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Awesome: 'Mass Effect 3: Welcome To Our Thread, Here Are Your Compli...' by Orikaeshigitae
Posts
It's pretty much a total hagiography of those two guys so yes.
Bioware publicly admitted prerelease that the two head writers wrote the ending entirely by themselves and kept it a complete secret from the rest of the staff with zero outside editing.
I'm not sure if your post is supposed to just be "hahaha angry nerds" or what, but this is literally what Bioware themselves said. Maybe they're lying just to get people to hate them, who knows!
Mass Effect 3: The Final Hours is available for $3.00 on apple devices.
(Before some goose asks, no I am not shilling. I couldn't care less if you buy the app. I'm certainly not going to. I'm just replying to Thejakeman's request for a citation).
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
Does anyone get the feeling that they never really planned the story ahead of time? I just got to Mars on my second playthrough a couple minutes ago and couldn't help but think, "Man, they've been making this series for 8 years! Did they plan on having this dumb superweapon and the Catalyst thing the whole time?" It occurred to me though, that maybe they really hadn't. I always thought they had a general, if not specific, idea or plan for the story of the trilogy, but when I think about it, it doesn't really seem like they did.
I mean, Mass Effect 1 ends with Shepard saying they're going to find a way to stop the reapers. But then ME2 begins with the Normandy on boring Geth patrol. More than that, the entirety of ME2 seems sort of out of place with the rest of the story. It's all about stopping the collectors, not finding a way to defeat the reapers. I feel like the second game should have been all about finding a way to stop the Reapers, rather than a half hour mission at the beginning of ME3. It just feels sort of jumbled and unplanned. I really expected the trilogy to have more of a storyboarded plan for the whole thing, but in the light of the Catalyst it really doesn't seem like it was. Does anybody else feel the same? Or, alternatively, does anybody have any links of the staff saying things that directly confirm/deny this idea?
The final hours thing talks about how they had all kinds of ending ideas in mind but kept scrapping them. Until Casey and Mac Walters locked themselves away and worked on draft after draft, keeping it separate from the other writers, so no peer review. No one else even saw the ending until the voices had been recorded and it was too late to change anything.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
"So, what do you guys think of the ending?"
"LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYBODY" were his exact words for what he was aiming for, which is thematically inappropriate for Mass Effect. In the bulk of the games the cause and effect of events are mechanically understood (that ship went to that planet, that person fired that bullet and killed that person). There's no speculation as to the outcome of your actions.
Getting the Thanix cannon lets you laser the collectors, getting the armor lets the collectors not laser you as much. In Mass Effect 3 introducing this extreme ambiguity out of nowhere is completely at odds with everything that came before.
The appropriate stance is, if you don't mind me repeating my words from forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/22537482#Comment_22537482, they didn't listen to their editors. No real peer review or editing = hubris and the demise of all things good. This is why as a series goes on and gets more popular the books gets more sloppy- either they drag on forever (re: Harry Potter), involve ridiculous plot twists (re: Lost), or simply descend into incomprehensibility. Because the writers think they're doing well enough to not need any real editing, and because they have enough clout with their publishers/producers/whatever that they can get their wishes for the life unedited granted. Folly, pure folly.
As for the post, it is indeed awesome. It amuses me to see a fellow Story Asshole do his thing. It further amuses me to see the author five posts later arguing semantics- HOW TYPICAL.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
I'd actually like to hear more about this. I'm not looking for an argument just generally intrigued to know more about your position on this.
Once we finally see the Catalyst, it points out that without the Crucible it wouldn't have any of the options given to us as "endings" at all. It's actually the Crucible that's giving the resolutions to the story, and we've been fully aware that this is entirely the point of the game. We've had a build up of constantly being told that the crucible is our only chance and that we still have no idea what it will do or what it's capabilities are. At one point you learn that multiple races created the Crucible itself without directly interacting with one another, so it stands to reason that they may have had multiple ideas for what it should do. It's the McGuffin of the story that resolves the conflict, not an omniscient presence or even some new concept.
