591 réponses à ce sujet

[Pzykozis]

Dave of Canada wrote...

I've heard this said many times and I can't understand why anyone would choose the "failure" path and be satisfied with it, I've chosen them many times in Origins (Killing Connor, leaving Redcliffe, wiping out the Dalish, killing Zevran, Harrowmont with Anvil) because that'd be what my character would do but it leaves the player--atleast in my case--feel like they've simply failed, rather than having done a tough decision.

Which is why I feel like having Catch-22 and Sophie's choices are actually important sometimes, Origins basically made it clear that certain things were the worse option, and whilst I prefer bleaker stories and outcomes I'm not out to hamstring myself in the process. Or having certain choices not change the outcome at all ('All That Remains' I love you so).

[JWvonGoethe]

esper wrote...

Hawke was a deconstructed hero and wasn't as the legend told at all which was the whole point of the game.

I got into a discussion with Palipride about this the other day. My view was that, while I really admire Bioware for taking such a thoughtful approach to the game, there was a discrepancy between intent and execution. If Hawke was meant to subvert the notion of a fantasy heroic archetype, then why did he have two giant boss fights in the endgame, for instance?

Nonetheless, it was good to see a developer taking such a risk-averse approach to concept, and I would like to see them to continue this tradition in the future. They just need to make sure there is less dissonance between story and concept next time.

Modifié par JWvonGoethe, 27 octobre 2012 - 09:56 .

[CommanderVyse]

For a novel, I can understand a character failing. You had no other choice. But for a game built on choice to suddenly take that away from you, why bother playing?

Even the most linear of games involves player choice. If you get a game over on the final boss, do you give up? Or do you continue to fight?

How many games, in which the protagonist dies at the end, involve the player actually pulling the trigger one last time? Or it it always handled in a cutscene? Because the player would fight.

The player always knows a better way out. How many people playing DAII thought, look at my level, look at my gear, I've killed dragons and mages and templars by the hundreds, I could storm the Gallows myself. Instead, a cutscene will tell us it is impossible. Tell us that we have to fail for the good of art.

[Fast Jimmy]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

It was my friends birthday today.  So we hopped on our Griffons and flew around Edmonton for a while, and filled up some water balloons and dive bombed the people that slighted us in the past year.  It was particularly awesome because the siblings of the griffons we were riding would go out and get us resupplies of water balloons.  Afterwards, the Griffons flew us home and high fived us, because they are awesome like that.


(This story is mostly fictional.  Mostly)

I want to do fly-by water balloon bombings on griffons!

Why not me?!



On topic, David, I think you are getting off topic of your own point... the reason ME3 did not succeed well as a narrative wasn't that Shepherd was an individual, it wasn't that his narrative wasn't unique enough, it wasn't even that they tried to make his journey grim/dark... it was the fact that its narrative structure completely breaks down at the end.

Let's take Allan's original story, and make a slight change:

Allan Schumacher wrote...

A story is quite literally simply a sequnce of events, which may or may not be fictional.  For example:


My friend had his birthday today.  He invited me out, and I joined his family for dinner.  It was a fun time, and afterward we went back to his place where he, his sister, and I watched an anime called Black Lagoon.  I just got home from this about 30 minutes ago and found my house burned down by extremists, because I am an alien and they think I am here to destroy their planet.

This introduces information about new characters (the extremists), about the main character (being an alien) and about the world (such as that the world we thought we understood pretty well for the majority of the story is actually not the one portrayed at the end, namely that there are aliens and that many people on the planet know this).

Mass Effect 3 does this. Up until the very end, it tells the story of the Mass Effect universe as a story - the story of Shepherd's struggle against the Reapers, an unbeatable foe that Shepherd has had victories against and which embodies the qualities of determiniation and never giving up (even Renegade Shepherd upholds these ideals). Then, at the end, we are shown a new character (a god child, creator and ruler of the Reapers), revealed information about Shepherd (that he accepts this information blindly, as opposed to being determined to reach his goal like he was the entire rest of the series) and that the world/universe is much different than we had we had been told for the vast majority of the narrative (that AI's and organics are the root of all problems and that this problem can't be solved without wide scale genocide... despite the fact that you are given the choice to solve an example of said problem without said genocide literally just hours ago).


