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[PA Comic] Friday, March 16, 2012 - The Delicious Invasion
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Why so defensive, mate? Take a look at my post history, my looong post history, before deciding that the only reason I brought this up was so that I could sneer at your lack of taste. I really and truly want to know why someone would like this ending which is why I asked.
Ending stuff
Now as far as synthesis: I have several problems with this ending. First and foremost, the person telling you that this is the only way to peace is the lead reaper. Imagine if Harbinger's voice and image were telling you this was the way to peace; would you really believe him? But even supposing that he's being completely accurate and has no reason to lie, a bigger issue is that all the games have been about championing diversity... and then the golden ending is about how if we all just turn in to each other then there'll be peace. Even if we just accept the weirdness of synthesis - what does it even mean for everything to be both organic and non-organic? Why would it bring peace? Even organics of the same race fight and kill each other. It's like saying that if every human suddenly got a rich purple skin tone, then there'd be no racism. A cursory glance at humanity should be able to tell you that's not true. Even the Asari who have ostensibly the same skin tone, still practice a kind of racism against each other. And other organics are racist against the Quarians - suit rat and all that. I mean there's all kinds of reason for war, and people aren't suddenly decide that there's no reason for conflict just because we all have reaper DNA now.
Worse than that, perhaps, is changing the fundamental nature of everyone without even asking their permission. Even species that never heard of the reapers. Imagine if Shep's choice was to turn everyone female to save them; do you think that maybe some people might not want to be female, and might feel a tad perturbed that their gender was changed without their say-so?
Again, dude: Why so hostile? Relax, my friend. As a matter of fact, I'm hugely sympathetic to Bioware. I love those dudes. Even after the horrible ending, I just ordered a ladies' hoodie and a vanguard t-shirt. I invite you again to look at my posting history here. I have in jest, called myself 'Bioware's whore'. I own almost every piece of DLC you can get for ME2, and all the DLC for DA:O. I was right out there before the game was released, calling people idiots for complaining about day one DLC. I still believe that, and continue to call people out about that.
Loving Bioware and thinking the ending is well written are two different things, though.
I think all that is just an example of why the ending is badly presented. Because the things you mention can so easily be taken in ways the creators never intended. Again, this is why peer review is important and discarding it at the climactic point of the series was a poor idea.
And this is really in a nutshell all that I really find wrong with the ending. The choices are fine as far as they go. Not great, but OK. But they needed to give Shep the chance to argue with Catalyst, to say "I brokered peace with the geth" so that Catalyst can say "I have seen this before, it won't last" or something similar. There should have been the chance to rebel. Maybe your shep isn't the kind to punch people in the face or shoot them if they pull a gun on her, but my Shep is. To have a suddenly meek, docile Shep who doesn't even question what is told is very jarring. The endings could have remained the same, just with a little more thought and there wouldn't have been near this amount of outcry. Who your Shep is is the most important part of the game. Being able to play her as you like is the main fun of playing the game. My paragon-who-doesn't-take-shit shouldn't have gotten submerged for Ms. Congeniality.
Well, additionally there is the problem with the unexplained Normandy crash, with people coming out of it who were previously right beside me groundside. But just cut that part out and it's good. I usually just mentally ignore it.
What we're arguing - or what I'm arguing at least - is that even if you liked the ending, it's flawed. It needs to be fleshed out, the lore and continuity errors fixed. It needed peer review. Casey didn't want to do it before release, now he's being faced with the peer review of thousands of fans. That can't be comfortable, but at least he'll have learned that peer review is important.
Anyone who 'demands' anything here is being a goose. What is happening is that people are requesting that Bioware consider fleshing out what they wrote, and I don't see anything inherently 'entitled' to a request. Go to the retake mass effect web page; read the petition. It's completely respectful and undemanding.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
And the Destroy ending was basically the same as it is - destroy the reapers, but you also destroy the mass relays, and any AI that uses reaper tech (described that way so that we at least get a plausible explanation for why the destroy ending kills EDI and the Geth).
And the Synthesis ending... well, Synthesis is really the "reapers turn to ice cream", ridiculously perfect ending that Mike and Jerry are mocking in their comic. The reality is, there's something intellectually dishonest about including it at all. I think it should have been scrapped.
So the final choice is a genuine 'Sophie's Choice' about what to do next. Do you destroy galactic infrastructure to end the reaper threat, but also sacrifice the lives of your comrades? Do you keep the relays and let the AI survive, but risk becoming the monster yourself?