I also disagree that the last options aren't carefully engrained in the gameplay throughout. While I agree and wholly understand that our game play may be wildly different there seems to be a lot of the same choices at the end presented to us on a smaller scale in different missions.
Destroying the Reapers: This is prefaced by two games of play, but I'll focus on just it's use in Mass Effect 3. A lot of the game play is built around fighting the reapers and even killing a few of them. You're building an army with two express purposes. Retaking Earth and fighting the Reapers. In multiple situations like when mediating the war council you're led into taking direct action against the Reapers themselves. You talk to the War Council to create a strategy to fight the reapers, you go to Tuchanka to bring the Krogan into that fight, and you're given plenty of incentive to do that at the start of the game back on Earth. In fact, back on Earth you see a Reaper kill a child you just tried to save, and that image is brought up constantly throughout the game. This is something that's so horrifying that for the first time in our experience, it's something that shakes our character to the core. Shepard can go into any danger knowing that she is probably going to die, can yell down the council for not recognizing the threats out there, but when it finally strikes home that she may not be able to save people no matter the odds, it just traumatizes her to the point of mental breakdown. That it the reason to destroy the reapers, because this is a threat not just to the universe, but to our very avatar. This is as traumatizing to the player as it is to Shepard, because it takes control away from both the player and the character. We could decide how Shepard reacts to everything but this. That kind of thing scares people, and that's why you destroy.
Controlling the Reapers: This is brought up directly by the Illusive Man early on, and the idea of control rather than outright fighting is always present in the game through the very act of gameplay. We have control over everything, or so we think, because we can control how a conversation moves and how a fight goes. We saw gangs of mercenaries and turned them into our own personal army, we saw problems throughout the galaxy and we fixed them, we see an enemy and we know we control what happens to them. We've been controlling conflict throughout the game, and using our control to determine who lives or dies. We are the ultimate hero of the galaxy and we control what happens. Why shouldn't we also control the Reapers? The Catalyst even tells us we can before we do it. We're imbued with the concept that there's nothing within this universe that Shepard does not have control over.
Synthesis: This is really a culmination of different missions and concepts brought up. On Tuchanka we learn that we have the power to alter the very nature of an entire species. We can bring life where there was death and we can alter others to fit our needs. On Rannoch we are once again given the option to completely change the nature of an entire species and bring true sentience and individuality to synthetics. Rannoch also serves as the anchor to our concept of what the Geth are. It's on Rannoch that we either determine that all Geth deserve to live and be free or that they deserve to die, mere tools that they are. There's a conversation that happens just before this point back on the Normandy that only serves to prime us for this question. The Chief Engineer and the Doctor are talking in the mess about whether Geth are "alive" or not. You're directed to this confrontation by your personal assistant who tells you to go check it out. You're given three options, Geth are "alive", Geth are merely tools, or walk away. Really, the last one is less of an option than a reaction, but it prefaces the question you'll have to answer back on Rannoch. This all primes you to answer whether you believe that changing the nature of all species to prevent this catastrophe is better or worse than killing all Synthetics. You're less inclined to hit that big red ending if you actually care about the Geth or the martyrdom of their personal Jesus.
Synthesis is also the "happy" ending. Everyone lives, Synthetics and synthetic-people alike, even the Reapers go on living.
I think my real issue with the endings stems from the floating panel. Alright, it floats up. Panels float all the time in this universe. But then the Catalyst seems to actually be surprised, within the given value that you can surprise such a thing. It points out that your presence in front of it proves that the cycle cannot continue. But didn't the Catalyst bring you there?
It also never really explains the Catalyst or the Reapers at all. Everything that happens afterwords stems from the Crucible and there's only a single line on what the Catalyst is. Saying it was built to stop all organic life from being subsumed by Synthetic life would be one thing, but it actually hands that entire description to the Reapers.
Let me clarify. In the ending to Mass Effect 3, we don't even get a picture of the immediate outcome of what the hell happened. We're not even left with a foundation upon which to speculate, leading to fans having to make up all the details out of whole cloth re: the fate of every single character in the game.
