Foopydoopydoo wrote...
Fast Jimmy wrote...
I'm going to assume you didn't read all of the response you snipped my original quote from.
In that, I talk about DA:O's endings as being great, INCLUDING THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE. There, your hero dies only so Morrigan cannot conceive and raise a suspect supernatural child. Saving the Blight would have happened regardless of the DR decision. Is that a more noble reason to die than to preserve dozens, if not hundreds, of galactic sentient and sapient species? I'd say not.
So why did DA:O feel noble, while ME felt horrible? Because of follow-through. We saw and were shown the after-math of our actions. The DA:O version of the ME3 endings would be to cut off right when it shows the giant explosion on top of Fort Drakon and the darkspawn running away.
Also, it is not Bioware's responsibility to be worried about what I (and other) consumers assume about a story... but it certainly is their concern. Based on the information given in the last DLC released for ME2, destroying a Mass Relay releases an explosion that wipes out an entire star system. The very next piece of content we receive after that DLC, ME3, has an ending where every single Mass Relay is destroyed in a big explosion.
Sure, they are pretty explosions, but they are being caused by a giant machine built from blueprints no one really understands and explained by a glowing child who's line of logic is seriously faulted.
Is it Bioware's responsibility to try and prevent me from assuming the information they gave us right before ME3 came out was still valid? No. But its not my responsibility to like their endings or come to their defense when entire swaths of the gaming community begin to call their writers hacks.
ME3's ending didn't suck though. That's just like, your opinion, man. I actually assumed that when the Mass Relays exploded that A LOT of people were going to die and I was cool (well not cool) with that fact. Sacrifices and such. I consider the EC a bit of a retcon in that regard. And my Shepard's sacrifice felt noble as ****. I never did the Ultimate Sacrifice with my Warden because a) there was an obvious way out and 
the sacrifice wouldn't have birthed a new form of life with limitless knowledge. Sacrificing my Shep felt much more worth it than sacrificing my Warden.
Anyway all the whining about ME3's ending seems to be one of two things. Either that Bioware didn't choose to explain EVERYTHING to you or that it was sad. The first one is a dev choice, you can argue they were stupid or contradicting their own lore and you might or might not have a point. But the second one is a totally subjective personal preference. And since that's what the thread is supposed to be about... No, a happy ending is definitely not the lesson to be learned from ME3 imo.
Also concern and worry are synonyms dude. Might as well just have disagreed with me instead of being disingenuous.
Concern and worry are snynonyms, dude. Being concerned about something and having a responsibility about something are two VERY different things. Please read your own original words that I was responding to instead of being disinegnous.
Besides that, I am not "whining" about the ME3 endings. Do you see me stomping my feet, crying out and gnashing my teeth? Do you see me demanding that Bioware remake them? And give me a happy ending where I can fly off into the sunset with my LI of choice? Or be able to flip the Catalyst the bird, hop into a starfighter ship and blow up all the Reaper ships with my awesome flying and shooting, fist pumping while "Joker and the Thief" blasts on the speakers? No. You see me saying none of those things.
My posts have broken down why the endings are poorly constructed and written. It points out flaws in the narrative, inconsistenices that don't add up. It also discusses the format of video game endings and why ME (especially the original endings) were terribly put together if they were attempting to foster a feeling of completion and finality for the players.
Ambiguity in whether or not you have just sentenced an entire galaxy to death or not is not good. Ambiguity in if you just condemned everyone in existence to a life of robo-mind control for all eternity is not good. Ambiguity that your character wakes up and takes a breath in a place that is scientifically impossible for them to do so unless the entire last ten minutes sequence (which was very bizarre and surreal) was all a dream is NOT GOOD.
Couple that with the fact that no previous choice made in the entire game comes into play at all beyond a number to the endings and the fact that no questions are answered about the fate of your friends, your allies or even your enemies (even the original Destroy was a little nebulous about if the Reapers were truly dead - one could say they simply looked stunned) and you can see that the lack of closure abounded everywhere.
It wasn't a design choice not to tell the player everything. It was a design choice to not tell the player ANYTHING. Every detail was so generic and unexplained that it could result in a million different explanations. And, while that may work for a Ridely Scott film like Bladerunner, where it can add to the film if there is mystery if Deckard is a replicant or not, this is a video game, a game that engages the player with choices. We are not watching the story of Shepherd. We are DEFINING the story of Shepherd. Despite dev comments prior to release, the players were not co-authors of this series ending and we were given the same bespoked endings.
No details, no closure. No closure, no catharsis. No catharsis, and people then begin to wonder what they were doing spending hundreds of hours playing a game series to begin with. That's NEVER the experience you want people to have when playing a game.
Is this everyone's experience? Of course not. But is it a very common, if not the majority's experience? Yes. Obviously so.
People can pretend the BSN is its own little micorcosm of haters of ME3, but anywhere you see the game talked about, the endings are mentioined. If not as a full-on negative, then as something that the person discussing them has to defend in some way. GI did an issue a few months back where ME3 won RPG of the year. The description of the award was nearly defensive and apologetic, as was the Editor's Note for that issue, which explained their voting process and detailing out that their votes are not bought from publishers, but are centered around debate and argument about games. This is a perfect example of the very obvious fact - the endings are good for some, neutral for others, but infuriatingly upsetting for a non-trivial group of people. So much so that everyone in the gaming community knows that bringing it up without starting a fight is like walking on eggshells.
That's not a good experience you want attached to your video game. And it is NOT because it isn't happy. It is because it is unclear and lacks any attempt to make you feel like your choices resulted in anything but the same exact thing everyone else got, except for the color of your explosions.
THAT'S what DA3 should pay attention to. Don't make your endings wide open to nothing but interpretation. Give an ending like DA:O, where there is so much variability and reflection of choice at the end, that the very next thing people want to do after beating your game is start it over so they can see how the endings play out differently based on their choices. Not make them want to throw their TV out of a window because they felt like they had just wasted huge chunks of their lives on a false promise of choice.
Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 08 mars 2013 - 12:44 .
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