Grim/dark stories that result in people not being ideal, the main character not being perfect and sacrificing, either of the protagonist or of others, are not bad story-telling elements - in video game mediums or any other - in and of themselves. Its only when the very concept of narrative structure is completely broken down at the end do things become terrible.

Are Control/Destroy/Synthesis INHERENTLY bad ideas? If presented by Anderson, TIM and, perhaps, EDI, instead of by a random glowing child whose very existence is questionable (good ole' Indoc Theory, or the fact that if he is in the Citadel why anything in ME1 happened at all) this could have been done better. 

Could the theory these choices were based off of, Ai vs. Organics, been sold to us as players? Sure, if the only examples we had seen in the trilogy didn't hint that this was the exact opposite.Shepherd has negotiated peace with synthetics and organics time and time again now. And these conflicts don't stand out as being any more thorny or likely than any other conflict - humanity vs. the council races, krogan vs. salarians, batarians vs... well, everyone it seems like. They could have just as easily came out and said that the Batarians are born into every cycle and would be the undoing of the galaxy for all the mental preparedness they gave us that Synthetics were the inherent problem.

Could the idea that Shepherd dies been acceptable? Absolutely - almost everyone expected it anyway. Bioware saying that "this is the end of Shepherd's story" and "this was always planned as only a trilogy, to tell the story of Shepherd," etc... if you didn't pick up the vibes that they were killing off the protagonist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what else they could have done.

But to have him die for reasons Shepherd doesn't understand that well (as indicated by the conversation options) and for something the player doesn't either is terrible. TERRIBLE. 

You are no longer stopping the Reapers, the entire point of the trilogy. You are solving a problem that was presented to you in the last few minutes, a problem that you'd already solved just hours before. The only synthetics killing organics in the galaxy are the Reapers... who are trying to prevent synthetics from killing organics. I'd post the Xzibit meme here, but it already goes without saying - that's dumb. 



The Extended Cut fixes all of the logistical problems with the ending, making it not grim/dark anymore. The crew isn't stranded for eternity in conditions where some of them could starve and die. The same goes for the majority of the galactic forces. In addition, the destruction of the relays doesn't cause death across the galaxy anymore, killing anything and everyone. And the Normandy teleporting to new places makes sense now... even with all of this (and more), the EC doesn't fix the ending not because its grim/dark, but the REASON things are grim/dark is for poor narrative reasons. 

Because of the way we are thrown a narrative curve ball that makes no sense in relation to how we have been presented the universe prior to the final decision, it doesn't matter how many plot threads you tie up with the EC... its stil going to be terrible, because the entire ending is based in narrative incoherence. Because of this, and no other reason, are the ME endings bad. In fact, EC Destroy is probably a great example of proper grim/dark, since it shows some sacrifice (EDI and the Geth) but ultimately accomplishes the goal you set out to do. Its not a deciison you love, but it accomplishes the goal you set out to do. Its still stupid, since it is based in Space Magic and logical fallacies, but it is most in line with the rest of the narrative we have been presented so far.


Point being - its not the concept of a story that isn't perfect. Its a lack of closure (still not handled properly in the EC, they need to take a queue from Origins) and its a lack of narrative cohesion in the last ten minutes (which no amount of DLC will fix, since the writers say that the aren't changing that part). Grim/dark, sunshine happiness, moral ambiguity or ramifications to hard choices have nothing to do with the reason the ME3 endings fail.

[Reznore57]

I like bittersweet , sometimes.
But I think it always depends on how it's done.

In ME3 , I liked the idea of the relays destroyed and the world facing a dark age ,for me it was a logical conclusion .
Getting rid of all reaper influence and starting anew.
Sadly , how it was done was so confusing that i felt like i just blew up the entire galaxy and was a reaper puppet all along.

IMHO , a good bittersweet ending means , you're deeply sad about the lost you have to deal with for defeating X.
But you're shown it was not in vain.

There is also when everything looks dandy , you won at first glance , but to do so you had to do something shady and you know that it may come back and bite you in the ass.(like the dark ritual)

In DA2 , I don't know if it was a bittersweet , sad or happy ending.

