Of course there were problems with ME 3. What game doesn't have problems?

And yes, the original endings did suck. I actually wanted Shepard, most of his team and most of the armies to die, since it made much more sense than getting away unscathed from a fight with thousands of godlike beings, so I wasn't annoyed by the negativity of the endings (although killing off most of the galaxy was a bit too much imo).

What I hated was all the plot-holes and the fact that the writers just plain didn't put much effort or thought into the endings. It was pretty clear they didn't even consider the consequences of what they showed happening in the ending (best example, the destruction of the mass relays would mean the death, either from the explosion or from starvation, of most people in the galaxy, bet they didn't think about that when they put it in).

I haven't played the extended endings yet, so I can't comment on how they might have improved things. Still, the original ME 3 ending was a real letdown.

On the other hand, even that big mess didn't somehow negate the fact that I had dozens of hours of fun playing the Mass Effect trilogy, and while ME 3's main story just didn't make much sense, there were still plenty of great moments of gaming in the game, foremost being the Krogan missions and the Geth-Quarian conflict.
Personally, I loved those parts and by themselves they showed that Bioware could still make great stuff.

I think when most ME 3 players calmed down and got over the post-endings rage, they recognized that, and they'd be willing to buy an eventual ME 4 (preferably one without Commander Shepards or any of his team, since imo their story is pretty much over, even if Bioware decides they survived).

Hating on Bioware seems to be popular on gaming forums, but the fact remains that they have made plenty of very good games, even post-EA they have one the best track records among developers, and while they may have used up some of that goodwill with DA 2 and some bad PR, they still have plenty of rep left imo.

Complex, yes. Coherent and consistant are two of the last words I would use to describe the franchise. The series is filled with an absolutely ludicrous amount of plot holes and retcons, and a huge shift in mood and gameplay between ME 1 and ME2. The complexity argument is likewise a bit problematic, as the series is only 'complex' in certain departments and in a way that panders to the fanbase. Most choices which would have required Bioware to write storylines which branched in any significant way were essentially ignored. You have what should have been decisions with huge ramifications, such as killing the council and pushing for a human led council led by Udina (essentially a coup), or killing the rachni, destroying/saving the collector base having effectively no real impact of note in the story down the line. Instead, it is the relatively minor choices which end up being played up. Saving or killing Wrex ends up being the only choice the player can make in ME1 which ends up having any real impact in the story down the line. Popular characters and choices are reflected more than unpopular ones, you can see this in how certain popular characters get preferential treatment in the follow ups. (Bioware has mentioned in the past that they keep track of the statistics for players choosing certain choices, romances, etc over others) Liara for instance has a huge role in the series for someone who was essentially just a (rather useless) scientist i nthe first. Garrus is some sort of batman vigilante in ME2, etc. Meanwhile, unpopular characters get pushed out of the limelight or marginalized. Had a romance with Jacob in ME2? too bad for you. Recruited Morinth instead of Samara? Too bad for you. Chose Udina isntead of Anderson? too bad for you. Instead of exploring the unpopular options and making them worthwhile to explore in the follow-ups, they were marginalized in the sequels. Whiel there may be a lot of 'choices' in the game, they are rarely of any real consequence, which is a pity, because there is no real reason to recruit Morinth in ME2, because she basically gets killed off offscreen without ever seeing her in ME3, or choosing Udina over Anderson, because there is zero payoff, and hence no real reason to choose those options-they don't expand on them to make them an interesting alternative route on your next playthrough, they chuck them out with the bathwater, so while havign a romance with Jacob in 2 will always result in a dead end, characters such as Liara, Wrex, and Mordin had attention heaped onto them by Bioware. IMO for this reason there is less replayability value in the series with each entry, because Bioware makes it increasingly clear which characters and choices you are supposed to like, etc with each new game by focusing on them to the exclusion of others.


