663 réponses à ce sujet

[Wulfram]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I'm not proposing it as an either/or.  I'm just trying to make sense out of this idea of "Do you feel like you took back Earth?"

For example, you say that seeing the scenes of Drell, Krogan, etc. doing awesome things would help you feel like you are taking back Earth.  My question for you is: Would the feeling of taking back Earth felt significantly different if the kickass scenes you would have liked to have seen with the various races still existed but just with humans.

i.e. Is the lack of feeling of taking back Earth more due to a general lack of content (show the fight), or more due to the lack of seeing the combined forces.

I think showing the combined forces is important.  Because that's what you've been spending the rest of the game working at.  Humans aren't there because of Shepard's efforts, but the Quarians and the Krogan are.

Also, aliens would help give a better sense of an epic scale.

[ananna21]

No. The blatant use of a landmark city made it look like an easy attempt to show hey this earth along with obsolete phone boxes that I half expected to see the doctor who box. No the ending brought no sense of accomplishment.

[Lars10178]

Get rid of everything after you fire the missiles, and extend it to really make you feel the pain of the war like you did when you were defending Palaven

[Deputy Secretary of Awesome]

No, I didn't feel like we took Earth back.

The push to the beam and the swarms of Reapers were fine, I actually really enjoyed the atmosphere of that and the adrenaline of the combat as you push forward and just try to hold on. Even taking down the Reaper with the missiles was cool.

When Harbinger diverts to the beam and you're about to make the final rush, that felt epic, like it was the setup to a big confrontation... Then Harbinger's beam stops you and queue ending, and the momentum falls flat.

I personally believe in IT, but just taking the Literal ending on face value:

The Illusive Man confrontation was great. The starkid ending was, as has been discussed elsewhere, problematic. If you take it on face value, sure it was a "resolution", but it felt hollow and forced. It did not feel like Shepard or you the player were driving the narrative any longer. Now obviously neither Shepard or the player is in reality driving the narrative, it's an illusion, but it's a compelling one, and the ending shattered that.

The other major issue about Take Back Earth was clearly the war assets. You see little to no differentiation based on what your EMS score is, let alone what particular factions or characters you recruited. All it did was unlock different mysterious end choices with tiny differences in dialogue and visuals (again a clue for IT in my opinion). But there was no direct causal relationship you can clearly point to in order to say: "because I brought this overwhelming military force I was able to achieve X". You can only interpret and speculate a relationship between EMS and say "why Synthesis was unlocked" for example. The Crucible always makes it to the Citadel. If it was an issue of "completing the Crucible" with higher EMS, what's the point of the military forces since the Crucible can't be stopped from reaching the Citadel anyway, even with the lowest EMS?

Issues like that really threw me and it seems a lot of people from the expectations of sophistication and variability set up in the ME2 ending for example. ME2 still had a channeled, linear ending, but it had a lot of variation. And that game had to continue to ME3. ME3 is the finale (we think), it should have been free reign to be flexible and go all out.

[CINCTuchanka]

Wulfram wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I'm not proposing it as an either/or.  I'm just trying to make sense out of this idea of "Do you feel like you took back Earth?"

For example, you say that seeing the scenes of Drell, Krogan, etc. doing awesome things would help you feel like you are taking back Earth.  My question for you is: Would the feeling of taking back Earth felt significantly different if the kickass scenes you would have liked to have seen with the various races still existed but just with humans.

i.e. Is the lack of feeling of taking back Earth more due to a general lack of content (show the fight), or more due to the lack of seeing the combined forces.

I think showing the combined forces is important.  Because that's what you've been spending the rest of the game working at.  Humans aren't there because of Shepard's efforts, but the Quarians and the Krogan are.

Also, aliens would help give a better sense of an epic scale.

I very much agree with this.  The entire point of the game was gathering this huge armada.  Now, I understand that you can't show every single war asset, but when we only see humanity's allies in battle ever-so-briefly it sort of ruins the immersion.   

This actually came up in Dragon Age: Origins to a lesser extent.  I assembled this huge army, and it barely shows up in the cutscenes (IIRC).  The saving grace there was that I could summon them into battle.  I didn't really feel the impact of the choices of my allies in the gameplay so much EXCEPT for the Golems.  They made the Archdemon a breeze.  I had a mostly a "Paragon " Warden in DA:O except for the Golems where I chose pragmatism over idealism.  And it actually paid off in gameplay!  Definitely made the ending of DA: O a lot better for me. 