Hawke felt so removed from it that it's hard to tell .It was more about the story of the world getting to a conclusion , like a natural disaster.
You can't stop it , so you just go along , try to survive and move on.

As a pc , it's pretty frustrating since it has little to do with you .
And since DA2 was about a personal journey it feels also a bit off .

And since the media is a video game , I think the quality of the story/ending doesn't rely 100 % on the writing.
ME2 , for all the weird looking reaper terminator baby and kind of a weak overall arc , pulls it off nicely.
Why , good action , you can suffer loss (the possibility of companion dying /shepard dying) , good music , good cinematics.

[Maria Caliban]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

David7204 wrote...

It should explain a lot.

That's what a story is. By nature, a story is about the exceptional, the unique, the uncanny, the unexpected, the unlikely.

This is simply incorrect.

I'd say that 90% of stories are about just that. Even if you're talking about slice-of-life literary fiction, the events and characters tend to be vibrant and unusual.

Allan Schumacher wrote...

A story is quite literally simply a sequnce of events, which may or may not be fictional.

That would explain our difference of opinion.

David7204 wrote...

What happened to you happened to nobody else in the universe. It happened once, and it will never happen again. If we lived a few thousands years ago and took and guessed that all of that happened at the exact place, and the exact time, it would be miraculous.

Now you're not even trying.

We've gone from literary theory to every one is a being a snowflake. Some snowflakes are boring and even if a specific person might technically be unique, that isn't the same as being exceptional, unusual, or uncanny.

esper wrote...

Eh... no. What happened to me was that somebody sat down and told the story. As a danish we have a writer 'Helle Helle' (who I loathe, btw, but whatever), who dedicates entire short stories to nothing other than to people having a cup of coffe.

I also read a story about a middle aged man eating a cake by another writer. Somebody may or may not having died, but the story was about someone eating a cake.

Heh. Slice-of-cake literary fiction.

Modifié par Maria Caliban, 27 octobre 2012 - 10:48 .

[WotanAnubis]

wwinters99 wrote...

How many games, in which the protagonist dies at the end, involve the player actually pulling the trigger one last time? Or it it always handled in a cutscene? Because the player would fight.

There aren't many, but Spec Ops: The Line can end with your character committing suicide. There are quite a few players who feel that the main character killing himself is the most 'valid' ending in the entire game and the endings where your character lives are not.

Of course, Spec Ops works hard to earn that ending. Most games aren't willing to go that far.

[Maria Caliban]

esper wrote...

David7204 wrote...

The "point" of this is that a story is expected to be about something and not nothing.

No it is not. There a plenty of minimalism authors who purposely writes stories about 'nothing' and claim that they are not suppossed to be understood as anything else than a story about nothing.

I'd argue that those writers are writing those stories specifically to play with people's expectations.

In fact, if those expectations didn't exist, those stories wouldn't managed to get published because they tend to be uninteresting save as meta-commentary.

[CommanderVyse]

WotanAnubis wrote...

wwinters99 wrote...

How many games, in which the protagonist dies at the end, involve the player actually pulling the trigger one last time? Or it it always handled in a cutscene? Because the player would fight.

There aren't many, but Spec Ops: The Line can end with your character committing suicide. There are quite a few players who feel that the main character killing himself is the most 'valid' ending in the entire game and the endings where your character lives are not.

Of course, Spec Ops works hard to earn that ending. Most games aren't willing to go that far.

Did you think while playing Spec Ops that the ending would be happy? The game set the tone from the beginning and stuck to it.

In Mass Effect 3 (and in a lesser extent Dragon Age 2) I thought Shepard/Hawke would triumph the entire time. And then they didn't.

[Wulfram]

ME3's endings problem wasn't that it was bittersweet, but that it was bad. In almost every way possible. Which for one thing meant most of the "sweet" getting lost in translation to the players, particularly pre-EC.

Admittedly a bad happy ending might have been acceptable to more players than a bad bittersweet one.

(The music was pretty good)

[Lennard Testarossa]

Just passing through to point out that "only make happy endings" is not the lesson to be learned form ME3's ending. The lesson is that nobody likes deos ex machina and science-fiction is called science-fiction because it contains fictional science, not magic.

[Giltspur]

David7204 wrote...

"He is the hero, he is everything."

