1896 réponses à ce sujet

[Taboo]

Michael Gamble wrote...

Is your question about whether or not we are going to retcon the catalyst? The answer is no. We've already said we are not changing the endings, but again - there are many things that we *can* do without changing them. 

A lot of folks had questions that we want to answer for them - but just like any piece of content, we are not going to outline the specifics before release. 

I am still in awe that people do not understand what he is saying here. This is exatcly what an extended cut is supposed to do. They are "changing" the endings without changing the endings.

[Fiannawolf]

On the plus side. I still have Witcher 1/2 and TOR to pass the time with until EC. Plus getting my other 2 sheps to the London Multiverse block party. With 100k + Hot Pink MP geth in tow. Muahahaha!

[TODD9999]

I still find it irritating that the paraphrased memories of a conversation/interview with one BioWare employee at a general gaming convention (and some contradictory tweets) are the most official response that has been given to the questions of the customer uproar. No typed or video'd Q&A, no official FAQ, nothing. Nothing but speculation for everyone, I guess.

If I could at least know their intent, then I could give them a little more credit, rather than being given no alternative to the ending being exactly what I saw.

I really, really hope their reticence on this means that they're playing their cards exceptionally close to their chests for the Extended Cut, and good things are coming.

[Makrys]

Valorefane Dragonwinter wrote...

I hate to repeat myself, but:

If they go with the Indoctrination Theory or some variant thereof, they don't have to retcon the starbrat or "change" the existing ending. It'll all be non-existent when Shep wakes up.

Agreed. I believe in the IT, and to me it seems the only viable path they can go down. How else can you explain that the Catalyst was the same kid in Shepard's dreams? Because it wasn't real. It was a manipulation in Shepard's mind. I see no other way to explain it. And if they did that, they indeed wouldn't have to cut it out, because then it would make sense. Just finish the damn game though. If it was all a dream, then Shepard never actually destroyed the Reapers... none of it makes sense as it stands now.

[TODD9999]

Opsrbest wrote...

It's what Bioware does before they make 90% of the whine completely stop. A lot of people assume right now based on how Bioware has responded that they weren't prepared for this.

Really when has Bioware ever butchered a story the way they did in me3.

When they talk about defending the team's artistic vision, when they say they were happy with the endings, and were surprised at the fan demands, and when they talk about reallocating resources for the Extended Cut DLC, and when what we saw in the game seems to jive with the handwritten brainstorming from Final Hours, I find it difficult to not draw the conclusion that those statements are being honest.  They thought they were giving us another great BioWare ending, and had no idea they were giving us what we actually got.

Actually, I'll go ahead and throw in the contradictory statements from this interview, other interviews, what we saw in the game, and Twitter into this.  The lack of a coherent response is indicative to me of a lack of forethought - either towards the fan response (which means, again, they did not anticipate it) or towards what they directly showed us (which I don't even know what that indicates, but I don't think it's good - a lack of communication between teams, maybe?  At its worst, a lack of actually thinking about what they were putting in the game and how someone who didn't have the script in front of them might interpret it?) . 

I might not have been made a content fan again by an official BioWare information release "clarifying" what they intended to show, but as I said - I could at least give them some credit for what they tried to do, instead of only giving them the blame for what I saw.

[Richard 060]

TODD9999 wrote...

When they talk about defending the team's artistic vision, when they say they were happy with the endings, and were surprised at the fan demands, and when they talk about reallocating resources for the Extended Cut DLC, and when what we saw in the game seems to jive with the handwritten brainstorming from Final Hours, I find it difficult to not draw the conclusion that those statements are being honest.  They thought they were giving us another great BioWare ending, and had no idea they were giving us what we actually got.

I agree with this sentiment - I really don't believe that the writing team wrote the ending with the intent to 'troll' players with a cheap attempt at being provocative. I get the impression that they genuinely believed the whole Catalyst reveal/"synthetics will inevitably destroy organic life, because I say so" story was a good idea and a fitting conclusion to the trilogy.

Apart from the fact that I'm baffled that writers of such calibre could sit back and think "wow - this is truly great stuff! No-one's going to mis-interpret any of this, or find any continuity errors, logical fallacies, etc. - nosiree...", I just wish that BioWare could stop being so defensive about this whole thing. If they took a minute to get out of 'siege mode', look at it all from an objective, outsider's perspective, I'd like to believe that they're intelligent enough folks to be able to say "...aw, hell - that bit doesn't work half as well as we thought", or "ok, we've just contradicted a major plot point with that one line - we need to fix that in the EC".

