Exactly. I preordered the collectors edition because I had faith in Bioware. Not anymore. DAII was disappointing enough that coupled with MEIII that I’m not even going to buy DAIII until it’s at 15 bucks on Ebay.
And yeah, if Bethesda could figure out how to fix Fallout 3, then Bioware should be able to figure out how to fix MEIII. Unless they’ve really got their heads up their asses. If there’s no “Broken Steel” style expansion for MEIII, then fuck 'em.
The Obligatory Downfall Parody
Unfortunately, obsessive nerds have made it very difficult to get ones outrage taken seriously. The Child’s Play thing is a good start. But I’ve been trying to formulate an explanation that would make sense to someone who isn’t a fan of even the genre, much less the game itself:
Take a movie like Steel Magnolias. You follow these characters through their trials and eventually come to a sadder but wiser happy ending with mixed joy and tears. If you didn’t get that ending, wouldn’t you feel you’d been misled? Wait, wind that back slightly. Suppose instead, you get right up to where the emotional climax is supposed to be but at the last minute there is an incoherent discussion followed by a never-before-mentioned bomb going off that devastates the whole town, though you do see some people still twitching in the rubble.
Furthermore, imagine that you expected a happy ending because you yourself ran around talking to people about their problems, confronting your own inner tumult, etc. Then you are given a choice of what color the explosion will be when all those things you accomplished become a waste.
Now, imagine that instead of having spent less than ten bucks and been involved for a couple of hours, you had spent over a hundred and invested hundreds of hours in the story over the past five years.
Nobody’s asking for Julia Roberts to come back for the dead. But you don’t turn a story advertised as a heartwarming tearjerker into a nihilistic farce about the meaninglessness of even trying at the last minute and expect the audience to be happy.
This is where I am, down to pre-ordering the collector’s edition, except I might buy DA3 a little sooner than that. Maybe on sale through a major retailer. I’d probably pay full price if all the reviews (fan included) say “OMG, you remember the DA2/ME3 endings? Bioware listened!”
The rest of the game was just so… moving. Then the very last bit manages to make you hate the thought of ever playing it again.
I wouldn’t call ME3’s ending the absolute worst ending to a video game; for me that dishonour goes to Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, another EA franchise buyout and another final part…hmm. All the speculation about Kane and how he tied into the Red Alert universe, the answers boiled down to “Erm, he’s an alien we guess. Red Alert? Have some Japanese robots straight out of a bad manga.” And both the GDI and Nod endings were pretty much the same (hmmm…). Fan outrage peaked when Westwood’s last efforts surfaced, which would have begun with GDI finding an Allied Chronosphere, which is already more awesome than the entirity of EA’s final C&C offering.
/Off-topic rant.
On-topic hope:
NO NO NO. It’s not closure or answers. It needs to MATTER. Lord.
… and make sense with the series’ lore and show that your decisions through the three games had some sort of impact and fit in thematically and…
And “wanting a happier ending” isn’t the point either, contrary to the article’s first paragraph! :smack:
BETTER. That does not automatically translate to “happier.”
Indeed, the maker of this poll is also pissing me off, because ‘brighter’ is not the point. The point is that we want an ending that doesn’t obviate everything that the player actually did. Hell, when the Reavers took the Citadel, that already dismissed in a line of dialogue everything the player had been asked to care about up to that point. Then, at the very end, everything you were asked to care about for the last three games was demolished with a bizarre mix of dispatch and obscurity, and an appalling indifference to how they previously tried to make you feel about all the peoples and places of this world.
The Indoctrination Delusion explanation would at least mean there was hope that there was a real ending besides choosing one of three History Eraser Buttons. You just assume it that Shepard stumbled through the attempted mind fuck and in the end managed to pick an ending that made your hundreds of hours and $180+ bucks worthwhile.
Anyhow, the game really was fantastic up to that point, except for the several plotlines that seemed to build up and get dropped. All those hints that various people are about to turn on Shepard just fizzle out, though by now we have to have come to accept that Shepard never sees betrayal coming no matter how obvious. Well, we’re all Shepard now. All these plotlines were hints that Bioware was going to stab us in the back, and I sure as hell never saw it coming. Cēveat emptor!
Yes, I really hate the coverage that states people want a happier ending. That may be true of some people, but most are looking for “coherent” and “in keeping with the overall narrative.”
Hell, (I guess I better spoiler this because it includes information about what I thought would happen in the end but doesn’t) the minute Liara said "Oh we’ve got this superweapon but it’s missing a piece called the “Catalyst” I assumed it would turn out Shepard was the Catalyst and had to climb in and get disintegrated or something to make the thing work. And I was OK with that, because it would fit with the epic hero narrative tradition.
Exactly. I’d be 100% fine with a Shep Dies!!! ending, but it would have to make sense. And even if Shepherd dies, I’d still want to know what happened to the rest of the galaxy. And even if Shep dies, then smashing all the mass relays and plunging the galaxy into starvation is a lame way to end the series even if you win. There it’s not that there has to be a happy ending, but that if all the endings end up the galaxy starving to death, then there’s really nothing you’ve done through the whole series that made a difference, and the whole series is about the effects of personal choice.
Y’know, I’ll go out on a limb–I want my perfect play to result in a generally happy ending.
