Bioware has been pretty clear to me so far. They're obviously taken back and disheartened by the level of fan response/movements (unprecedented in all of gaming history), but they're mostly definitely going to be sticking to their guns on this. 'Clarifications' will most likely be offered as somewhat of a consolation (most likely to be announced at Pax in one form or the other). At least that much, the Retake movement has earned and it's the most realistic solution that Bioware can offer. It will not appease the most hardcore fans, but the fans will grow tired, will become divided over how 'acceptable' the solution is, the numbers would be diminish regardless at this point anyway (a whole month it will have been since launch). I can kind of sympathize with Bioware on that resolution (as disappointed as I was with the quality of the endings, the games were still great), and I can definitely accept that as a gesture of good will and as a promise that they will defintely pay a LOT more attention to how they conclude their games.
Ultimately, I just can't see, more importantly Bioware/EA can't possibly think they'd losing as many fans, at least not enough for them to do a 180 on the issue. Aside from a professional poll being commissioned (UBER EXPENSIVE BTW) and somehow providing STRONG GAMECHANGING evidence to indicate otherwise. While the whole '60k disgruntled fans vs millions of sales' arguement doesn't hold to work against the fan's opinions, the BSN polls/outcries can just as easily fall apart if you start getting into reliable/realistic statistics.
Basically, there will likely be a bit of an exodus of the 'hardcore' base for any future support/purchases, but enough of the fans will stick around. That said, even if many of the long-time/hardcore fans are lost, new fans can be gained. Also, sure the endings were botched, but the quality of the 100s of hours of content prior to that indicate that Bioware is still capable of producing quality content. And there will be people willing to give Bioware another chance on that basis, not to mention they'll continue to get great reviews because well... aside from the endings the games themselves are more or less perfectly fine, amazing even, and nevermind that those positive reviews will have a very big sway on how well a game will sell, especially combined with the kind of marketing/production dollars that EA will support Bioware with.
Many of the Bioware fans here in the Retake movement will become the 'former-Bullfrog/NWN fans' of today, citing too familiar tales of caution of 'how awesome company X used to be but went downhill cause of *insert whatever here*. You see people like that all the time, I am sure many of you, yourselves, have just ignored them in the past as overtly-disgruntled fans. If someone came up to you before you saw the ME3 endings and said "Bioware's been going downhill since selling Neverwinter Nights series and ending it hte way they did" would you have seriously contemplated not touching ME3? I wouldn't have. Did you listen to the angry DA fans and the hooplah over the DA2 endings prior to ME3's release? I didn't, it's also obvious many of you didn't either (btw, DA2 endings worked more or less fine imo).
I know many of you are really holding on to the hope here, but really if you remove the emotional attatchment, this is the only course of outcome that is in line with everything Bioware/EA has done and said so far.
Hold the line, hold on to your hopes, but it's also about time you seriously think about where this is going, and what you'll do about it.
Personally, I don't expect Bioware to do all that much much about ME3 ending situation, but I WILL be carefully watching to see how they handle thier future games. They do fantastic work, it's just they obviously have problems with endings (whether due to time/budget constraints or just the way they do things). Hopefully this debacle will have them seriously look into how they fix that issue.
I will be carefully watching to see if this lesson sticks for Bioware for their future projects, but to those of you expecting a 'triumph' for ME3's situation after the upcoming announcement in April... I think it's about time we let go and start making future plans of our own.
Modifié par pikey1969, 05 avril 2012 - 03:50 .
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