Let's face it - if they're genuinely surprised at some of the conclusions our speculation has led us to (for example, the devs seem puzzled by the idea that the destruction of the Relays would play out like the Arrival DLC, or that the Normandy crew risked dying of starvation depending on the nature of the local fauna/flora), then the ending hasn't done it's job properly.

Part of me would love to make a laundry list of errors, points of confusion, scientific 'gremlins', etc., akin to THIS:

Errors in 'Mass Effect: Deception'

...and send it to the team, for them to take into consideration while making the Extended Cut.

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

Makrys wrote...

Valorefane Dragonwinter wrote...

I hate to repeat myself, but:

If they go with the Indoctrination Theory or some variant thereof, they don't have to retcon the starbrat or "change" the existing ending. It'll all be non-existent when Shep wakes up.

Agreed. I believe in the IT, and to me it seems the only viable path they can go down. How else can you explain that the Catalyst was the same kid in Shepard's dreams? Because it wasn't real. It was a manipulation in Shepard's mind. I see no other way to explain it. And if they did that, they indeed wouldn't have to cut it out, because then it would make sense. Just finish the damn game though. If it was all a dream, then Shepard never actually destroyed the Reapers... none of it makes sense as it stands now.

I think the EC will start w/ Shep either waking up (if you choose the destroy ending) or a nice vid of what happens after Shep gets indoctrinated if you chose one of the other two endings.  That way, the existing endings don't get changed and the starbrat isn't retconned. 

[theflyingzamboni]

Richard 060 wrote...

TODD9999 wrote...

When they talk about defending the team's artistic vision, when they say they were happy with the endings, and were surprised at the fan demands, and when they talk about reallocating resources for the Extended Cut DLC, and when what we saw in the game seems to jive with the handwritten brainstorming from Final Hours, I find it difficult to not draw the conclusion that those statements are being honest.  They thought they were giving us another great BioWare ending, and had no idea they were giving us what we actually got.

I agree with this sentiment - I really don't believe that the writing team wrote the ending with the intent to 'troll' players with a cheap attempt at being provocative. I get the impression that they genuinely believed the whole Catalyst reveal/"synthetics will inevitably destroy organic life, because I say so" story was a good idea and a fitting conclusion to the trilogy.

Apart from the fact that I'm baffled that writers of such calibre could sit back and think "wow - this is truly great stuff! No-one's going to mis-interpret any of this, or find any continuity errors, logical fallacies, etc. - nosiree...", I just wish that BioWare could stop being so defensive about this whole thing. If they took a minute to get out of 'siege mode', look at it all from an objective, outsider's perspective, I'd like to believe that they're intelligent enough folks to be able to say "...aw, hell - that bit doesn't work half as well as we thought", or "ok, we've just contradicted a major plot point with that one line - we need to fix that in the EC".

Let's face it - if they're genuinely surprised at some of the conclusions our speculation has led us to (for example, the devs seem puzzled by the idea that the destruction of the Relays would play out like the Arrival DLC, or that the Normandy crew risked dying of starvation depending on the nature of the local fauna/flora), then the ending hasn't done it's job properly.

Part of me would love to make a laundry list of errors, points of confusion, scientific 'gremlins', etc., akin to THIS:

Errors in 'Mass Effect: Deception'

...and send it to the team, for them to take into consideration while making the Extended Cut.

Yeah, everything points to the ending being something that they really did believe in. It shows every sign of being an idea that they loved. That's why all the errors got through. The creators like the basic idea so much that they stopped thinking critically about how it would work, because they just wanted it to be there. They knew how they thought it would work, and they had for so long that they no longer remembered that not everyone else would see what they saw. This is the kind of thing that usually gets filtered out by an editor in novels. The external source can see issues that the author no longer does, and then the author adjusts it. I seriously wonder if they had anyone outside the writing team look at the material. I doubt it. Someone with a more objective view would have caught at least some of the mistakes and made the team address them.

[BearlyHere]

Opsrbest wrote...

Really when has Bioware ever butchered a story the way they did in me3.

Neverwinter Nights 2 comes to mind. After promising closure at the similar uproar over the "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending, they didn't do much of anything. The second expansion was related to the main game in name only. I know people who swore off Bioware then and haven't come back.

I can understand the need for editors to point out the errors in logic or consistency. It reminds me of a college midterm, where the professor gave everyone credit for one of the questions when finding after her first reading that almost no one got the question right, she realized it wasn't us, it was her. She hadn't communicated the information correctly. The near silence from Bioware tells me that they still haven't figured this out yet.

[SerraAdvocate]

BearlyHere wrote...

Opsrbest wrote...

Really when has Bioware ever butchered a story the way they did in me3.