And if you had low assets, instead of the trailer park version of the high assets ending, you would get an ending where Shepard dies before using the crucible, the fleet is decimated, and the only thing to survive is Liara's time capsule, hidden away safely for the next reaper cycle in 50,000 years
It really kills me how close they were to something good... all their ideas needed was a little more polish and a little less ice cream reapers.
Essentially it feels like, people like the ending because the one ending provided is good enough for them. They don't need 3 different endings, they don't need a Shepard fails scenario. But is it really so bad for the rest of us to request more endings than that? Or to at least request that the existing endings be clarified so that they don't seem to have virtually the same result?
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Ultimately you're admitting that a game is a product designed to entertain you rather than a work of art designed to be enjoyed.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
And yet Molyneux never seems to lack for a job.
If the same basic events happened, the same choices given, but it was all presented in better ways that didn't feel like a huge last minute rush job, and if war assets were handled in a more satisfying and meaningful way during the climactic last couple of hours, I would have been fine with it.
Pretty much this exactly. The biggest problem with the ending is presentation. Give the ending context, couch the endings in a way that takes into account what came before.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
It is a product designed to entertain me. But that's beside the point. Casey Hudson may wish he were Kubrick, but he is not. Mass Effect has not now and never will be 2001. And the ending is not on level with the ending of 2001, because it's a genre mismatch. It's like ending the new Star Trek movie with a 2001 ending. You can't do flashy action movie/space opera for 200 hours, and then suddenly decide in the last 5 minutes that you were doing deep philosophical concept sci-fi all along. Doing so is not some kind of edgy genius move, it's amateurish. You can't end Mass Effect like a Kubrick film any more than you can end a Die Hard film like it was directed by Kubrick.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
And that makes it acceptable?
"but this time, he said he's changed! it'll be different"
no
no listen, sshhhh
do you need to go somewhere tonight
somewhere safe
Do you have a source to link? I'm not sure what false advertising you're talking about.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/37677/mass-effect-3-citadel-is-bigger-than-ever-endings-will-be-more-sophisticated/
This is the article which spawned the quote which is currently getting passed around, but Casey Hudson's been raising expectations for a long time.
From the App interview talked about earlier (SPOILERS for ending stuff)
Well ain't that a thing
After reading this article to get that Casey quote in context:
oxm.co.uk/37677/mass-effect-3-citadel-is-bigger-than-ever-endings-will-be-more-sophisticated/
... I'm even more annoyed. I had no idea he said all that stuff about the Citadel. But it would be excusable if the article weren't dated January 2012! I mean seriously, after exploring the Citadel on ME3 (no wards access at all!) I was sort of like - oh well, I guess they're just reducing the Citadel size progressively for each game, whatever. But for Casey to say that 2 months before release--what?
Thanks for the link.
That's...quite a quote, given how the game actually turned out.
In a large part of good Science Fiction, alien species are a plot element that allows human readers to dissect and experience elements or themes of human nature outside of the bias of being human. We have a completely understandable bias when it comes to looking at our world, as we can only see it though the lens of being human. There's the tendency for people to assume that others think like them, and when they realize that they might not, there's a repulsion. It's that creepy feeling you get when you hear some radical fringe group go off on a rant. It's also that feeling you get that we've since described as "The Uncanny Valley" for robotics. It's that eerie sense that something isn't quite right. That leads you to shun the person who talks about themselves in the third person or who declares something obviously racist or hate filled. That's the feeling of wrongness writ small and large. When you assume something is "wrong" with that person you have a hard time empathizing with them or even attempting to understand the purpose behind that "wrongness". Put it behind the face of an Alien though, and you have completely different expectations of what's correct and pick up on different clues to that subtle or not so subtle "wrongness".
There are two methods that writers use this in, by and large.
First, what I posit as Xenos Existentialism:
When we see another human acting in a manner we do not agree with, we assume that there is something wrong with them. When we see an Alien acting that way, we have an easier time of dissecting the motivations and reasoning behind those actions. We don't see someone who's mad or insane, we see that they're under different circumstances from us and their motivations stem from that. We like to put ourselves in other people's shoes while still essentially being ourselves, so we have trouble understanding and empathizing with the more radical or differing views from our own as we don't fully understand the motivations behind it. How could we, we've never lived it.