In my opinion, Bioware has never really been an imaginative company, most of their best games were based in settings that were not of their making, such as forgotten realms or star wars. Most of their original settings have been rather generic and/or derivitive of other works, to be honest, and I include both Dragon Age and Mass Effect in this category. Their stories can have some rather large plot holes in them (esp their mroe recent ogames). Their characters can be awfully similar to the point that sometimes they are practically stock characters. What they have been good at is execution. Bioware's games are usually much better than the sum of their parts, for all of their failings, they weave together these elements into reliably enjoyable games.

More recently, they have been experimenting with courting a different target audience with their games. They have become more action oriented, with less focus on such things as player choice and customization. They have also trended more towards a more 'mature' atmosphere in their games recently, citing such things as game of thrones as inspiration, and including more violence, blood, sex and foul language and other 'dark' themes. I think this blending of 'mature' content with action is intended to heighten player emotional investment in the game, but IMO it just comes of as terribly terribly heavy handed, crass, and shallow. Then there is also the huge retcosn that they have been inserting into their games of late, which seems like somthing of an insult to previous players, IMO. I rarely play modern Bioware games for many of these reasons, I would agree that they are losing themselves, in the sense that they are losing me by changing away from the sort of content I have come to enjoy in their games.

I haven't played The Old Republic or KOTOR but I've been enjoying practically every Bioware game that I ever got my hands on whether it was Baldur's Gate or even the recent games like Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2. Yes, I liked Dragon Age 2.

Groups; whether they be companies, teams, or clubs; change just like the people that they consist of and people come and go. I don't think that Bioware is truly losing itself and hasn't lost itself when it joined EA. This isn't like when the head of Team Ninja, Itagaki, and most of the original staff left Tecmo resulting in Team Ninja becoming just a name.

Also, a lot of the hate toward Bioware seems to come from a handful of extremely vocal haters who think that if a Bioware game isn't Baldur's Gate, then it is somehow automatically bad and they get especially vocal when a game isn't a PC exclusive. Not all the haters are like that but a lot of them are.

This goes back to expectations. They did an amazing job handling 3 games worth of decisions considering how much possible variance there is in a video game. You expected more but I don't think you were being realistic.

The ending to the Mass Effect trilogy was, for me, a lot like Lost.

I *loved* the first two seasons of Lost. I liked the rest of the seasons. But I don't think I'll ever be able to watch it again because of how the series was resolved. Seemingly important plot threads either had some really lame explanation, or dropped completely. Foreshadowing didn't go anywhere because it turned out that the writers were making stuff up as they went along. It was like the series was promising this great explanation to a grand mystery, and it ended with a fizzle. It would be pointless to watch again because now I know all those mysteries lead nowhere but a disappointment.

ME was the same, only worse. Foreshadowing meant nothing because the writers made stuff up as they went along. Important plot threads were forgotten or resolved with an afterthought. You had to make some difficult and seemingly important choices in the span of three games, and unlike what the devs said, none of that mattered. You might as well given up at the start of ME1. It turned out everything is run by a Deus Ex Machina that was introduced by the last minute, and if you stop for a while to think about the whole logic in his "great plan", you realise Mr. Plot Device must be both retarded and a psychopath. The whole "mystery" of the reapers was explained with silly circular logic that doesn't make any bloody sense if you spend a while to think about it. The resolution to the entire series is nothing but illogical nonsense.

It certainly didn't help when Bioware hid behind "artistic integrity" when confronted with the quality of their writing. Plot holes have nothing to do with art. These same guys are making the next Mass Effect games and I'm not sure why I should trust them.

BioWare went down the hill when EA purchased them, just like with Lionhead Studios. Working with the devil never works out.

Look, I understand where you're coming from. I was disappointed with the fact that some of the choices that should have had the biggest consequences just didn't seem to matter, saving the council or not being the most important of those.

OTOH, if they had really tried to depict accurately the consequences of all the choices you could make in the first game's story, it would have taken them a lot longer to make the second and third games, as you would have had lots of optional storylines, and major changes in the main story depending on your choices in ME 1.

That's just not realistic, you couldn't expect them to do a lot of work that many people wouldn't even get to experience, so it was obvious that the consequences of most of your choices were always going to be cosmetic.