Neverwinter Nights 2 comes to mind. After promising closure at the similar uproar over the "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending, they didn't do much of anything. The second expansion was related to the main game in name only. I know people who swore off Bioware then and haven't come back.

I can understand the need for editors to point out the errors in logic or consistency. It reminds me of a college midterm, where the professor gave everyone credit for one of the questions when finding after her first reading that almost no one got the question right, she realized it wasn't us, it was her. She hadn't communicated the information correctly. The near silence from Bioware tells me that they still haven't figured this out yet.

Anyone swearing off BioWare after NWN 2 made a significant mistake, since BioWare didn't make NWN 2.

[BearlyHere]

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

[SerraAdvocate]

BearlyHere wrote...

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

As have I. BioWare was involved in the development process in a  threadbare manner, but Obsidian made NWN 2, just as they did KOTOR 2.

Modifié par Helm505, 27 avril 2012 - 08:39 .

[WangGozinya]

Good Stuff

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

Helm505 wrote...

BearlyHere wrote...

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

As have I. BioWare was involved in the development process in a  threadbare manner, but Obsidian made NWN 2, just as they did KOTOR 2.

From wikipedia:  
Neverwinter Nights 2 (also known as NWN2) is a role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Atari. It is the sequel to BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, based on the Dungeons & Dragons pencil and paper fantasy role-playing game. Neverwinter Nights 2 utilizes an adaptation of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition rules.

I, too, have been playing Bioware games since the beginning.  However, you can see Bioware had very little to do with the making of NWN2.

Now, back to the subject at hand...  Weekes discusses creating Mordin, probably one of my favorite characters of the series.

Modifié par Valorefane Dragonwinter, 27 avril 2012 - 09:35 .

[Allan Schumacher]

BearlyHere wrote...

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

It might have been confusing since the forums were kept together, but Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian Entertainment.

http://en.wikipedia....winter_Nights_2


EDIT:  I should have refreshed the page before submitting this...

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 27 avril 2012 - 09:52 .

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

Allan Schumacher wrote...
EDIT:  I should have refreshed the page before submitting this...

My nefarious plot has succeeded!  muahahahahaha!  

[xsdob]

TODD9999 wrote...

I still find it irritating that the paraphrased memories of a conversation/interview with one BioWare employee at a general gaming convention (and some contradictory tweets) are the most official response that has been given to the questions of the customer uproar. No typed or video'd Q&A, no official FAQ, nothing. Nothing but speculation for everyone, I guess.

If I could at least know their intent, then I could give them a little more credit, rather than being given no alternative to the ending being exactly what I saw.

I really, really hope their reticence on this means that they're playing their cards exceptionally close to their chests for the Extended Cut, and good things are coming.

You could always look on thier twitter pages, they have answered questions about the indoctrination theory and synthesis on there. Althought most of that was confusion about how their ending promoted racism.

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

xsdob wrote...

You could always look on thier twitter pages, they have answered questions about the indoctrination theory and synthesis on there. Althought most of that was confusion about how their ending promoted racism.

HOW did the ending promote racism?  

Unless you feel that purple or yellow or some other color was treated unfairly... 

Modifié par Valorefane Dragonwinter, 28 avril 2012 - 12:20 .

[lordnyx1]

Valorefane Dragonwinter wrote...

xsdob wrote...

You could always look on thier twitter pages, they have answered questions about the indoctrination theory and synthesis on there. Althought most of that was confusion about how their ending promoted racism.

HOW did the ending promote racism?  

Unless you feel that purple or yellow or some other color was treated unfairly... 

Sythenic life isn't worth as much as organic life. Sythenics will always kill organics.  That peaceful geth prime saying they'll help rebuild our future, all lies they're really kill bots. etc

[Noblewolf]

pikey1969 wrote...



Source.



After that tweet, a few more tweets from him surfaced regarding the interview...

James isn't there to be dumb. He's often used as a voice for people new to series. That was one joking aside presented as my response. 

Also doesn't include second half of my response in re EDI: I WAS nervous, but I thought Chris Hepler aced her continuing character arc.

And second half of James was that I expected a basic marine and was blown away by what FPJ brought to the character. 

So please take that with a grain of salt.  (This was in response to the original interviewee's apologetic tweet)

Thanks, @sethjdickinson, no harm done. They were great questions. Just didn't want anyone to think I was slamming EDI/James. 


Sooooo, now on to the good stuff, the informal interview is 'quoted' below. 

Okay, here is what I asked Patrick Weekes, and his answers as best as I can remember them. I've paraphrased but I'm doing my best to stick to what he said rather than introduce any interpretation.