Alien species present a blank slate. They allow us to examine diversity and the reactions to it in an entirely different manner than we would if both sides were human. We know the Krogan are warlike because their prodigious breeding cycle leads them into a resource war shortly after they reached industrialization, and then shortly after colonizing less harsh worlds. We know Asari tend to think long term because they live long lives, and they are more open than other races partially because their ability to mate with any other species means most of them have mixed heritage. We accept these things as true, and they allow us to examine very human aspects of anger, patience, and empathy without the lens of humanity clouding the issue.
We can also explore examples of racism, classism, and diversity by planting an "other" on one side without hitting the wrong buttons in people and without letting out own judgments of humans get in the way. We might see Cerberus's attacks on aliens or, say, a Battarian hurting humans entirely differently than we would see a human on human conflict.
We could explain right away the actions of the Salarians in the Krogan Rebellions, but if we had to accurately explain war torn regions in our own world we tend to lack the empathy and interest to properly explain the reasoning behind it. Instead we attach to it real-world tropes like "Resources", "Money" or "Hate" and leave it at that rather than delve into the reasoning behind it.
Second is what I call Xenos Mirrors:
A person who is non-committal is simply a person who is unmotivated to one side or the other. When you put that person in a situation where they have to choose, you can get an answer. When you put them in an extraordinary situation, you get an answer that is closest to the core of who they are. Aliens act as an extraordinary situation that allows us to see and understand the actions of the human characters, while also seeing how we ourselves believe we would act in those situations. They exist to shine the mirror back at us out of the pages of a book or a screen and make us examine why we choose one action or another. When you study logic, you often have to take an argument to it's furthest logical conclusion to examine it fully. Sometimes that means examining the reverse of the statement.
IE: Taking "It's alright for me to kill an alien because it is trying to commit genocide on humanity" to it's converse of "It's alright for an alien to kill me because I am trying to commit genocide on it's species"
You see this kind of thing a lot actually with a variety of antagonists standing in as "the other", be it an alien species or simply a different culture. It's the theme that usually ends with that so often used line: "Were we any different?". Really, that's what the alien is, it exists to be the other and drive the story and characters into that extraordinary circumstance that shows the true core of the character. In other media it's our reaction to that choice that completes the effect and shines the spotlight at the consumer. In games it's our choices that make us think about tough questions.
Now for how it affects the game
The Genophage makes you question whether it's alright to let one entire species be exterminated, or allow them to possibly threaten the universe again. The Rachni make you answer that question twice throughout the series. The Quarian and Geth war makes us question what it means to be "alive" and by extension what it means to be human. The second and penultimate time of making that decision.
In Mass Effect 2's Legion loyalty mission you had to ask yourself both the meaning of what it means to be "alive", which allows you to feel empathy for the Geth heretics, and the question of what it means to have free will. If you decided the Geth were not "alive", then they had no free will and thus you could allow outside circumstances to change your decision. If you decided that the Geth were "alive", then the decision on whether Geth had free will was the basis of the decision. Because a decision that the Geth didn't have free will meant that is was morally right to change their minds for them. A decision that the Geth had free will meant it was morally wrong to subvert their minds for them. This is all happening in the mind of the engaged player, and it's a sentiment that's been repeated enough for me to confidently state that.
In Mass Effect 3 the question is about the nature of humanity, and it's foreshadowing into the final decision. In the final moments on Rannoch you have to decide whether the Geth should be exterminated or be uplifted into true individuals beings. And you have to make it without the knowledge of whether there's an option or not to save both races. It's one of what I would describe as "the God's choice", where you are suddenly thrust into the choice of whether to alter an entire species or allow it to be exterminated. You make this kind of decision multiple times in Mass Effect 3 before reaching Earth.
On the other side are the Xenos Mirrors of the series. The Reaper attacks force us to make tough decisions throughout the game, and usually the toughest decision actually doesn't involve any combat or guns on the player's part. It's when you take sides with people on one thing or the other. Dr Chakwas and Engineer Adams are discussing whether a synthetic creature is really "alive", and you side one way or the other. Tali is asking an ambassador for medicine to stop her people from dying, but the ambassador has none to give because his people are dying as well. You side either way knowing that someone else is going to die because you were charitable to one side or the other. All of these force you to make a decision, and it reflects that decision back at the consumer, focusing the conflict entirely within the mind of the player. You have to decide the question, and you have to do it without any other information than what two sides of a conflict are saying. That kind of mediation tells you something about the player and what they put emphasis on, more than on the story or even the character that's going to act as the voice of the player.