ME 1/2/3(pre ending) style speculation: I saved the krogan, they've pledged not to go on a murder spree. What will this mean for the galaxy? Is this a new era for them or have I just caused another war in the future? We know our bro Wrex is happy!
LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE: Flan from the extradimensional bread consortium has appeared and told me that his bread can save the universe, shepard agrees that this is the only hope and ravenously takes a bite, happy music plays, all of the volus in the galaxy explode, we see liara smile and the camera cuts to black.
In the former I know all of the people involved, there's no speculation regarding who anyone is, or why shepard made the decisions she did. In the latter I don't know what the fuck is going on, and my speculation has less to do with "What does this mean for the characters" than "What the fuck just happened". I'm not given enough information to adequately guess on what happened to anything or anybody. Mass Effect is about characters, not speculation, and we don't know what happened to the characters.
I defy anyone to even assemble a list of who, exactly, survived Mass Effect 3
This is a trick question! No one survived! At least, that's how it goes in the good (read: low assets) ending!
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
Because to me, simply surviving isn't enough. I'd rather everyone die than suddenly be able to reproduce with their ipads.
Great, there's a huge fleet of disparate races in the Sol system, trapped. Earth is a ruin which is visibly on fire from SPACE. Arguably about to settle into an ash covered ice age and mass extinction. Starving, the many races war for what little resources remain, the handful that do survive crawl from the ruins decades later, the inbred descendants of the cannibals that prowled Earth's broken streets. Their radioactive mutations and debased genetic stock causing them to live lives of untold misery and pain amongst a minefield of broken ships, disease ridden crumbling cities and ancient weapons.
Alternatively, if you did really badly so that the Earth's atmosphere is incinerated everyone is spared this torment by a quick fiery death.
1) Joker, EDI, Tali, Javik. They all hopped out of the crashed normandy, new shiny skin, glowing eyes and all.
2) Kasumi Goto. She was safely away from the battlefield just before I went to my death.
3) Apparently everyone but the human part of Hammer Squad. Lets face it, there's no one shown assaulting Harbinger, or even coming as back up after you downed the previous Reaper with missiles, that isn't human. For the majority of the last battle, Humans are the only ones shown fighting and dying. Everyone else is making heroic speeches back at base unless I physically dragged them with me.
4) 2 random humans shown in the end cutscene.
One of the oddities I'm noticing is that, by and large, a huge portion of the complaints come from people who played the game very similarly. The "everyone lives" or at least "most people lived" endings of the previous games are in full effect. I'm not seeing a lot of people who died in Mass Effect 1 or 2 complaining about how the ending didn't fit with their ideas, or people who didn't save Tali and the Geth, who didn't save Wrex, or even people who didn't get the option of the "Green" ending. It's strange, but maybe a lot of people felt the game was really similar to other people's playthroughs because they all played the game the same way and so got the same options and their last battles all felt the same because they were the same?
Quick question for everyone.
How many saw this:
or even this
in their playthrough?
That's why it was such a "wtf?" When Garrus, who had been in the assault with me, showed up on the Normandy.
Because of that, literally anyone could still be alive unless we actually see them have a death scene. And that's really dumb.
Unless you choose the low assets ending; then you get to actually see your teammates get killed, so no weird transporter beam stuff later on.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
That.. that was a good review, although my fangirl instinct is always "You're being too haaaaaarsh!" After that ending, though, I'm actually able to accept criticism of Bioware in a more reasonable light that I would have before. So I can see your points, and even agree with them.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
This is also true.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
I agree pretty well with this. A lot of the writing is great, but a lot of it is also ham-fisted.
How? They are real, basic problems with the fundamental nature of the game as it stands. They don't go away with a different final ten minutes.