Since the release of Mass Effect 3 about eight months ago, I've been following much of the BioWare staff wherever I can. Like many players, I was incredibly disappointed with the ending of Mass Effect 3, and was interested in the responses and opinions of the staff to see the reasons behind such a mistake and the likelihood of it happening again. I haven't played the Dragon Age games, but I've spent time on the forum since because some of the writers have been much more active on the forums and such since the announcement of Dragon Age III.

One of the things I picked up quickly is that the writers are very eager for 'bittersweet' stories. Some of the most enthusiastic reponses I've seen by the writers are how much they love 'bittersweetness.' And it makes me uneasy, because I feel as though they might well be making the same mistakes that have been made beforehand.

I don't think you need to be uneasy over that by itself. I don't think  Mass Effect 3's problem was that it was bittersweet.  

I'd recommend playing Dragon Age: Origins and comparing the choices you make towards the end of that game to the one in Mass Effect 3 and comparing the endings of that game to the ones in ME3 and see if you still have the same concerns about bittersweetness and such in games. My experience was that the choices in DAO were good and interesting choices and that the choice in ME3 was uninteresting and inappropriate.  And as for the endings in DAO, people might disagree which endings are heroic and which ones are bittersweet.  Some might call the most heroic ending the most bittersweet.  While still others might think the "happiest" is the least heroic while others would disagree with that.  In general, I thought DAO's endings were very well done and that combination of heroic accomplishment with not getting everything you wanted made them more impactful.

[DarkKnightHolmes]

The ME3 ending weren't bittersweet they were just........... terrible.

[TheJediSaint]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

It was my friends birthday today.  So we hopped on our Griffons and flew around Edmonton for a while, and filled up some water balloons and dive bombed the people that slighted us in the past year.  It was particularly awesome because the siblings of the griffons we were riding would go out and get us resupplies of water balloons.  Afterwards, the Griffons flew us home and high fived us, because they are awesome like that.


(This story is mostly fictional.  Mostly)

If you replace "Griffons" with "Moose", then it becomes plausible.


(And that's my cheep Canada joke of the day)

[TheJediSaint]

DarkKnightHolmes wrote...

The ME3 ending weren't bittersweet they were just........... terrible.

Bittersweet is fine.  Many things that are bittersweet are good, like the way I take my coffee.   The ending to Mass Effect 3 was not bittersweet, it was nonsensical noise.


(And there' my riff against ME3's ending for the day)

Modifié par TheJediSaint, 27 octobre 2012 - 12:55 .

[Wynne]

David7204 wrote...

It's also the primary reason why Mass Effect 3's ending was so horrible. Because heroism is meaningless. Because love, hope, unity, friendship, and every other quality a hero like Shepard embodies count for nothing. Because every friend, every ally, every ship, and every struggle encountered by Shepard in 120 hours of gameplay contribute so overwhelmingly little to the resolution of the conflict. So much less than we expected. So much less than Shepard deserves. I never want to see that happen again.

I think this is the part of your post that needs to be stressed. Why everyone loved Shepard is that she always fought no matter what the circumstances. So the third game essentially took away the message of "you can always keep fighting everything that's wrong with the world, and something good will probably come of it" and turned it into "except you actually can't! Because the universe is much bigger than you and it knows better. You can't save what you love, just choose how it burns." Thematic whiplash much? You could call it a narrative betrayal.

What should a good story leave the audience feeling? What do you, as a writer, want the audience to take away from your story? A feeling that life is meaningless and no one should bother trying because it will always turn out the same mostly-horrible way? Or that when your instinct is to give up you should fight that, because when you fight, you at least sometimes get through, and regardless probably made some kind of positive impact even if life seldom turns out the way you fully expected and hoped? 

Let me say, it should be the latter. Because I wouldn't want to be responsible for someone saying, "My wife left me, she took the kids, and I can't even find happiness in a fictional version of life. To hell with this," and hanging himself like my neighbor did. Games should have a believable level of happiness, they shouldn't be utterly depressing! That is not compatible with fun or escapism. 

Show a little love for your audience. Give them at least a fighting chance at a victory that isn't hollow. Because all it takes is one bad day for someone to decide it's really not worth it anymore. 

Modifié par Wynne, 27 octobre 2012 - 01:40 .