All of this builds and builds throughout the ending until it's final moments. When all that foreshadowing with the Geth, the Reapers, the nature of Synthetics and Organics, the various conflicts and mediations, Plagues and Cures, and all those extraordinary circumstances come together. The game has been been priming you to answer one question. It's been preparing you, quizzing you, and asking you about what you would do if given one specific kind of choice. What would you do? Would you control the minds of the Geth in Mass Effect 2? Would you cure the Genophage or evolve the Geth by uplifting an entire species? Would you live with that choice knowing what the Salarians went through after making the decision? Would you destroy everything in an attempt to stop it from destroying you? The Geth, the Collectors, Saren. Would you kill everything just because it was trying to kill you?
The game sets you in extraordinary circumstances and throws stress and weight on your decisions and it all has to be answered now, right this very second.
Until just about the very end it's all falling apart around you and there's nothing you can do....
And then it all stops...
It all freezes and all is tranquil.
And the game asks you a question without the stress, and without the weight or immediacy.
Throughout the story you're asked these same questions over and over and over again until the only thing the story could ask is the same thing it's been preparing you to answer, and once you've heard the question you know there could only ever have been one answer:
Do you kill the reapers knowing that they are being controlled, have their own existence, individuality, and that they are the amalgamated minds and bodies of every race that went before you?
Do you control the reapers, knowing that they have their own minds, their own individuality, and become just like the one controlling them just to gain a little more time until they come again?
Do you uplift all species everywhere, saving everyone from a cycle of destruction and death that never ends, while at the same time radically altering their bodies and minds without their consent?
Do you force your answer upon everyone no matter their opinions?
Even if you chose at the end your ending is not going to be the same as mine. Because I chose different paths throughout the game, I saved people here and let them fall there. My 60 hour ending wound up entirely differently from the other people I've talked to. They fought different people, different races betrayed them, and many many people died who I never knew. Whole individuals there and gone in a flash that I never saw because I let this person die or saved that one over a year ago. Even in the last 10 minutes, the last seconds of the game, the universe was in an entirely different state than that of people who made the same last choice I did.
That's what it is though. An ending writ large. You choose the eccentricities of where the galaxy is at over the course of an entire game in a way that neither of the previous titles could have. You decided whether entire species lived or died. You decided whether friends sacrificed themselves or were left to survive into peaceful times. The last minutes is the capstone to the arch of the game. You couldn't build an arch without knowing the shape of the capstone, and you couldn't design the capstone without knowing the shape of the arch. The events of the game and the final moments of it are what constitutes the ending itself, they play off one another until both are extensions of the same moments.
Really, as much as people throw around these quotes:
They would have been much more honest if they had used the entire quote instead of just the first paragraph or last sentence:
Which is really what I've been saying for a few days now.
The wards reference was tossed out there by the person writing the article, not anyone from Bioware. And the Bioware quote referenced the amount of content not physical space.
That's the problem I've been pointing out with that argument, and that Bioware pointed out before the game was released. The final moments are not "The end". The ending is how the universe is left when the story is over, and it could have happened any of a hundred different ways and my stance on that is entirely supported by the same quote that people try to use to tear it down, only with the entire quote and not snippets of it.
Oh sure, the credits are the same no matter what you choose, but not the actual story at the end of the game.
The fact that Bioware intends to continue with Mass Effect titles also invalidates the argument that what you decide on this or that planet has no effect. It's like deciding after playing Mass Effect 2, that only a handful of decisions you made in Mass Effect 1 have any effect, despite the fact that many of them come back in Mass Effect 3. What you decided on different planets is important to the ending because it will determine where the next game begins.
It's the assumption that all choices are made irrelevant by a few circumstances, without knowing the full circumstances (which can only be revealed by the next game) that is the fallacy in the argument.
I don't expect PA to agree with said fans just because they donated money, of course; that'd hardly be fair. However, such a misrepresentation of the primary arguments against the ending (Shepard being OOC, massive plot holes, abrupt tonal shift out of left field, not the ending that was promised) is disappointing.
When Forbes is the fairest, most accurate gaming journalism site out there, you've got a serious problem.
Irrelevant. You're still demanding that a creator alter their work to suit you.
And what's wrong with that?
As others have observed, Sherlock Holmes, one of the most-revered icons in modern pop culture, had its ending altered because fans were dissatisfied.