It would have been absolutely lovely to see something similar in ME3, though I do know they were going for a "darkest night" theme in Priority: Earth.  Regardless, I think that with enough time/resources it would have been great to work in somehow.

Modifié par CINCTuchanka, 18 avril 2012 - 01:02 .

[Mystiq6]

Allan Schumacher wrote...
I'm not proposing it as an either/or.  I'm just trying to make sense out of this idea of "Do you feel like you took back Earth?"

For example, you say that seeing the scenes of Drell, Krogan, etc. doing awesome things would help you feel like you are taking back Earth.  My question for you is: Would the feeling of taking back Earth felt significantly different if the kickass scenes you would have liked to have seen with the various races still existed but just with humans.

i.e. Is the lack of feeling of taking back Earth more due to a general lack of content (show the fight), or more due to the lack of seeing the combined forces.

I don't feel like I took Earth back because Earth was such a piddly amount of my time in the game. At first I did like the London mission, mostly because it just seemed to up the stakes more and more, but as I realized the ending was drawing closer, I kept waiting for a "big reveal" type of scenes where the reapers' joke was on me and then the real final mission would start. It never happened, and that left me feeling neither happy nor sad, just empty. And now, about a month later, I look back on that mission almost with scorn.

The big reveal was a gargantuan deal-breaker for me. I've said this in many of my posts but the moment I landed on the Citadel after reaching the beam, I knew things didn't sound right and everything seemed just, "off." By the time I found the Illusive Man, I was expecting some major twist to occur. Nothing came. All of my expectations had been shattered and by the time the Catalyst had concluded his spiel, my expectations had been thrown out the airlock. I don't feel like I took back Earth because every expectation I had for what I KNEW was going to happen in the ending was completely ignored and there was no pay-off for what came before it, and in hindsight, what came before could have been better because everything that I expected to happen didn't.

Thessia and Tuchanka were so good that I thought it was reasonable to expect that the final mission would top them. It didn't. It did the opposite. "Emotionally satisfying" is a word tossed around a lot here and I really believe all the arguments using it have complete and utter merit. It's reasonable to expect an ending to be emotionally satisfying. I've been using the words "reasonable" and "expectation" a lot and I think my reasonable expectations weren't met. 

Some part of me still believes the "big reveal" has yet to be revealed but with BioWare hinting up and down that the ending is to be taken literally, I don't know what to believe. I certainly don't have any expectations that can be called reasonable anymore.

I also don't feel like I took Earth back because I just wasn't made to care about it. Mordin said it best: "Hard to care about two armies fighting. One wins, one loses. For this fight, want personal connection. Can't anthropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favorite nephew. Fighting for him." I'm back on Earth and fighting for it! Yay!

For all intents and purposes, you spend the least amount of time on Earth out of all the planets in the entire series. Sure I live on Earth, but it's hard to care about Earth in the context of the game when I don't have time to make any connections to it. It feels like there are thousands upon thousands of missed opportunities.

You'll notice I said "I don't feel like I took Earth back" a fair number of times. There isn't one reason. It's a lot of reasons and a lot of them have to do with the ending. It was draining in every way and not satisfying in any way and all the work I did in leading up to it was not fulfilled. I collected all those war assets, and where were they? Defending the Crucible. Someone at BioWare was smart enough to come up with that line for Mordin and it's like they didn't even pay attention to what it was that they were writing, and that was the worst part about the ending and the retrospective biggest disappointment of the final mission.

Modifié par Mystiq6, 18 avril 2012 - 02:45 .

[ArchedAlbatross]

Wow. Never expected this thread to cause such a ruckus. Allan, thanks for joining the conversation and giving us some of your honest opinions, it was refreshing to see something, hell anything, come out of BW (even if it wasn't in an official press release).

I think that we have compiled a good conversation where the ME3 devs could turn to find out how they could satisfy their fans. I do wish that some of the actual ME3 dev team could come out and share their thoughts with us on some of what has been said here, because I must say that the most frustrating part of this whole thing has been the complete silence from a team that was screaming to the heavens about how great their game was going to be leading up to release. Just a little interaction between the team and fans could go a long, long, long way.

