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[PA Comic] Friday, March 16, 2012 - The Delicious Invasion
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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("god out of the machine"; plural: dei ex machina) is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.
I would also like to see Reaper Ice Cream a featured flavor at my local place this summer.
(Fortunately I was able to save this from cache before the Geth invasion was halted.)
Or better yet, whatever ending the players decide to achieve based on their past actions.
If I wanted it to be a tragic story where most of Shep's friends from ME1 and 2 don't make it through the suicide mission, I could do that too.
Hell, If I wanted to be a royally incompetent Shepard and literally suicide so hard at the end of ME2 that I manage to end the trilogy on a sequel, I could even do that.
In this game, the very end doesn't even finish with particular relevance to what you did except for the basic idea of the Crucible.
The glowlevator brings you up and then holokid tells you "go ahead, pick any ending you want and we'll show you a palette swapped FMV followed by a stock photo of Wintersun's Starchild album cover."
I personally not so much puzzled that it's not a perfect ending as how lazy an ending it is. Considering how much attention to detail Bioware likes to put into their games, I can't comprehend how this could have happened when you have a company that would even include details like this(note: this occurs if you don't do the Grissom Academy mission):
As posted by another user, this kind of drives the point home:
I really feel bad for everyone who paid full price for disappointment. I can't comment on if Tycho was right or wrong in his sentiment that the ending makes more sense if you've read science fiction, but it does come off as pretentious. Plenty of Mass Effect fans probably love science fiction in general and have read plenty of it and are still disappointed with the ending, perhaps moreso because it doesn't live up to the standards of other sci-fi series endings.
It's just an objective nightmare, really.
Thpoilerth?
Sheperd has permanently affected what will occur in the next cycles. In the long run of the universe, which is what the last bit of cinematic is about, the only choice Sheperd really had was: what will I do as regards future life and this cycle of reaping. All the game up to that point had been about the interpersonal relationships and characters, but none of that shit matters. Life as everyone knows it is ending. Maybe there'll be more life later. For now, Sheperd can give the gift of hope (or not) in a couple ways to future generations.
So all the game up to that point has let you play out your little sandbox fantasy with your people. The last 10 minutes are a reminder that in the face of all the progress of the universe, that shit barely matters.
So, is everyone basically just pissed off that the final cinematic doesn't highlight their characters, when they got all of that in everything leading up to it? That there's a bigger story to tell than which character kissed which?
With that being said, this ending is sure a lot better than the actual ending we got in ME3!
(dammit my original post on this was lost, it sounded a lot better too)
You don't want Krogan cake. The food Krogans eat will strip your intestines.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
Yeah, my original post was lost, but basically this.
More sites who completely miss the point of what people want to the point of being insulting, now in comic form!
Anyhow, the problem is not that the ending is unhappy. I'll put the problem in really general terms, but I'll throw spoiler tags on anyways:
I'm fine with an ending that isn't happy. Most people complaining are not looking for a happy ending. It's a desire for a thematically appropriate ending that is in keeping with the rest of the series.
If all that comes across as wanting puppies and unicorns, so be it.
Yeah. I think it's really disingenuous to just portray anyone who hated the ending as whiners who wanted a "happy ending" with ice cream and cake.
Like, I expect that kind of viewpoint from Mike, it's pretty consistent with the sort of views on things he espouses.
But I'm disappointed that, as a writer, Jerry is doing the thing he's doing here.
That still includes the Krogan. :winky:
Nahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnahnah STRAWMAAAAAN, strawmaaaan.
I'm actually that guy that wished Chris Avellone and Obsidian had been the guys to inherit Bioware's RPG throne post Black Isle. I'm not that guy who thinks Bioware can-do-no-wrong and I can actually view everything they do without the rose-tinted glasses.
Everything you said encapsulates the problem I have with their games. They're trying to balance a fantasy travelogue that explores a setting filled with personal dramas and political conflict . . . and staple a high-minded epic on top of it. I have to say that they're far better at the former and total crap at the latter. Because their attempts at the latter are cheesy.
Saving the world is not more important who Shepherd decided to kiss. The idea that the former is more valid storytelling because it's perceived to be "highbrow" annoys me to no end. It's simply not true. The saving-the-world plot is just lazy, sterile and un-engaging. It tries to raise-the-stakes in a bullshit way. But no matter how you try it's just not the same thing as deciding whether the race of psychopathic Klingons really deserve to live after all.
Playing Mass Effect 1, I had the dreadful premonition that they weren't going to be able to deliver very well on the Reaper storyline. There's no way they could hype-up a "save the galaxy/world/all life" plot and actually deliver a climax that has even the same gravitas as . . . say . . . the existential crisis of the Krogan genophage. Then Mass Effect 2 had the Giant Terminator. I mean, if you thought Mass Effect 3 was going to somehow wrap this up gracefully, I can only laugh at you.
