102 réponses à ce sujet

[OH-UP-THIS!]

NoUserNameHere wrote...

- The bespoke endings make future DLC/sequels easier to pull off.

- The reused content in each ending is the result of epic time constraints.

- The bat-guano tone of the endings was an attempt at being profound.

So a little from collumn A, a little from collumn B.

How does this make room for any DLC, when the majority of the people, are DONE with BEAWARE(yup spelt wrong)

I know I'm not buying any DLC, because that abortive/reflux ending, isn't going away!!!!!!!!!!

some idiot is, sure as sh!t going to say "play MP, it's loads of PUKE Can KMA as well!!!!!

[The_Other_M]

beyondsolo wrote...

sfam wrote...

2. Budget and Time Constraints: Bioware had to cut corners on their intended interpretive ending, and ended up cutting way too much.  We've gotten a sense from this out of some of Weeks' convo, but probably they thought that since its an intepretive ending anyways, its OK if not many answers are provided, as the paid DLC will fill in the detials. Perhaps this might also have provided the rationale why only Casey and Mac worked the ending - less minds perhaps leads to less time and budget problems.

Again, the whole Earth mission was cut short, and the ending cut scenes were virtually nonexistent. Again, they went way too overboard, so much so that the ending Normandy scene looks like the result of a bad over-editing job from a movie, where essential details were omitted.

This. I see two different aspects of how time and budget affected the ending:

First, they simply ran out of time. The entire Priority: Earth mission doesn't measure up to the standard set by the Tuchanka and Rannoch story arcs. Considering the fact that it's probably the most important mission of the game, if not of the entire series, there wasn't nearly enough effort put into it. You don't see any of your war assets in action, the level design is fairly simple, the whole thing is a pretty bad military operation, and so on. When you play it, you just get the feeling that stuff that should have been there isn't.

Second, a lot of stuff was cut from the game in general, which also affected the ending. There are tons of auto-dialogue (because apparently players skipped through dialogue in ME2, which is a bad argument because when you play through the game ten times you won't listen to every conversation). The fetch-quests are weak and the lack of explorative dialoge/zoom in for conversation mode detaches the player from the universe. The game's prologue is more than weak, riddled with plot holes, and misses any relevant action (like the trial foreshadowed in ME2: Arrival). There is pretty much nothing about the asari in the entire game, which is strange considering they're the most powerful species in the galaxy. And so on...

The horrible ending is the culmination of all this. They wanted to make the development process more efficient, taking the easy route with many things (like character interaction), and in the end they still ran out of time properly flesh out the ending so it would properly conclude the trilogy and at the very least make some sort of sense.

^^THIS, at least....I hope it was this.
And I'm pretty sure most of their budget & resources was allocated to SWTOR.

[Bill Casey]

NoUserNameHere wrote...

- The bespoke endings make future DLC/sequels easier to pull off.

- The reused content in each ending is the result of epic time constraints.

- The bat-guano tone of the endings was an attempt at being profound.

So a little from collumn A, a little from collumn B.

You don't know what bespoke means, do you?

[CSly]

I find it difficult to accept the idea that capable, creative, and critically-thinking professionals could have purposefully constructed the nonsensical ending to Mass Effect 3, as it currently exists.

Instead, I believe that Bioware did indeed set out to create a coherent, satisfying, and internally-consistent ending to Mass Effect 3, as promised.  However, those ambitions were ultimately derailed by time constraints and a lack of clear creative direction.

I suspect that at some point during the production process a critical deadline was reached, and it came down to the ending simply not being ready to go at that point in time.  Unable or unwilling to delay the game any longer, the game's producers made the decision to salvage what they could from the ending content that had theretofore been produced and, to the best of their constrained abilities, cobble together those bits and pieces into something that would at least "function" as an ending.  The final cutscenes (Normandy fleeing, Giligan's planet, etc.) appear to me to be nothing more than scraps stitched together from wildly disparate sources and contexts in a desperate attempt to give the ending something resembling a conclusory trajectory.

