Drayfish wrote this, abouth a month ago:
Considering the substantial, and rather worrying cognitive dissonance many fans (myself included) perceived between the numerous pre-release promises and what was actually delivered; considering the disparity between the near-universally gushing review scores and what actually appeared in the game (the bugs, the narrative railroading, the utterly required multiplayer despite repeated assurances to the contrary, and the muddled, obscure ending – almost none of which was addressed in reviewer analysis); and taking into account the near industry-wide condemnation of any fans who dared voice their displeasure at the game; I would argue that the confidence you place in any future alignment between the press and customer satisfaction is a little fantastical.
I have many issues with Bioware and Mass Effect 3 (which I will get to in a moment), but a good deal of other worrying issues extend into the 'games journalism' field itself, and the uncomfortable relationship that developers such as Bioware have with those people who should be holding publishers to greater account. The fact that your equation for future player satisfaction still relies upon some alignment between review scores and player experience, without anyone actually bothering to examine and correct what created such a glaring discrepancy this time around, suggests that very little – if indeed nothing – has been learned from this experience.
As for Bioware itself, although I am not sure I would categorise the sensation as the 'destruction' of some blind 'trust' I had in the company (they are, after all, a business, and I a consumer), what I did have faith in was a certain standard of product – both mechanically and narratively. Previous to ME3, every Bioware game I had played impressed me as a work of depth and expanse. Characters were well-rounded, plots (for the limitations of an RPG structure) were branching and surprising, design and programming were impeccable, all of which created an immersive world that the player could invest in. From the freedom to explore of ME1, to the multiplicity of choice and backstory and endgame in Dragon Age: Origins, to the depth of character and emotional resonance of ME2. There seemed to be a ratio of developer care to player investment that always suggested this was a team that would not cynically rush a product to market.
And so, what rather shocked me at first about ME3 was the lack of polish.
As I said, one of the traits of Bioware games I had put faith in was a level of presentational and structural finesse. It probably goes without saying at this point that I had (and have) not played Dragon Age 2 – so when I started ME3, the animation glitches, face import failure, and frequent dismissals of major choices from the previous games rather took me by surprise. It struck me as the kind of rushed work I attributed to other developers – not Bioware.
That the game was suddenly dismissing major decisions from the previous games (who was councillor; the death of the Racchni; the Collector Base; Shepard's entire character backstory, etc), a central component of the RPG elements continuously touted by Bioware to be at the centre of this experience for half a decade; that the game was suddenly dictating who the character of Shepard was to me, contrary to my personal input (she cares so much about 'random kid in the universe' that she will be haunted by him in naff dreams; she loved Kaiden and lamented his death, apparently); that the game severely truncated the speech options and had whole swaths of uninterrupted auto-dialogue; that it stripped away legitimate side-missions in favour of obscure, unfulfilling fetch-quests and a wholly linear narrative with little to no variation in level progression – all indicated that this game operated very differently from those that had come before it. Indeed, this was so evident that despite the frequent narrative call-backs presented, it was difficult to align this with the two games that had preceded it; with the exceptions of the Genophage arc and a good portion of the Rannoch missions, this entry seemed streamlined and narrowed to the point of losing all of the qualities that define a reactive, immersive Mass Effect experience entirely. (That there was an 'Action mode' only cemented this feeling further.)
But all of this only disappointed me. What horrified me was the ending.
And I am not talking about the cut corners, the deus ex machina, the illogical narrative leaps that needed to be spackled over in the EC, or the ham-fistedly on the nose religious metaphor of Shepard's sacrifice. I am talking about the moment in which it was made clear that Bioware – I presume in some misguided attempt to load an artless gravitas into the final decision tree – advocated the application of either an act of genocide, eugenic purgation, or becoming a totalitarian god.
And it is not enough to argue, as some people have, that 'the player did not have to do any of those things – they were choices', because the game was engineered so that it could only be completed if one of those choices was made. The conflict of the entire Mass Effect sage has been about racial conflict – metaphorically presented in the violence between synthetic and organic – and the only way to end it is to employ one of three war crimes. There is no way to work together, no way to have faith in your fellow allies, no way to talk the enemy of the game down from their intolerant hate-screed. You just have to do what they ask: exterminate a race of beings because their lives are worth less than yours; ascend to the arrogant position of an unstoppably dictatorial monster; or mutate every life in the universe to have the same DNA - because that's the only way to 'peace'.
Bioware decided to use their trilogy to send a nihilistic message about to futility of struggle and hope: you can't win by believing in stupid things like diversity and inclusivity. War can only be overcome by being the one to employ the war crime for your agenda (whatever that might be). Bigotry can only be overcome by forcing your will upon others: wiping them out, forcing them to get along, or violating them to become all genetically the same.
I have literally never seen a more horrifying message offered by a piece of popular entertainment in my life. And the fact that Bioware not only published such a hateful world-view in their fiction (perverting an otherwise hopeful and wondrous narrative in the process), but then after the fact became so aggressively protective of it – announcing themselves bewildered that fans could not appreciate their cynical vision and conceding only to expand the point they had made without explanation or compromise, has led me to believe that either Bioware is so blinded by hubris that they are incapable of actually taking responsibility for the implications of their fiction, or truly do have a vision of the world that stands fundamentally and profoundly opposed to my own.
Either way though, it is near impossible to see that gaping fissure being overcome by a few good reviews from fans and press next time (they were hardly indicative this time around anyway). To me the company Bioware is either narcissistically blind or so filled with a need to spout angsty, intolerant drivel, that their future texts will ultimately have little I want to engage with to say anyway.
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Cutting all the hyperbole and hate many people posed here in 2012, these were the complaints many of us had since march, and we still have today.
Saying that people here "don't have a point" it's simply not true. Relevant topics, regarding all the problems ME3 SP have, are around since march.
Modifié par Paulomedi, 21 janvier 2013 - 03:08 .
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