I think that filling us in on what is coming might help settle some of the frustration and anger. Just don't let the marketing department go crazy like they did leading up to the launch. Don't drop copies of the DLC from space, or have big red carpet setups in each time zone in the US. Just tell us "hey guys, we are going to give you some new cutscenes. We know this won't make everyone happy, but at least we are doing something."

Or even better, "wow, we never knew our fans cared so much, geez $86 K to a children's charity, that is awesome. So you know what, we are going to take a second look at this ending and try our hardest to come up with a playable mission that will give you, the fans, the most important part of this whole setup, some closure. To hell with artistic integrity, the whole video game industry threw out that concept when DLC was introduced. No longer are we shackled by the idea that a game is only what comes on the disc when you buy it, we can add to it, and we shall."

Either way, all the pissing and moaning that has been going on for the last few weeks will eventually die off. By the time the EC comes out, many people will have lost interest. So for now, I will be a disappointed fan, a quiet disappointed fan, because I am actually quite tired of reading the same crap over and over and nothing coming of it. I will wait for the DLC, download it, play it and then hopefully feel like I took back Earth. If I do I will return to this forum and sing the praises of BW's job well done on fixing this debacle. If I still feel like it sucks, I will simply remain quiet and BW will have lost an ardent, paying customer.

So I leave it to you BW. You can release some extra cut scenes that "clarify" everything that I the consumer, your livelihood, do not understand and continue to patronize me with your hubris, or you can do what a majority of your fan-base, your livelihood, want you to do and that is change the ending.

-Albatross out

[Insane_Ivan]

Heck no. I felt like everything was screwed over and dead. Many others before me posted valid reasons for this so I will not re-post them.

-Hold The Line

-Insane_Ivan

[Allan Schumacher]

Exeider wrote...

@ Allan Schumacher,

i hope you would read this and reply, I will answer your question in as little smarmy an answer as possible.

When Priority: Earth came up, and I was starting the end I felt or was rather expecting that certain game mechanics were going to come up, because they had been I felt foreshadowed earlier in the game.

1) (Single-weapon mode); There were two times in the game where for the sake of gameplay your weapons were removed and replaced with a single weapon, the geth "logic" blaster int he consensus, and the Target Painter.

I felt that in the first instances, I was getting "practice" with a new mechanic that was going to show up again at the end of the game.

specifically, right when we hear over the radio that "harbinger" was coming down from orbit to handle shepard personally.

I thought this was going to be the final battle, or A final battle, using the target painter and the orbiting fleet, which the strength of that 'weapon' would depend on your EMS.

Interesting.  I never thought of those sequences as "practice" types (I didn't really connect the two, possibly because they were a bit different in their purpose in game), but I don't think it's an invalid expectation.  I think the idea of utilizing the target painter and letting your EMS determine the damage to Harbinger would have been an interesting one too.

2) Minibosses and Final Boss;

without starting a round of maruader shields jokes, I have to ask? Where the heck was my final big bad boss Allan?

I'm probably the worst person to ask for this as my need for a specific boss encounter is not as high as most other people, and in fact dislike the boss fights from the first two games as they felt forced.

When I played the mission, and going through the seemingly endless left 4 dead style "Horde" mode play of waves of waves of enemies, I really thought that was filler for BETWEEN MINIBOSSES.

When no minibosses showed up I was like, WTF? I felt that we were going to fight Boss versions of the enemies, a "hero" version of a brute, or a banshee, then move on, fighting hordes between each, Miniboss Area, culminating in the Final Boss of Harbinger. Or at least a seemingly final Boss of harbinger, using the afore mentioned Target painter.

I did enjoy the confrontation against the Reaper destroyer though.  I found it intense and quite challenging, and loved setting up sequences for the Reaper's laser to scorch a banshee or two with a single blast while popping medigels.  Finally triggering those missiles watching the Reaper just fail to protect himself against it was pretty awesome for myself.

[Sil]

@Allan

I think the problem was more that that battle against the reaper felt like the beginning of a long battle to defeat the reapers rather than the final fight

[TJX2045]

The_Other_M wrote...

Provo_101 wrote...

Oh I took Earth back alright.

*sunglasses*

...Back to the Stone Age

YEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

^^HA
This.

+1 Internets to Provo for that.  Maybe that's what they meant by take back Earth.  LOL.  And now there will be space magic in the form of mages and templars.

[Kesak12]

Nope.

[XJ347]

Like most here...