In it's current patchwork form, I believe the ending is meant to be taken literally.  I don't believe that there is any deep or profound meaning behind it at all.  Nor do I subscribe to the indoctrination theory, insofar as I don't believe that indoctrination is meant to play a role in the ending as we have it now.  However, I do believe that an indoctrination plotline was supposed to have played a role in whatever original ending Bioware was working towards because the leftovers of such a plotline are all too evident in the ending as it currently exists.  

Moreover, I don't believe Bioware ever gave any real consideration to the implications (cataclysm of relay explosions, etc.) of the current ending.  Time constraints being what they were, they simply lacked that luxury.  They had a deadline.  They had to have an ending.  This was the best that they could do.

Simply put, the ending is a hack-job, necessitated by a combination of systemic and creative breakdowns. 

[Computer_God91]

Cause only Casey and Mac wrote it with zero input from the rest of the team.

[nycmode75]

It did feel rushed. In the end I didn't feel nearly as involved with the characters as in ME1 or ME2

[JBPBRC]

Definitely to try and pull a Capcom. It was recently announced (don't know if its available yet) that Capcom was going to sell the "true ending" to Asura's Wrath via DLC. EAware was probably trying to go down the same route, hoping that the ending was good enough of a hook to get people to pay for the EC.

[-WeAreLegion-]

Two. People (read bosh'tets). Wrote. It.

[Jononarf]

WHY IS THIS STILL BEING DISCUSSED?

[XwebraiderX]

Jononarf wrote...

WHY IS THIS STILL BEING DISCUSSED?

because we are amused of delightful reactions like yours. you may go on.

[Beeno4Life]

Casey Hudson is an idiot.

[Warbuckaz]

I blame Multiplayer!!! All resources shouldve been dumped into the single player caimpaign...any left over time or staff should have been spent on MP at the every end

[MattFini]

Even under extreme time constraints I remain absolutely fascinated that THIS was the best they could do.

I mean, I am NOT a Casey Hudson hater at all, which is why I can't believe he signed off on the junk of Priority: Earth and Star Child.

I expected more from the man who oversaw two masterpieces.

[PeaRLoFJaM]

Sparse wrote...

I think that budget and time constraints are why there are no side-missions, N7 reused multiplayer maps and rather skewed interaction with team members. I also think that sales are why it is much less an RPG than the others. I don't think it is the cause of the ending though

Things went wrong the moment they put their central plotline up on a whiteboard and it had less than half as many steps as it should have had. There was just no journey for the player. At the beginning you were told what your mission was and then given the tools to do it. The game was then you doing it - by collecting resources te nature of which were meaningless. You were basically playing Pac-Man

It doesn't matter how good the writing of the quests that make up the main storyline is, if there is no journey it just ends up somewhere boring.

It's where the ending came from, they tried to get around the fact that the main plot didn't work with an interesting ending. The board on the Normandy with dead crew members on it and the nightmares were supposed to be the demonstration of the journey, which then brought you to the whole starchild thing. It didn't hang together though, it did not clearly demonstrate Shepard becoming weary with the pressures of his life and crumbling under the pressure because it wasn't in any way linked to everything else that was happening.

The story was just wrong. The sub-plots were fine but the central storyline started in the wrong place didn't reallty go anywhere and then ended somewhere that it hadn't reached. It's the first time I have looked at the central plot of a Bioware game and thought, "I could do better than that". It's that bad.

[crimzontearz]

monetary reasons. It costs less to render 1 cutscene and add different colors and then sell expanding DLC later.

which also makes the art defense pretty much insulting

[Varus Praetor]

Temporary insanity is a likely candidate, although I'm more partial to good old fashioned incompetence.

[Cyne]

My best guess is that they thought a vague, unusual ending would result in more DLC purchases, as people would be clamoring to find out what really happened. That and they were rushed and had little time/desire to devote to a better ending.

I also think that the writers probably disagreed on how to do the ending, since it's such an important part, and so one or two took it upon themselves to write it out without the others' input.