But then again, I perceived ME2 has having a happy ending, too–I got my squad through alive through profound dedication, and I told TIM to eat a bag of dicks as I blew up his little prize. That’s happy enough for me. I saw the final teaser of the Reapers activating and thought, “hey, y’know, let the metal fuckers come. If we go down we’ll go down swinging–they’re just big bioorganic assholes, not gods.”
Maybe “hopeful” ending is the better way of putting that. Tragedy can happen on the way, but I want the sense that the galaxy AS I LEARNED TO LOVE IT is going to generally survive, perhaps after a prolonged rebuilding.
Ah, yes. The Captain Scarlet Ending. “People of Earth, this is the voice of the Mysterons. We have planted a bomb in one of your cities that will destroy your planet unless snicker one of you chortle throws himself in a commercial sausage press! (Shut up, I’m talking to the People of Earth. Hey, puff, puff, pass, asshole) Where was I? Yeah, sausage press. And get, like ground into chunks. Oh, and put the chunks in a can with Captain Scarlet’s picture on it. snort Then we want to watch as he resurrects! SNORGLE Oh, man. That shit’ll be funny. Do it, Earthlings. Mars out!”
But, yeah, I expected something like this, too, because of all the build up in 2 about Shepard being noticed as something special within humankind.
Or at the very least, hopeful vs something else. Instead of pretty much the same damned ending if you manage to make it through the game, no matter what.
For instance, I’m going to spoiler the potential endings for Dragon Age: Origins here, and I think all of them are quite good endings even though you aren’t going to strictly call all - or maybe any - of them unqualifiedly “happy.” Quick summary of the “dark fantasy” game: You and a young man named Alistair are Grey Wardens, respected and feared warriors who are the only hope to save your nation and its populace from a ravaging horde of darkspawn (zombies) and their Archdemon (in huge, fearsome dragon form). An Archdemon arises from underground every few centuries or something, and the Grey Wardens are the only ones who can defeat them.
[spoiler]The problem is, as a third Grey Warden who joins you explains to you newbie Wardens - the Archdemon has to be defeated through the sacrifice of a Warden’s life to annihilate that evil soul. Wardens drink a bit of Archdemon blood as part of their initiation and not only does that give them their powers, it also kills them within 20 years or so. No problem, says the veteran Warden, he’ll make the sacrifice in the final battle; he’s coming up on about 20 years anyway. Except he dies before the battle. And I didn’t mention that your buddy might now be the new king of your country. Maybe. Depends on the choices you made.
Meanwhile, a witch traveling with your group says she has another option - these Archdemons used to be Elder Gods but were corrupted. She wants to get pregnant by one of you Wardens and then perform a spell at the Archdemon battle that will pull out its spirit into her Warden-empowered fetus, to raise the godling as her own. Oh, and she’s going off on her own afterwards and won’t tell you what her plans are for her kid.
So the options are - OK, you may lose one of these or have an alternate character fill in, but for most people the options are - have your buddy Alistair step up and sacrifice himself, sacrifice yourself, or have Alistair (or you, if you’re playing a male character) one-night-stand with the bitchy witch and let her run off with a baby with an Archdemon’s soul in it and do god knows what. Plus if you’re playing a female character, you may well have started a romantic relationship with Alistair, and if you both opt out of the demon baby option and bring him to the final fight, he says he’s going to make the sacrifice and there’s no way to stop him.
So you can save your country by sacrificing yourself, sacrificing your boon companion (who might also be the next king and/or your true love), or letting a witch have a baby with an Archdemon’s soul. You definitely win, and the outcome does vary some depending on the choice you made, and there’s an epilogue, even if you die.[/spoiler]
That’s the kind of hope I had for ME3.
I’m waiting to see what the upcoming DLC is before I assume anything.
I just had a snicker when I saw this on BioWare’s new Command&Conquer Front Page
snicker
Yeah, good idea. Timing? Terrible.
Despite Generals being my favourite RTS, I’m probably going to give this a pass. If EA doesn’t fix their mistake with ME 3, if they make Generals 2 an Origins exclusive, and if they insist on shoehorning this microtransactions crap into my RTS, I’d rather just see the company die as an example to the others.
Have you guys seen this? I want to believe! (There are spoilers in the link.)
I feel like they would have said something by now since Amazon is giving full refunds and the game has already dropped in price. 
Really?
What are the requirements to qualify for a refund. I ordered my collector’s edition through Amazon and might like to return it if the requirements aren’t too onerous.
That’s what really gets me; no matter [spoiler]what you do in the previous three games, the three endings are pretty much the same. Shep dies, relays blow up, Normandy crashes.
I’m fine with some bittersweet endings (arguably the best Dragon Age: Origins ending was the one with the Warden dead - but at least you had some goddamn closure! You had a funeral, you had the major decisions taken into account when talking about the fates of people and places. I’d rather see it, but whatever), but to be honest I still wanted to *earn *my happy ending; marriage, old age and lots of little blue children![/spoiler]
Pffft. I still think it makes more sense to suppose that Bioware didn’t intend for this to be the final word, though they seem to be suggesting that they did. But if there’s a meta-story mind-fuck here it could just as easily be that Bioware spent years building our confidence and swearing that they wouldn’t pull away the football just before we try to kick it. The most sinister part of the mind-fuck is that they pulled away the football in Dragon Age II just to heighten the irony that we all fell for it again.