X-Post from Bioware Forums - Just my 2 cents

So, I know there are lot of people expressing their thoughts on this, but I figured I may as well add my 2 cents.

The Silent Majority

The implicit assumption that is being thrown around by Bioware and Gaming critics is that if people aren't writing on the forums about how they didn't like the game, then they must have liked it. WRONG. While it is true that statistically the sample of people who post about the game are likely to be those who REALLY didn't like it, it is flat out illogical to assume that everyone else did. I've been too busy with work to post about my feelings. In fact, I don't think I've ever posted on the forums here before. Everyone I know feels similarly, but many don't have the time or motivation to post on the forums. The only thing that prompted me was how self-rightously Bioware and the gaming press was defending this ending as if it were good.

That being said, I was extremely dissapointed with how the game ended. It was rushed, it was poorly thought-out, it was a complete reversal of everything that the Mass Effect franchise had going for it. It accomplished the incredible - it actually soured my enjoyment of the rest of the series. Mass Effect used to be the example I would hold up to non-gamers as the best example of Video Games as Art. Now, not so much. In what seems a desperate bid at securing lasting fame for the series and themselves, Bioware really screwed up a good thing.

It Didn't Have to Be Happy

This is another mistaken assumption. The ending did not HAVE to be a happily-ever-after. I think there is a strong argument to be made for the fact that a pure paragon playthrough should result in a happy ending, while a renegade ending ends up more ashes and ruins, while a rushed playthrough is bleak defeat. But that is irrelevant to the main problem with the ending - it offers NOTHING of what made me like ME. The universe I had come to love and be fascinated by was destroyed. The friends, the alien races, the alliances, ancient secrets and political schemes were simply swept under the rug. Everything that made the game great was completely absent from the ending.

This is not some one-off artsy movie. People had expectations about movies like star wars, lord of the rings, and such, because they were invested. Sure, Babylon A.D. had a terrible ending, but I didn't really care. If Lord of Rings ended with an explosion wiping out the entire world, people would have been pissed. People are pissed about Mass Effect because we were implicity and explicitly promised a different kind of resolution. We knew it might not end well, but we were promised that our choices would matter. Did the Quarians get wiped out? That should have had DEEP and NOTICABLE impact on the battle for earth. Did you save the Collector Base in ME2? That decision should have had a serious, dramatic impact on events in ME3. But none of these did.

The pay-off of the entire serious, of 300 hours of decision-based RPG gaming, was reduced to a single cutscene. All of the characters we had come to know, the decisions we had made, the world that had drawn us it, were simply brushed aside for an ending that was completely out of character for the series. I don't mean unexpected here, I mean completely off color. It's like Schindler's List having an animal-house style "gag-reel" at the end. It's like the little mermaid ending with Ariel being accidently killed by a whaling ship. It's like the entire cast of Saving Private Ryan being abducted by aliens.

What Bioware (and apparently the critics) don't understand about Bioware games is that they are interactive and participatory literature. We care not just for the plot, but for the world, because Bioware is one of the leading entities in creating dynamic worlds that actually interact with players. That's their calling card, and that's why I bought Dragon Age without hesitation. Next time, I will hestitate. It seems clear to me, by their reactions to the responses about the ending that they have forgotten why we play their games. Or maybe they have different plans. Either way, I'll probably be picking up their next title from the second-hand bin at GameStop.

Even Deus Ex, with its infamous "Endingtron 3000" had more variation in the ending. That says a lot.