At this point I just feel like developers, especially directors and writers in the biz should have some kind of "Ending-writing course" available to them, so they can learn to write an ending for a game that satisfies their fans.
Just personally speaking, and no one has to agree but I know others have thought the same, I can name a few really, really noteworthy games of the last 2-3 years which I felt had god-awful endings in an otherwise extraordinary game/story:
- Mass Effect 3 (2012)
- Deus Ex Human Revolution (2012)
- Halo 4 (2012)
- Assassin's Creed III
- Dragon Age Inquisition (2014)
- The Witcher 3
- Arkham Knight
Okay, bear with me. The heaviest hitters are ME3, TW3 and AK for me personally because all of them are trilogy bookends and in the final endings of them (as in the most 100% outcomes) it feels as if the directors or writers went "It's the ending, we have to make it impressive!" where a smarter guy would've probably said "we've told our story. Let's give some closure and start wrapping it up."
What I'm trying to say, is that I feel as though too many writers in this biz have no knowledge or common sense as to what an ending should contain. Admittedly this stuff happened to TV-series too when the writers were just "winging it" with Lost for example and came up with an ending that didn't give answers and was basically their own weird gibberish as if they didn't care.
But in the case of Witcher 3, and without spoiling the story, basically, no matter what the ending you get, it's right around the climax that it goes haywire. You know there's some kind of thing that is missing as icing on the cake to the plot.. just some kind of twist as it has been foreshadowed and then after the final boss indeed there was a little twist, then things get really climactic quickly and you arrive at the twist ending and it just... it feels unfitting somehow because of what happens in the scene no matter what. Then during this climactic twist ending it abruptly cuts away and starts the epilogue, and even then there are so many characters that are suddenly missing and so many answers we are looking for after such a long adventure, and we just get a basic answer to the most important thing and it feels like a bunch of important scenes had been cut or something. I've even heard many argue that the problem lies within the twist-ending itself and that its entire premise feels ill-fitting and didn't need to be there. I can agree, but personally I thought it was the content within that twist ending that lacked some crucial developments.
As for Arkham Knight the problem isn't so much the climax itself... hell, I even think the climax itself is the high-point of the game and something every Arkham fan should get to see for themselves, but then after the climax you get to activate the 100% complete epilogue ending if you've beaten enough side-missions and the content of this ending, like Mass Effect 3 and, to some, like Witcher 3, it feels like, instead of just keeping it simple and closing the story the developers felt a need to go out of their way to create some kind of twist or some really impactful scene that changes our entire experience of the story, and just... just stop, lol. I feel like there are so many games that are kind of getting it right, but then fumble right at the finish line because developers think a good ending is the one with the most shock-value or the most ambiguous one.
To me, the best kind of ending is in the one that makes me say goodbye to all the important characters and concentrate on reflecting upon where the journey from the rest of the game has taken these characters. The ending is a reflection of the destination, not the destination itself if that makes sense. To my recollection, TLoU did this right, Halo 3 did it right, every Zelda game (almost) did this right, but there are so many highly esteemed AAA games from companies that have a knack for writing and storytelling that just don't seem to know how to handle its endings properly, and it's so frustrating to see as a consumer of games.
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