Modifié par Cyne, 23 avril 2012 - 03:02 .

[leapingmonkeys]

Seems like unrealistic time constraints imposed on the project with little consideration for the resulting quality. That plus a rather sophomoric notion of "profound" writing resulting in a rather nihilistic ending. I suspect a little bit of ego thrown in as well which resulted in the game discounting the players choices in favor of the project lead's choices.

Probably more time would have fixed the other two problems as a proper review process and a system of checks-and-balances would have stopped the shoot-from-the-hip process that ignored so much of what made the prior games enjoyable.

[sky99cap]

Jealous Beauty wrote...

What makes any of you think that they actually believe they "screwed up" the ending at all? Frankly, I think they wrote exactly what they wanted and were genuinely astonished that we didn't "get it."

This, as evidence by their continual harping on their "artistic vision" and that the DLC will change nothing in the ending.

[FlamingBoy]

i think the reasons are commericial, either wanted the set the game up for a new series, or, more likely, they wanted to set up some paid dlc

[leapingmonkeys]

MattFini wrote...

Even under extreme time constraints I remain absolutely fascinated that THIS was the best they could do.

I mean, I am NOT a Casey Hudson hater at all, which is why I can't believe he signed off on the junk of Priority: Earth and Star Child.

I expected more from the man who oversaw two masterpieces.

I cannot find information about who was the project lead for ME1, but what I can find is that the lead writer for ME1 was a co-lead for ME2 and then he left (Drew Karpyshyn).  The next ME game after he left was flat, linear and completely discounted player decisions/actions in favor of a tacked-on ending that came out of left field.  How many times have we heard Bioware say "we didn't realize the customers want XYZ" in the aftermath of ME3?  To me it feels like the person who was perhaps most responsible for the success of ME1/ME2 wasn't there for ME3...

[SAmaster01]

I don't see how the Catalyst was setting up for ME4. One because while we complain about the Endings of ME3 being too similar, how do you smush everything being a cyborg, versus not cyborg with dead Reapers lying around. Two, because the Mass Effect universe has been absolutely destroyed, from a literary perspective (no Mass Relays in Mass Effect is like no magic in Harry Potter) and from a literal perspective.

I believe they were rushed, ME3 is not a perfect game even if you take our the endings. I figure that Bioware Lied when they said that they already had the ending planned from the beggining (like you are supposed to) or at least that ending got cut. If the ending we got is planned ending, everyone at Bioware is an idiot for not making the themes of the ending present throughout the rest of the game.

What probably happened was when they were pushed to put out an 'easily accessable game meant for everyone + multiplayer' before they were read, the ending was rushed without being thought through, and was made to be 'artistic' and philosophical, despite the fact that Mass Effect was not a philoshophical game, and hoped that they could BS enough people, and the rest of the game would carry it. Which is not happening.

[feliciano2040]

Do you guys realize that no ending would've pleased you at all ?

People had irrational expectations about this game.

Was the ending flawed ? Deffinitely, but it was an ending that was designed to ASK QUESTIONS, instead of complaining so much about the starchild, why not wonder about his origins ? Is he a "being of light" from Klencory ? Why does he appear to Shepard as a child ? Why is the child himself so important to Shepard ?

I respect the rights of consumers, I myself am one, but that doesn't mean we have to lash out like wounded animals, instead of thinking things through.

[ronnok]

First letter E second letter A

[SwiftRevenant]

You do not throw in a completely new plot device (star child) in the last 5 min of a game that you have not talked about through the entire series. The ending is quite honestly the same with very slight variations.

When you see the "quality" of earlier missions, choices from earlier games affecting who you see and what you can do, normandy crew dialogues (Vega talking with Jaavik is hilarious), etc. you get upset when you get the ending we got. It was not done well to save the least.

Time crunching, costs, perhaps some of the old bioware employees leaving left some areas with less than the necessary direction and consistency we've all grown accustomed to.

Wait and see on the EC if you follow the twitter accounts of Mike Gamble, Jessica Merizan, etc. they know they have to regain the fanbase trust.