It's the same problem I had with Dragon Age. The whole Darkspawn invasion didn't actually seem like the story they wanted to tell. It was just a kludgy plot device. Nearly any other kind of plot device would've worked better (e.g. REVENGE FOR YOUR MENTOR).
If anything, everything I've read in this thread indicates that the Reaper storyline wasn't really the core engagement of the Mass Effect games. And Mass Effect would have been a much better game if they just embraced the pulp and simply made it "The Marvelous Adventures of Space Captain Shepard." Watch him teach the meaning of love to alien wimmenz.
I'm glad Gabe like it, but majority of fans didn't and I had to sign in just to post this, I thought Penny-Arcade's reaction to the current issue would be different if not less severe more neutral. But I'm tired of explaining myself so I'm going to quote Forbes :P
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/13/mass-effect-3-and-the-pernicious-myth-of-gamer-entitlement/
keep note also games like Witcher 2's endings was also altered due to fan reaction it's really up to the developers... Now bioware renegade or paragon take your pick
I'm still taking the approach that the game designers' final plot theme was, "Fuck you, you can make decisions all you want and they're relevant to your personal story, but in the grand scheme of things they're pretty meaningless. The universe is a big place, and if you can make any influence at all on that, it's pretty amazing, but the minutae of your story are pretty irrelevant."
Isn't that exactly what Kevin McCullough and Martha MacCallum(lolfoxnews) thought the first Mass Effect game was, and railed against it in an anti-video game crusade(so much so that PA did a strip about it), until they both admitted that they never actually played the game?
Nope!
They're pissed that parts of the ending just make zero sense in regards to the parts that come just before it. There are several complete 180s.
They're pissed that they were promised many different endings that are dependent on their choices. They were promised this by the developers all the way through including in interviews a week before release.
So please get off your high horse in thinking that people who are annoyed are simply just not versed in sci-fi storytelling and that this is what we should have expected from the start. Especially when we were specifically told that this wouldn't be the case.
Ahhh who are we kidding? It's all smut anyway. There's a reason these things are rated "M."
Except throughout the whole game the choices you're making aren't "be nice or punch this reporter" or "who do I want to bang"
These aren't purely personal choices, you are already making galaxy-altering decisions. The scope is very different than the original Mass Effect, so if you aren't going to play ME3 then maybe you shouldn't comment on its content.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
You might recall this game called Indigo Prophecy.
But it never had that many of a user base and this game spanned 2 sequels...
Agreed though it all went down hill fast when it went scifi from a psychological thriller
Oh my god that game was a mess. The me3 ending was perfect compared to the last third of that trainwreck.
Indigo Prophecy is a perfect example of a game whose ending was pure "what the fuck is this"
But, I don't know that there's a series that has comparably fucked up five years of build-up over the course of three god damn games
That's the part that makes it the most galling. Deus Ex: HR's endings are terrible, too, but you weren't playing Jensen over the course of three games in a five year span, carrying all your decisions and emotional investment forward.
And just as an FYI, I have no problem with unhappy endings. In the original Dragon Age: Origins game, I gave my character's life to beat the darkspawn and it was amazing!
I've already explained my problem with the ending a ton, if you want a good argument as to why the ending is bad, visit the link below...
http://www.gamefront.com/mass-effect-3-ending-hatred-5-reasons-the-fans-are-right
How do you respond to the argument that ME3 is the ending to the series, and so you got lots of ending relevant to your decisions, you just didn't like the last 10 minutes of cinematic?
I mean, in any game we can take the ending to "and then they all got old and died and none of their shit really mattered too much." This one takes it to
You still got everything you wanted up till that last 10 minutes, and that last 10 minutes finished out the final big theme.
The people who hate the ending are attacking the ending itself, the writing of it, it's messages, etc. etc.
You get articles like that Gamefront one linked to above which point-for-point explain what was wrong with the ending and why they hate it.
I don't really see people with any kind of volume making attacks against people who like the ending, like "If you like this ending clearly you are an idiot" or anything. I'm not seeing those kinds of articles, I'm not seeing people post giant rants blaming fans for liking the ending.
Yet, conversely, you have articles like the one Colin Moriarty at IGN or Ben Kuchera at PA Report have done, essentially attacking people who hate the ending and questioning them personally. Instead of trying to defend the ending on its own merits, they resort to basically insults, calling people entitled whiners who don't understand real sci-fi and just want happy endings with ice cream and cake.
This is what this PA comic is doing too, and it's dishonest and lazy. Gabe's newspost earlier this week tried to address people's actual criticisms with the ending, but it was still full of attacking the people, not the argument.
I think it's pretty telling when one side is critical of the material, and the other side is critical of the people.