[Terrorize69]

What you got to remember about DA is, each game is it's own with a fresh PC, once the story reaches a climax, wouldn't you like the PC to go out in a bang?

(Rather then a cameo in some bar in the next?

[Aggie Punbot]

If I may interject:

In my opinion, Dragon Age: Origins handled the bittersweet ending just perfectly. If you wanted a tragic hero, you got one. If you wanted your hero to live, they could, but not without a cost that is yet to be determined. Everyone was happy, and no one was forced into accepting one outcome for their Warden. The epilogue slides forebode of the potential consequences of our actions in a 'realistic' manner. In short: it was done properly and with respect to player agency.

However, not only did Dragon Age 2 not follow this same formula (by refusing to provide a proper sendoff or even hint of an ending for the playable character), it metaphorically dragged the perfect ending from Dragon Age: Origins into the street and shot it in the back of the head. It not only botched its own ending, it retroactively ruined its predecessor's, and this is rather difficult to overlook.

Mass Effect 3 featured 3 rather unpalatable choices for the end game, and very, very few people left the game feeling satisfied (judging by the general fan reactions upon game launch).

Frankly, I don't expect Dragon Age 3's story to be any different than Mass Effect 3, which is why I can't really see myself getting this game no matter how much I loved the first and liked the second. But I accept the fact that no one gives a damn about my opinion and I let it go.

Modifié par TS2Aggie, 27 octobre 2012 - 01:51 .

[Lennard Testarossa]

Wynne wrote...

What should a good story leave the audience feeling? What do you, as a writer, want the audience to take away from your story? A feeling that life is meaningless and no one should bother trying because it will always turn out the same mostly-horrible way? Or that when your instinct is to give up you should fight that, because when you fight, you at least sometimes get through, and regardless probably made some kind of positive impact even if life seldom turns out the way you fully expected and hoped?

There is no default feeling an audience has to be left with in order for a story to be good.

I, for one, do not play rpgs to escape real life. I do not want stories to be motivating and positive, I just want them to be interesting and well-written.

Besides, what one feels when confronted with a certain kind of ending differs from person to person. Uninteresting and unbelievable good endings filled with simplistic notions of heroism depress me, while an interesting bad ending makes a thoughful and - in a sense - happy.

[Perlicka]

I have no problem with bad/sad/tragic endings, if it's written well ( but I can't say that about me3)

[Pzykozis]

TS2Aggie wrote...

If I may interject:

In my opinion, Dragon Age: Origins handled the bittersweet ending just perfectly. If you wanted a tragic hero, you got one. If you wanted your hero to live, they could, but not without a cost that is yet to be determined. Everyone was happy, and no one was forced into accepting one outcome for their Warden. The epilogue slides forebode of the potential consequences of our actions in a 'realistic' manner. In short: it was done properly and with respect to player agency.

I have wondered if it is just me who sees the final choice as a non-choice... for me its got nothing to do with heroism or whatever it just boils down to; "do I want my warden to randomly commit suicide?" (or do I suddenly wish Alistair / Loghain to die) or "do I just not want to die?".

Anyway there's nothing depressing about fighting something you know you can't win and losing, infact that's far better to me than standard power fantasy which is depressing to me mostly just because to me it really kinda makes a mockery of writing in general, even Beowulf died against the dragon. Someone just punching Cthulu to death would be the most depressing thing I could ever read.

[Solmanian]

"Heroism need to matter". Exactly, except true heroism isn't about finishing a boss monster. True heroism is about facing a problem without an obvius "perfect" solution, making a hard decision and taking responsibility for the consequences.

That what people don't understand about the ME3 ending: If one of the choices is a perfect ending without true implications, it's not a true choice at all. While it may not have been executed as good as it could've been, the ME3 ending is one of BW greatest accomplishment: they gave us three "bad" choices to consider for ourselves what is the lesser evil. When a game makes you think, rally ponder your decisions, it's a good thing. When you agonize about what you're supposed to do, is what makes an RPG game great.

Consider the fallout 3 ending: they give you 3 choices - give the wasteland a supply of clean water, destroy the purifier, or poison the water... Those are not actual choices, even though you can obviously make the "wrong" choices, we both know hat cannon will be...