You're asking me why a triumphant and cathartic ending can make you forget the parts of a narrative that are bad? I'm not really sure I can. I'm not, like you, a "trained story asshole", I can't really answer for why an uplifting ending (even a sad uplifting ending, like, say, the ending of the film Central Station) makes weaknesses in the narrative somehow more forgivable. I only know that for me, on an emotional level, they do.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
For the same reason one might reminisce fondly about the times in their life that they hated when they were living them. It isn't that it makes the poorly written areas less so, it makes them stand out less. I hope I'm not over-stepping myself, but you seem more inclined to view the game by it's constituent pieces and rank the merit of the whole based off of the sum of it's parts. I find it's less the case with the average gamer for who sections of the game can be tedious or poorly written, but the entire game can still be enjoyable. Neither is necessarily the wrong way to play, though your method is more likely to advance the medium.
However, I'm not sure the ending will ever be resolved or people will ever be happy with it, but since it's the last area of the game many experience, it's an issue all the same. I'm interested in going back into the game and experiencing many of the things I missed by playing the cookie-cutter ending. I'm forming the opinion that a lot of the issues with the ending was because, when a lot of people are comparing their playthroughs, it's all coming up the same except for the ending due to the influence of forums, wikis and such that mean a not-insignificant number of players make the same choices and end up with the same game. My hypothesis is that if I play the game differently or without the benefit of previous saves, I can have a lot of sway in how the ending feels and the emotions it evokes.
Of course, there's no wrong way to enjoy a game. I don't think Orikaeshigitae was writing as a "gamer", he was writing as a critic. It's strongly evident that he enjoyed the game. That's even more of a reason not to overlook the flaws. If you like a friend, but that friend is kind of a douchebag and maybe has a bit of a drinking problem, sometimes you just deal with him being a douchebag. If you love that friend and really care for him, you call him out on his bullshit. Same deal here.
Bioware, we do this because we love you. Put down the bottle, etc.
Yeah, I actually think Orikaeshigitae is going about games reviewing in the right way... instead of spouting a bunch of buzzwords and gushing about the game, he's actually trying to be honest about the things that are wrong with the game (and the medium). I think we could use more reviewers like that, and fewer fanboys dressed up as reviewers. Honest criticism of art is important to art.
Origin ID: jazzmess
Amazon Wishlist
edit: God I really need to get off Orikaeshigitae's nuts. I'm starting to sound like the worst kind of sockpuppet.
edit2: pun intended.
But returning back to the bruised and beaten Shepard, shambling his way into the Citadel. At this point the whole idea of Shepard as an ustoppable champion of the Galaxy (who gets stuff done and walks into Collector's Base, guns blazing, shoots everyone on his way, kills a Reaper, blows the whole thing up, and escapes with his life no less) is done for. Now he's just some guy, who by sheer luck stumbles into the galaxy control room and gets to play with the shiny buttons. There's no determination, no keeping your shit tight, and no fighting and earning your right to become a big damn hero. Just the Elusive Man, who can be simply shot or made to pull off Saren, and the Star Child who is the worst ass-pulled plot device I've seen in ages.
As far as I can tell the whole outrage is about the expectations of Shepard, storming the Citadel and changing the fate of the galaxy, not being met. He is just let in and offered three bad choices with an added flavour of inevitable mass relay destruction. He is powerless and beaten and all his previous badassery get thrown out of the window. And that just isn't the Shepard people wanted to see. Sure, blasting your way through, saying your famous last words and dying would have been okay, if Shepard could actually decide the fate of the galaxy before he expires. But he doesn't and, quite naturally, players experience cognitive dissonace, since it was not what they payed their money for. They wanted an epic space novel, not a lovecraftian we-are-all-screwed-anyways story.
Well that's exactly what happened with Mass Effect 1. A solid ending can easily make you forget a difficult first two acts. Even if the problems are mechanical, not thematic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak-end_rule
People are very forgiving of 'filler content' and 'sloppy gameplay' as long as they get satisfaction at the end. It's also why I think it's entirely reasonable for someone to say the last five minutes ruined the entire franchise. That's not a crazy, hyperbolic sentiment. It's perfectly reasonable (though not one I share).
edit: Just so we're clear. I'm agreeing entirely with your review. Just saying that a better ending would have made a lot of people gloss over the errors (which don't go away, as you said), but they can just forget about them.