for listening and taking your fans seriously.
However, some of the wording did give me cause to worry, so I'd like to register
my direct feedback to the letter here because I believe it's where I'm most
likely to be heard by your feedback-gathering.
The letter references games as an art form and supporting
the decisions of the development team.
Those sentiments are good in general.
However, in reference to the ending, they give me worry.
You describe the upcoming (free, I'm assuming, since you
don't want to commit ritual PR suicide) DLC this way:
(quote) [it will]
help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further
closure to their journey. You’ll hear more on this in April. We’re working hard to maintain the right
balance between the artistic integrity of the original story while addressing
the fan feedback we’ve received. (endquote)
First off, many of us, including myself, are asking for the
ending to be improved precisely because we respect the artistic integrity of
the original story (meaning the 99% of the game that preceded the ending). You can find many rational explanations from
very smart people all over the internet that explain this. The ending as it is currently executed is
abrupt, has many plot holes not characteristic of the rest of Bioware's excellent
work on the game, and runs counter to many of the themes and conventions established
across 3 games.
The wording makes me worry that in efforts to preserve what
you at Bioware view as the ending's artistic integrity, you may miss the point
a little. Maybe you won't, but the way the
ending was botched as ship means that we can't trust you the way you may want
us to. I'm worried you might get the
correction of the ending wrong by thinking this is what you need to do to
"hold the line" on "artistic integrity". If you only do the following, we're going to
be disappointed, even if it makes you feel better about not caving to us artistically:
Do not just add some dialogue options where the starchild
explains more. Do not just add a pat
scene at the end meant to offer your idea of "closure for those wanting more explanation". In short, do not think that offering exactly
the same ending with more explanations is going to fix things.
First, please understand: the primary issue is not one of
"art". It is of quality. Not offering us an ending where we get blue
babies or live in a house with Tali? The
community could handle that. I
personally don't even want that. Sure,
you'd get some disappointment and complaints from some people, but you would not get a movement that completely takes over
your PR, lowers the game's price, and moves people to donate tens of thousands
of dollars to charity in protest. I maintain
that if the ending had been simply of reasonable quality given the expectations
created by ME2, your marketing, and the preceding 99% of the game (which was
excellent and I'd even describe as a "triumph"!), the response would
have been more in line with your expectations.
People would have been generally satisfied, though some would be disappointed. You guys are good, and I know you can do
better work that this.
So you don't need to change the actual events of the ending
overall, if that's what you really want.
If you really think this is the best thing you can do artistically, then
just delivering the quality we've come to expect from you is all it would take
to fix this. I don't think you should
keep the endings the way they are artistically either, but that's just my
opinion. I wouldn't be up in arms over
it. I am up in arms over the quality of the
product I paid for.
Here is my constructive feedback about what you would
actually need to change (and, as a bonus, it lets you keep the artistic
integrity of the original ending, if you refuse to change it!):
Fix plotholes. You'll
need to either make changes or add explanations for the following:
- How did my team survive harbinger's beam and get back on the
Normandy? - Why is Joker running away from the fight on earth?
- How did Anderson beat me to the citadel?
- Why is shep suddenly wounded in the same spot she shot Anderson?
- Why does the radio chatter indicate they don’t' see shep and
Anderson get into the citadel beam, but then Hackett tells shep is must be
something "on your end", indicating he knows where she is? - Why does shep accept everything the starchild says without
question? - If you can control the reapers with the blue ending, why
can't you just order them to kill themselves, thus destroying the reapers
without killing EDI or destroying all of our technology?
Make war assets mean something. After the triumph that was the execution of
ME2's ending, in which all of your decisions throughout the game led to a wide
variety of outcomes that were relatively obvious results of your choices, it
was a shocking disappointment to find the very limited effects of my war
assets. As far as I can tell, war assets
currently only affect 3 things: do you have the option to pick the green
ending, does earth burn, and does Shepard survive. The earth only burns if you have a super low
war asset total. The other two results
are not obvious outcomes from your actions.
How would you ever know in the game that you only got the green option
because of your high war assets? You'd
have to look up spoilers, basically. And
honestly, Shepard's survival is much more dependent on new game + and taking
the destroy option than it is on war assets.
After ME2's ending, I think it was very fair of us to expect something
of similar quality, thoughtfulness, and logic.
Why didn't some of our squadmates live or die in the assault on earth
based on our assets? Why didn't we see a
larger number of obvious effects on the assault on earth based on how many and
which assets we'd acquired? Basically,
once you get to the ending, the war assets go 99% of the way out the window and
barely matter at all, even though we are led to believe throughout the whole
game that they are a crucial metric.