THESE ARE NOT DIRECT QUOTES.

-Is there still a setting to explore after the ending? Is everything ruined?

The setting is definitely not ruined. We still have a big, lively galaxy.

-Will long-distance superluminal travel still be possible post-Ending? (will Tali or Wrex or Garrus see their homeworlds again? Will everyone starve?)

Galactic civilization will rebuild. The mass relays were not necessary for interstellar flight. Remember, what does it say in the Codex about the speed of ships? That's right, 12 lightyears per (day? hour? minute?). And that's only the cruising speed, not the maximum speed.

People have never needed to research basic FTL improvements before because they have mass relays. With the relays gone, new technology will increase that speed. Additionally, the element zero cores of the dead/controlled Reapers can be used to improve FTL drives. Starflight will continue using conventional FTL.

-Why did Joker leave Shep behind?

Joker would never abandon Shep without a good reason. Hopefully this will be clear in the Expanded Cut.

-Why can EDI survive the Destroy ending?

We argued a lot about this, I said that she was made of Reapertech and should therefore be destroyed, but (unclear, don't remember - wish I'd been able to ask a followup as his response doesn't make much sense)

-Did anyone on the Citadel survive?

Yes. We would never, ever do anything that made the player feel, on replay, that it would be better for everyone on the Citadel if they just died. The Citadel has emergency shelters and kinetic barriers - even if it blows up, millions might survive.  You should assume that everyone plot-important on the Citadel survived. 

-Is it better for Kelly Chambers if we talk her into suicide?

No, see above.

-Who wrote the death of Joker's sister?

I did! We intentionally did not connect the dots. We were very interested to see how fast gamers figured it out.

-Whose idea was it to make the Rayya fall out of the sky if you destroy the Quarian fleet?

Someone in the audio department, it was brilliant.

-Did the mass relays pull an Arrival and go supernova?

No, they didn't. (i'm paraphrasing here, please don't interpret this too hard) They overloaded, they didn't rupture. We really didn't mean to imply that the whole galaxy had been destroyed. People interpreted the ending in ways we really didn't expect. 

(Mr. Weekes dropped a lot of hints that he really didn't like the ending. He also said something that was almost 100% verbatim from the Penny Arcade Forum post often attributed to him)

-Why did Legion pull a 180 from his Mass Effect 2 philosophy?

He and the Geth were backed into a corner. They'd been made a lot dumber by the attack on the Dyson swarm. There was no other choice for Geth survival.

-What was up with the Rachni story? Why did we get railroaded?

Welcome to game development. In some games (Alpha Protocol) they make a bold choice where some decisions can knock entire missions out of the story. At BioWare, we never want people to be locked out of content due to a decision several games ago. We just didn't have the resources to do an alternate for the Rachni mission, so we decided that the Rachni mission could occur whether or not players saved the Queen.

-Why didn't (X squadmate from ME2) return?

There was a very ugly month of development where we fought out who would return. We knew we had to have a smaller cast so we could fit in more squad banter. Eventually we decided to bring Garrus and Tali back, so they could be squadmates in all three games. We also knew we'd have Vega in order for new players to have someone dumber than they were.

I was very resentful of Vega at first because I thought he was taking a slot that could've gone to a ME2 character, but he grew on me.

-Why did EDI have cameltoe?

We don't get a lot of feedback from the art department but (unclear, wish I remembered this better  )

Lots of discussion about how he was uncomfortable doing Pinocchio stories for both Legion and EDI because 'EDI was fine, she was an AI, she was cool - do we really need her to turn into Commander Data? We had seven seasons of Data, that was enough.'

-Why did you write Pinocchio stories for all the synthetic characters?

See above

-What was up with the Human Reaper in ME2? Why did it look so dumb?

We wanted to use the Suicide Mission to show several steps of the Reaper development process, from human reaper embryo all the way to cuttlefish. But the mission grew too complicated so it was cut for time.

Do the Reapers really only generate one capital ship per cycle? How do they ever break even?

Well, we never totally pinned that down. But this cycle was really anomalous. They don't normally take any capital-size Reaper losses at all.

-What was up with Kai Leng? How do you feel about him?

We really wanted to have a recurring antagonist for Shep, a 'Darth Maul' (his words). But I feel like there was some definite conflict between cutscene and gameplay there, and I think it's something we have to work on.

'He was a great antagonist in the books' 

-Why did we only get top and bottom dialogue choices, no middle?

Part of it was resources. Part of it is that Mass Effect 3 is a war story and it's really hard for Shep to feel middling about the Reapers.