FO3 had its ending altered because it was completely nonsensical, and I think we can all agree that was a good thing.
There's nothing wrong with fan criticism of an ending. That should prompt the creator to re-examine the ending to see if fan complaints are valid. If they deem that the complaints are not valid, then they won't change anything, and everything is fine.
If they deem that the complaints are valid, though, then I see no problem with a creator changing their own work as a result of fan outcry. The bottom line is that there's no reason to put a creative work on a pedestal simply because it's a creative work. Let people demand change, and then let the creator decide whether or not change is actually warranted.
Hell, movies focus group endings and often pick different ones based on fan reaction. Editors demand that books change their content and, yes, endings to suit the expectations of fans (or the editor) all the time. It's hardly like video games are the only medium of entertainment this occurs for, and acting like demanding a change in ME3's ending is completely unprecedented is disingenuous.
Another thing which really perturbs me is that there appears to be a disconnect between people's perception of criticizing gameplay and story. Demanding better or different gameplay from a studio is something which fans do all the time; it's become a matter of rote among gamers at this point, and is often delivered through DLC, patches, or expansions. However, the idea that people demand that game devs alter their gameplay, which is just as much a creative work as a game's story, doesn't seem to get nearly as much flak as the idea of asking a developer to change the story.
Now, why is that? Again, they're both equally creative works, but one-the story-seems to be perceived as far more sacred and inviolable, while demands of gameplay changes are expected.
Hell, demanding gameplay changes is something PA themselves have done from time to time, and yet they still criticize fans for demanding that a story be changed instead of gameplay. I just don't understand how that disconnect sprang up.
To use an example for what I'm discussing, let's take Heroes of Might and Magic VI, the latest entry in a popular turn-based strategy series. In this entry, the developers decided not to include full-screen town screen art for the towns that form the center of players' operations in the game. These beautiful town screens had been a tradition of the series since the first game, and fans were naturally shocked at their removal. This led to much criticism, both constructive and otherwise, of the developer, as fans who felt that the lack of this feature was a betrayal of the franchise demanded that Black Hole implement townscreens. At the end of the day, they agreed, and fans are currently waiting on townscreen implementation.
The movement to include townscreens had more relative support within the community than the movement to change the ME3 ending, and far fewer detractors; nobody criticized those demanding townscreens as "entitled" or "selfish" for demanding a change to a creative work.
So, my question is, why is something like that-demanding that a creator alter elements of gameplay fans found to be a betrayal of the franchise-OK, but demanding that a creator alter elements of their story for the same reason is bad? Is story more of a creative work than gameplay? If so, why?
It's not unprecedented, it's shockingly entitled. Gamers are throwing a shitfit because they didn't get exactly what they wanted, which they can't seem to agree on, either.
Hold the Line...
NEVER FORGET!
I didn't say they were beyond challenge, I said that you're demanding that a creator alter their work to suit you. Changing something you made in response to a relatively insignificant portion of your consumer base (because again, the majority of people who have bought this game have not actually finished it, and not all of those who have think the ending needs to be changed) is not the same as being challenged. Starting a charity fundraiser in an attempt to emotionally blackmail Bioware into making the change is not the same as simply asking either.
No matter how many pretty words you try to put on it, it's a shitfit.
I am demanding the creator change his work. Why is "art" elevated above something like a car? If a new model car came out and I didn't' like the way it looked, I'd ask that it be changed in the next model. "Artistic Integrity" is bullshit made up by artists to defend shitty work.
I hate this fucking argument. No, people are not annoyed because they wanted exactly one thing and didn't get it. People are annoyed because the ending as-is is poorly presented, has a bunch of continuity errors, doesn't explain or elaborate certain things the way they should be, takes away the agency that Shepard has for the entire rest of the trilogy, and brushes off a lot of what you spend time doing during the game like none of it matters. You are exactly what is wrong with the discourse about the ending, one of those dudes who willfully ignores what people are actually saying and putting a strawman in place of the actual complaints.
Oh and your whole "you people are DEMANDING they change it!" is also a fucking strawman, because a lot of people complaining are doing no such thing.
The only thing I want from Bioware is for the continuity issues to be explained. That can be done with a blog post.
ending stuff here and above
And no matter how many nasty words you try to put on it, it's a well reasoned argument made by many intelligent and well-educated people as well as other dedicated fans that feel strongly that something is lacking.