Let me try and explain it.

A movie has you as a viewer, a non-participant. You can root for characters and hope they survive or succeed, but you're just an audience. If the movie ends on a "negative" note, it's just an hour and a half or two hours "wasted".

With a game, the goal is YOURS, YOU have to fight to succeed, you have to fight to survive. The idea that, after three games and many many hours of perusing a specific goal, the end result is something that isn't quite what people wanted to put it mildly. Not only does it make the past three games feel less powerful since you failed in a way, it also makes replaying them a lot less tempting since you know the end won't be very positive.

Compare that to ME1's great ending where you really felt like "yay, fuck them, I won!", and no wonder players felt they got screwed over.

There was multiples problems, basically we could say that there was two main ones :

- Bioware promised that it would be a "complex" ending taking into account you choices and not a basic "choose door A,B or C" ending.

- That the endings made no sense at all where full of plot holes, incoherence, and felt rushed and amateurish.

The damage control edition ending somewhat corrected some of the second problem points, even thought it often feel like they make a check list of all the points the fans pointed out and tied to fix them one by one. IMHO it changed the ending from "terrible" to "average", which is definitely an "improvement" but far from what I would call "good".

Silly debate ? that's actually the core of the ME trilogy, the fights/incomprehension between organics and synthetics. The whole Geth/Quarians war began because of intolerance and fear of the former against their creation, and it's their tentative of exterminating the Geth that pushed them to ally with the Reapers. And that's a pretty big part of the plot.

Saying it's a silly debates in the ME universe is like saying that the religious aspect was just a silly debate in the crusade wars.

Personally I wouldn't call it the anarchy ending but more the "renegade",let's kill the enemy doing what ever it takes even if it means exterminating a friendly and allied sentient specie. (specie who had once, or twice depending of your choice, the possibility to exterminate an organic specie and decided not to do it)

I don't think that's really a valid way to draw conclusions. 90% Of players don't visit the game forum no matter what. Having said that, I liked the ending as well.

And having said that, I really hate the gameplay of both 2 and 3, and that's even after having replayed 1 after 2.

It would be amazing if gamers grown up to the "you can't always win" level in their experience.

Is there always have to be a good ending? I don't think so.

btw. for me ME3 endings were ok after Extended Cut.

I personally consider this done very well.

Obviously you couldn't do this in the proper ending, as that would have exploded the production costs. But over the course of the game, you got E-Mails, dialogues and galaxy at war scores that reflected every decision you made in the game.

No game ever came close to this and I found it brilliant. Whoever thinks that this is "not enough" really needs their reality sensors checked.

Done that, but thanks anyway : D. Fine games, but I generally find them somehow uninteresting (mostly because I lost about 15-20 hours of saves on the first one, so most of my playing is, in fact, replaying). I do get bursts of interest in them so I will eventually complete both. Really glad I found the books thanks to the games, one of the most interesting series I've read. And ridiculously fun!

Don't worry, the second game's got much better pacing, more interesting storyline and storytelling in general. They delve much deeper into ... Well let's just say it's much more akin to the books and leave it at that :D

Try to recall every game with a negative ending. Try to recall a single one of those where people didn't complain that the ending sucked. See? People do NOT want a negative ending after hours of "hard work". You're emotionally invested - it's even worse after a trilogy. With movies and books it's different because, like I said, you're the audience. But in games, you're the one busting your ass to reach the end only to get a "fuck you" from the devs. No surprise some people are not too happy about that.

Heck, remember the original Fallout 3 ending? I didn't think it was that bad myself because, you know, you may die but you do it by saving thousands of lives and doing it in a heroic way. Even then people complained a great deal about this ending. And yet, Mass Effect 3 takes it several steps further by actually REMOVING the positive element of the ending and basically giving you seven shades of shit as reward.

I didn't think the endings were that negative really. That's a perspective issue I guess. What would you have done instead though? That's my main question. It's easy to complain when something doesn't meet your expectations, but harder to offer a better alternative.
The whole game was that though. Everything I did on the first two games came back and had an impact. It just all didn't happen in the last 10 minutes, which seems to be what people expected.

I meant by silly that there's no point going into it on a forum like this, more than it being unimportant. In the end though I stand by that being the ultimate freedom ending, or the anarchy ending. In Deus Ex you blacked out the whole world which surely had consequences and killed people, but everyone was free for the first time in decades, free from the control of governments and technology. In ME3 it is the same, the "death" of synthetics does not change that.