-How did YOU feel about the ending?

(I didn't ask this, but he seems to have gone to GREAT lengths to think ways around a lot of stuff the ending implied.)

Why no female (alien X?)

Resource limitations. They have a very strict budget for how many different characters they can use in a given area. Some are basically free - if you have human males you have Batarians because they're humans with funny heads, if you have human females you have asari, etc.

Where was Harbinger? Can we ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL of him?

I definitely want more closure on Harbinger. That'd be hilarious. Stop punching yourself, Harbinger.

How did the Reapers storm the Citadel? Why didn't they shut down the relays as per their original plan once they had control?

Originally we planned to have a cutscene of Reapers taking over, Reaper monsters punching buttons, et cetera. But we cut it, partially for resource reasons and partly because it disrupted the pacing.

The Reapers didn't shut down the mass relays because the Keepers interfered with that. (I wish I could've asked a follow-up here, it doesn't make much sense.)

Why don't Ken and Gabby have more dialogue?

They actually have a bunch more on disk, but we somehow introduced a bug where their dialogue is tied to your approval level with Ash. If Ash has low approval, or isn't present, most of Ken and Gabby's dialogue won't play.

Why do you guys do Star Wars style space battles instead of the battles described in the codex?

We want to provide a familiar, compelling visual experience for people who grew up on Star Wars and stuff like that. These are some of our favorite parts of the game.

***

Things I wish I'd asked:

Why the drat Starchild?

What was up with the Stargazer? (He touched on the Stargazer once and pretty much said 'oh, yeah, the Stargazer.'

Again: NOT DIRECT QUOTES. These are NOT OFFICIAL BIOWARE STATEMENTS. Please don't gently caress Patrick Weekes over by posting these as 'official BioWare PR' or whatever. Please feel free to ask me follow-up questions, as I definitely didn't cover the whole conversation with him.

My takeaway was: the epilogue DLC is probably going to do a lot of good and be pretty well written, and Patrick Weekes should've been lead writer on ME3.  

And there you have it. Everything in that quote box is the interview EXACTLY as it was posted on the SomethingAwful forums. Don't forget about the preceding section's additional Tweets from Weekes regarding this interview after this thread surfaced on BSN. Weekes, understandably, wanted to clarify some of the content in that interview as it was paraphrased from the interviewer's memory (before you send the fan shared that interview your hate mails, please note that he went through the trouble to share this information).

Additionally, check out these particular posts from Michale Gamble who dropped by in this thread and shared a couple thoughts.

Michael Gamble wrote...

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

Michael Gamble wrote...

Cmon - give us some time with the DLC, and let's try to avoid hatin' on Patrick or Jessica:P

Honestly, after all the valid and incisive criticism leveled at the Catalyst and his presence in the ending, why insist on keeping him around? 90% of what's wrong with the ending can be solved simply by retconning him out of existence.

Why not just answer this question directly?

Is your question about whether or not we are going to retcon the catalyst? The answer is no. We've already said we are not changing the endings, but again - there are many things that we *can* do without changing them. 

A lot of folks had questions that we want to answer for them - but just like any piece of content, we are not going to outline the specifics before release. 

Michael Gamble wrote...

By the way, Patrick, John, Reid myself - we were all ready to answer those kinds of questions in dialogue just like the original OP. It was the whole reason we came to PAX. In fact, a lot of people may have gotten a bit *too* much out of me

Either way, we met hundreds of folks - and we were so happy and pleased that everyone just wanted to talk and have some great convo.

All of us are feeling pax with a sense of...renewal, and we are ready to work our butts off in the months ahead.

Hope you all enjoy resurgence!

And that's all folks!

Personally, I still won't be fully satisfied with the RGB options as they exist, as I feel they were too artificially/arbitrarily weighted by 'moral dilemmas' (they REALLY need to at least add another option on top of the three or greatly alter certain aspects of the existing three). However, it looks to me like most of the people at Bioware are coming around to the fact the endings were not as quite 'complete' for the fans as shipped (caused by EA being pricks with deadlines/funding in my personal opinion). It also sounds like they'll have the full writing team fully dedicated and hard at work with this project now. On top of some of the revelations from above, there's a LOT of promising stuff here for the coming Extended Ending content update.

ps. I Weekes too.

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

Thanks for the repost of the OP.

[Lethys1]

BearlyHere wrote...

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

Love it when people who are wrong insist that they're right.  Obsidian was in charge of NWN2.

[Valorefane Dragonwinter]

Looks like Raphael Sbarge is back in the studio doing more VA work for ME3. *fingers crossed*

[Baa Baa]

Good to here. Makes me smile