Closure: do not make the mistake to think that when we ask
for closure, we are necessarily asking for a happy ending, or for all mysteries
to be explained. Please believe me when
I say that you can definitely offer satisfying closure to the audience without
giving up the speculation about the endings that, by all accounts, you deeply
desire. Not every question needs an
obvious answer. However, once the plot
holes are closed, you need to provide the player with some sense that what they
did made things better, and some answers on what happened to the people they
cared about throughout the story. It's
OK if we always wonder "wow, what happened in the mass effect universe
after I merged all organic and synthetic life?" It's not OK if we always wonder "wow,
did my sacrifice really mean anything when I have no idea what state I'm
leaving the universe in and what happened to my friends?" To adapt what your marketing kept saying: you
don't need to close out the mass effect universe's story, but you DO need to
close out Shepard’s story. Tell us what
happens to all of the important characters and races in the wake of our
decisions, so that which one we choose carries real weight without telling us
the entire future history of the universe. Speaking of that...
Make the endings actually different. Since all we see are different-colored
explosions and a slight graphical variation on our squad as they step out of
the crashed Normandy, it is left to us to think back to what the starchild said
to figure out if there even are any differences between the endings. This breaks the cardinal rule that I'm sure
your writers are familiar with: show, don't tell. The results of the endings seem almost
exactly the same, which takes all the weight out of making our final
choice. This lends the ending a feeling
of negating all of our previous choices and then giving us one last token
choice that doesn't really matter. If we
choose destroy, you need to show us a bit of how that plays out - is everyone
stranded without technology? Does Joker
have to watch EDI die without knowing why?
If we choose control, why doesn't Shepard simply have the reapers kill
themselves? Since shep's gone and can't
explain things to them, does everyone think the war is still on - are the
characters we know trying to guess what just happened and where to go
next? If we choose merge, is joker
suddenly cured of his boneitis? How do
the geth and quarians initially react to each other in this new state? What happens to the reapers, do they just
become a nice peaceful race to themselves since they are now part of the merged
over-race? I get that the writers
thought these questions would make for interesting speculation, but the reality
is that those are the questions we need answered to close our shep's story, and
they still leave plenty of room for speculation about what happens next in the
mass effect universe.
To put it another way: when the audience is speculating
about whether or not their "heroic" sacrifice just caused a massive
universe-wide holocaust, you may have gone too far with the ambiguity.
And finally, address thematic issues. I realize that these are much more on the
artistic end, but I'd like to offer some thoughts on why some of the audience
feels like the ending doesn't fit thematically with the rest of the work.
The reaper's motivation has some problems. It's a bit tough to buy that in order to prevent
organics being destroyed by synthetics, anyone thought the only good solution
was to create synthetics (with some organic slurry inside) to destroy all
advanced organics. Also, the reapers
have claimed that we mortals would never comprehend their motivations - but
their motivations are easy for us to understand. The ending also betrays the themes of tolerance and what
you've done with the quarian/geth conflict, and your relationship with EDI, to
be presented with these choices by the catalyst, especially since Shepard
doesn't have the option to argue with the starchild. I can recognize that the endings try to
address this by making the destroy ending a vote of faith that organics won't
make the same mistakes - but it's muddled by both the destruction of the geth
and EDI as well as the "telling not showing" nature of the ending.
Another core theme throughout the series has been player
choice. One of the primary problems with
the ending choice is that it abruptly negates the impacts of most of your previous
choices. The ending forgets that the
interesting thing about choices is not simply being presented with options, but
seeing the results that you've wrought in the world through your will. The ending as it is blunts the impact of all
previous choices, while simultaneously refusing to show us the impact of this
supposedly big final choice. I can't
read your minds, but I can see how you may have thought "the game is about
choice, so at the end we need to give them THE BIGGEST CHOICE!" but in
doing so you may have missed what made those choices, and the game, so
compelling.
Free will and what it means to be alive is another core
theme in the series. The way the ending
is executed currently blunts Shepard’s free will by giving him a set of pat
choices presented by the catalyst. But
even more importantly, it completely negates the free will of every other
character/race in the series. Shepard is
choosing for them what their entire future will be, what will happen to their
bodies, who lives and dies - everything!
Can he really do this to other living beings without at least arguing
with the starchild a little bit, or desperately trying to find some other
solution?
In closing: Bioware, I want to thank you for listening. I think the work you did on the first two
games and the first 99% of ME3 is extraordinary. I hope you don't think "clarity" is
enough. It really isn't that people
"don't get" your "artistic" ending. I really hope to see you bring to bear those
skills you obviously have to make the ending of the mass effect trilogy
something that you can be proud of artistically, and that does justice to your
great work and the story of Shepard, your creation.
PS: All that said, if you embrace the indoctrination theory
and give us a totally new ending showing what actually happened while sticking
to these principles, it will go down in history as one of the best game endings
ever. Though it may make you feel like
you are caving to entitled fans and sacrificing your artistic integrity (and it
may be a prohibitive amount of work, I realize), I hope you earnestly consider
this possibility. You would become
legends - and then you can buy my DLC! (see what I did there?)
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