NO

Shepard didn't take back Earth, he killed it via the relay explosion or if that didnt happen, then starvation from that fleet outside earth when they start looking for food.

Modifié par XJ347, 18 avril 2012 - 02:03 .

[Aaleel]

No, I felt like it was given to me out of pity.  I didn't take back Earth, the Catalyst/kid LET me do it.

[Naugi]

Nope.

[XJ347]

Aaleel wrote...

No, I felt like it was given to me out of pity.  I didn't take back Earth, the Catalyst/kid LET me do it.

So true!

[Unholyknight800]

Yes. There! I broke from the crowd! WOOT!

[Naugi]

Unholyknight800 wrote...

Yes. There! I broke from the crowd! WOOT!

The Reapers made you say that. You've been indoctrinated.

[Unholyknight800]

Naugi wrote...

Unholyknight800 wrote...

Yes. There! I broke from the crowd! WOOT!

The Reapers made you say that. You've been indoctrinated.

Nooooooooooo, the Thorian made me do it.

[cutegigi]

should I say yes out of pity to make EA/Bioware happy ???

[Unholyknight800]

cutegigi wrote...

should I say yes out of pity to make EA/Bioware happy ???

Synthesis. Say maybe.

[Filanwizard]

Part of me wanted to see Kodiak shuttles deploying marines enmasse like those videos you see of Vietnam and the Huey. and considering the UT-47 is basically a space huey it would be fitting.

[Ticonderoga117]

Nope. 2 out of 3 endings leads to dropping the Citadel (more or less) on Earth. The Citadel is BIG man. That will not end well. And yeah, Priority Earth had some good parts. Talking to your crew one last time was awesome. So was charging the beam. Sadly, that's about it. It just feels like the dev team went: "Oh crap! Time is running out and we haven't done an Earth mission yet! Uhm, uhm, quick! Cobble something together! Ack! We need an ending to! *Unknown person I will refer to as Bob* Bob: I got that covered. Just played Deus Ex last night. Good ending sequence. Other Dev: Brilliant! Code!"

I like to describe this "Lack of taking back Earth" as an acute case of "Halo 2".
Advertised as "fighting for/on Earth a good portion", end up there for one or two stinkin' missions.

[Naugi]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

i.e. Is the lack of feeling of taking back Earth more due to a general lack of content (show the fight), or more due to the lack of seeing the combined forces.

Both. Come on, how can people have a feeling of having taken back earth when some of the only scenes after we make our A B C choice are things like the Normandy running away and everything exploding. There was no taking back earth. Hell, half the ME3 fanbase seems to believe in IDT and in that case taking back earth hasnt even begun yet as Shepard is still on the ground in London ...

Modifié par Naugi, 18 avril 2012 - 02:21 .

[clos]

I'm sorry Allan. I appreciate you showing your face in the forums since the ME team seems scared to do so. That being said, I just don't agree with your arguments.

The ending is indefensible from a thematic point of view when an all out war final confrontation with the universe's future is at stake. Call if what you will but the truth is, no matter how much it's tried to be explained, the ending doesn't resonate with the fans.

No matter how hard you try to explain, now matter how hard you try to put your finger on the illusive reason why it works, the fact remains. The fans are emotionally disenchanted with the franchise. Sense of believe has been suspended and all that's left at this point is deep and insurmountable dissatisfaction.

Clearly, something is wrong with the ending and it's just not defensible. Sometimes there is no reason other than the ending is broken, not what we have been led to believe and expected to receive as customers of the franchise. We can theorize why it could potentially make sense but the mountain of evidence mounts against the game from hundreds of sources, slowly tearing apart the argument for current ending.

Sometimes, it's just better to admit the ending was and is a grave mistake. Sometimes, it's better to admit it was really bad and that everything should be done to make it right, no matter the cost.

The whole franchise's future is at stake. No half-baked measures will satisfy. It's beyond reason at this point. It's a wave of unified emotion set in motion that can't be stopped and it can only end in either total disaster or great success. Right now, the middle path won't cut it and will only lead down the path to great failure for what has rightfully been a great franchise.

Here is to hoping ME team sees beyond their artistic integrity and looks at the matter objectively and sees what truly needs to be done. Here is to hoping they choose right because ultimately, it's their choice whether to destroy everything they worked so hard for the last years or to toss it all away with undignified and senseless pride.