As for favouring the popular characters, that's nothing new. They did exactly the same thing in the transition between BG and BG 2, how else do you think they chose which NPCs you could get back as companions?
For example, Imoen was originally supposed to die in the game, but there was a forum outcry about that and so they put her back in as a companion.

As for the change towards more action games, I'll remind you that Bioware isn't just the company that made BG, but also the one that made Shattered Steel. The founders also repeatedly said that their favourite game was Jade Empire which is an action RPG.
In other words, Bioware have always wanted to do action games, they were just locked into making RPGs up until now by their rep.


So, they aren't really losing themselves at all. Whether they're losing you or their more traditional customers probably doesn't matter all that much to them provided they gain others.

I just don't really agree with this. No one ever fought them to the end before, and they were programmed if that ever happened to offer the options presented. Makes sense to me. As someone else said, the machine vs. man thing is the root of the entire series.

Honestly I think when something epic ends very few are ever happy with the conclusion. It's due to massive anticipation and years spent imagining your perfect ending.

That was my ending. Damn I was proud and sad at the same time. My Shepard was never one to take orders from annoying suprise characters.

I'm not sure if I should try to ruin the ending to someone who likes it, but please stop for a moment to consider the reason *why* the reapers exist in the first place. What the "child's" plan is and why. In short, it goes a little bit like this: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s1AsUICbAIU/T2y8txLYyiI/AAAAAAAABOk/Vpew44_zXBQ/s1600/f95.jpg

A longer answer would be this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QT4IUepvrU1pfv_B95oQj0H84DlCTUmzQ_uQh1voTUs/preview?pli=1&sle=true

It's a little outdated since it's written before the DLC, but the main logical fallacies were never fixed.

The departure of BW founders could be caused by anything. For example, Ray Muzyka recently expressed a desire for journalists to speculate on ill-founded rumours less (see link). Pointing to one group without any proof is same as accusing all pro-enders of being mentally unable to comprehend its implications.

I'm curious about Bioware's future. Writers' and developers' passion for their products seem to be genuine, so I'm not worried about a lack of ideas. On the other hand, Gibeau's infamous statement about blocking non-MP games definitely affects their work. Also how BW intentonally ignored or lied about some issues after ME3 release makes me worried.

We'll see.

Sure, but every evil motivation is similarly easy to make look stupid, right? That's why they're the bad guys. I mean let's make a lolcat about Hitler saying the way to save Germany was to make it everyone's enemy. Brilliant! But it happened.

The fact the original race thought the way to keep synthetics from ruling the galaxy was to exterminate all developed cultures before they created synthetics that powerful is why they're wrong and evil and I destroyed their asses and every other synthetic with them.

The motivation of the AI was purely flawed. But it was the machine logic.

AI was programmed to preserve organic life, not ALL organic life. So wipeing out 95% of the organic life and preserving 5% was "mission complete" for AI.

I never thought I would have to explain something this obvious.

"machine logic" like that should make you question if it actually was AI. The point of AI is to be able to understand the distinction between literal and inferred. If it disagreed, that would be one thing. But taking literal too far is a sign of stupidity.

Either way, it's dumb. Being dumb because the character is dumb doesn't make it any less dumb.

No. It was covered in many movies so far.

AI doesn't work like human intelligence because it doesn't have any conscience. Like in 2001Space Odyssey - the AI's goal was to complete the mission. Not necessarily with anyone ALIVE on board. Are you implying that Space Odyssey is a stupid movie? :P

It's stupid by human logic and conscience, but it doesn't have to be stupid by machine logic.

Implying that only human logic is correct is stupid and short sighted. Even Krogan logic or Turian logic was way different than human one.

The AI's plan in Mass Effecy worked. It may look stupid by human standards, but it was completely correct by AI's logic. Organic life is preserved, mission acomplished.

Human life is just a variable, non important data in AI's calculations. Like in that no so brilliant movie Eagle Eye, which purpose was to defend the integrity of united states. Killing everyone in the govt. was a good way to do that for the machine.

If the cold logic said "the only way to preserve organic life is to kill 95% of the organics" was a perfect plan. If you can't understand that kind of logic, I feel sorry for you, really...
I can't explain this any easier.