I like how gamers are to take the blame for "not getting it", instead of Bioware for releasing an half-assed epilogue. Cute. :)

Not sure if flamebaiting, but... as with most fantasy and sci-fi fiction, it's not a matter of what happens, but how well it's presented. The ending was poor and rushed, I don't think that's open to debate. Hadn't been so Bioware would have simply left it as it was, a company doesn't invest the time and resources that went into the EC without a very good reason.
That's to say that the incomprehensible group of whiny, stupid and entitled aliens known as "gamers" would have probably accepted a bad ending, had it been done properly.
But ending aside, shall we talk about how "gamers" should feel about all the PR bullshit Bioware pulled off before and after release?

Mass Effect 3 will shake up the player's moral choices more than ever before, even going so far as allowing the Reapers to win the battle for Earth, according to BioWare's community representative Mike Gamble.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-02-bioware-mass-effect-3-ending-will-make-some-people-angry]Bioware will not do a "Lost" and leave fans with more questions than answers after finishing the game, Gamble promised.

"You'll get answers to everything. That was one of the key things. Regardless of how we did everything, we had to say, yes, we're going to provide some answers to these people." [/url]

“There are many different endings. We wouldn’t do it any other way. How could you go through all three campaigns playing as your Shepard and then be forced into a bespoke ending that everyone gets? But I can’t say any more than that…”

It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C.

[The presence of the Rachni] has huge consequences in Mass Effect 3. Even just in the final battle with the Reapers.


That's not how a company should treat its customers. And the way Bioware reacted to the complaints was just as low: first silence, then insults, and then more silence. That's not to say a lot of forum users weren't far from reasonable, didn't go over the top, and there wasn't a whole lot of trash talking. But it came from both sides, and I think it's less excusable when it comes from a PR employee than a teen.

Myzuka's letter to the fans (to announce the EC) has been a breath of fresh air and just about the only sane official response Bioware gave to the fans at this date. Which is why I can't take the article in the OP seriously, not only he hasn't been targeted at all in the uproar of ME3's ending (all the blame was mostly on Hudson and Walters) but he came out as one of the "good guys" from that incident. Frankly I'd be surprised if even half of those who buy Bioware games ever heard of him before that.


Edit: goddamn formatting...

FALLOUT 3 SPOILERS
What I hated about the Fallout 3 ending was that it was determined to be a "Jesus ending," and didn't bother to try and account for other possible solutions. I happened to have a super mutant with me, and sent him in to deal with the problem since he's immune to radiation (right?). But the game still had the audacity to criticise me for not sacrificing my life. At least I got the GOTY Edition, so I could still run around and explore the world after that.

Also, IIRC it kinda came out of nowhere. It wasn't like the plot was leading up to that one decision. It just kinda showed up once the "actual" plot had been resolved.

Often it's not the best thing to do to blame the developer. They probably wanted to make the game this way, but you know, in the end, it's the Publisher who says "we won't give you money for this, you better hurry up with finishing this game or else"

Being dependent means they shouldn't say out loud such things, because in the end, it's never their to decide.

(More spoilers)

Wait, you were able to get the super mutant to do that? For me he was all like "I will not get involved" or some bullshit. Did you have only the base game or some DLCs?

Personally I always considered that a very easy and cheap way to handle choices and consequences. You just need some summer job writers to spend 10 minutes writing an e-mail and have some devs spend 5 minutes adding an IF in the code and voila you have a new "consequence".

You could easily create a DN3D mod that do the same and make that, for each alien you avoid killing, you receive an e-mail form his family thanking you for letting him live; if would be easy to do but it wouldn't make DN3D a games loaded with meaningful choices and consequences.

For the military readiness, it's closer basic achievements than anything else, no matter what choices you made you can easily boost the value my playing 1 or 2 hours online and have access to all the endings.


IMO ME is a very mixed bag when it comes to handling choices and consequences, it does some great/good thing with it, the way the relationship between team members were handled for example, how having a "romance" didn't just mean some lame PEGI-3 love scene but had impact on several conversations; that was handled very well in ME3 (Much better than in DAO or other Bioware games).

But on the other side there was plenty of big "universe shattering" choices that in the end had very very little impact on the actual game itself; if you were lucky you had at best one or two dialogs change and a bunch of e-mail. Kill character "A" then character "not A but a close enough copy" will take its place and give you the same missions and let's not mention choices that were "reseted" to their default state because the Devs didn't knew how to handle them.

Personally I consider that Witcher 2 did a much better job with choices and consequence, there was of course a lot less choices and most (i.e. 99%) of W1 choices didn't carry over, but there was more choices that had a "real" impact on the game, totally locking some parts of the story while unlocking others.

Of course I am realistic and I never expected to have thousands of branching paths for all your little choices, but having at least one or two for some of your major choices would have been nice; not just some silly e-mails, some spreadsheet scores, or at best some different cut scenes.