“Objectively awful” seems to be going a bit far, don’t you think? I didn’t find the ending to be perfect, but I appreciated the broader picture that Bioware was trying to paint with it, even if I thought the execution wasn’t fantastic. Am I objectively wrong because I enjoyed it overall?
I’d argue it’s a sure sign that industry journalists don’t have the time to finish a 25-35hr game before they go to press. 
Yes, you are.
You’re going to hate this answer, but it is actually objectively false that what you do in the series doesn’t affect the ending. The various things you do raise your EMS score, and with a high enough one you get that ‘secret ending’. The EMS score is raised by doing things ‘right’, like reuniting the Quarians with the Geth. So yeah, even though it gets boiled down to a single number, what you do does have an effect on the ending.
I will be very surprised and disappointed in Bioware if the DLC they had planned for this did not also take this into account.
I simply don’t think this is true. There are too many incongruent details in the ending for it to be something slapdash. It’s possible it wasn’t executed in a way that made a whole lot of sense without thorough analysis, but what’s there is what they wanted to say, and I do not believe it clashes with the rest of the story. At worst, it’s simply not explained well.
That Shepard is experiencing an attempt at indoctrination at the end I think is indisputable, although disputed. insert smiley here Specifically, I believe that
[ul][li]everything that supposedly takes place on the Citadel at the end is a symbolic representation of Shepard’s inner struggle against indoctrination. [/li][li]Neither Anderson or Lulu were really there, and I can be persuaded that they are actually symbolic of Shepard’s internal struggle rather than projections placed there in the indoctrination process. [/li][li]Everything the Star Child is horseshit, and only taken at face value by Shepard because of the suggestible state Shepard is undergoing. [/li][li]The blowing up of the mass relays didn’t happen, nor the mysterious flight and marooning of the Normandy.[/li][li]We don’t get to see what actually happened, but it seems likely that if you choose ‘destroy’ then you have actually won.[/ul][/li]
What I don’t buy is any notion that Shepard’s indoctrination goes back further, because too many things that don’t make sense before that are indistinguishable from slopply, rushed plotting. The bit where you could have seen the child running into the building before you found him in the ducts is intriguing, but I played through that beginning a number of times during the demo and missed it. Looks like you would have to have run right up to the wall and looked down, when there was all this other stuff actually going on to look at, so for most players the first appearance of the child would be when this theory would have that he’s already a figment of Shepard’s imagination.
Furthermore, I absolutely don’t buy that this is a brilliant move on Bioware’s part. If there’s more to the story that they’re withholding that would explain what really happened and they decided not to include it in the game as it first came out, that is an intriguing notion of using the current state of the medium (that it includes supplemental stuff downloaded later and re-imagined by the audience as having been there all along, unlike any other creative endeavor) that particular experiment with this aspect of the medium is proving to have been a colossal blunder that will go down in gaming legend along with “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch.”
Of course, the fact Mass Effect 3 was otherwise a stellar game may help people get over it. I am waiting for a good reason to be forgiving. But I goddamn sure don’t buy that I don’t have good reason to hold a grudge as it stands.
I think the ‘artistic integrity’ argument misses the point, or outright dismisses the legitimacy of the fans’ grievance. Theories of art that reduce it to the vision of the artist alone have done more damage to art than censorship ever did. Art is always an interplay between the artist and the audience. Yes, often great things were done by artists who arrogated to themselves a more dominant role in this relationship. But that this is the way art is supposed to be is a fairly new notion that is often more destructive than liberating, and it’s not the notion that underlies the work of Shakespeare, Michelangelo or really anybody else who came before the 19th century.
That said, it would be terrible if creative people took it as their job to re-fashion their own work ad hoc to please the whims of a crowd. An artist is allowed and may even be praised for subverting the wishes of an audience, but not for its own sake, and certainly not with noting but ‘the artist had a vision’ as its justification. What happens is that the artist establishes a relationship to the audience by building credibility. We forgive logical inconsistencies and other failings even when we notice them because of this relationship of trust that the artist builds.
In an interactive story, I don’t assume everything will turn out great. But when a player engages in the story and saves a child from being eaten by a bear, he’s assuming the writer isn’t going to then have the galaxy blow up shortly thereafter. If you go on for hundreds of hours and paying hundreds of dollars to engage in a saga filled with you saving children from bears, it usually does not need to be said that you trust the writers not to put you at the end of it all in front of three different colored ‘all children explode’ buttons. That’s the complaint. Your reward for trusting the writers is that they do precisely what you trust them not to do. That is a clear break of the understood contract between the player and the game studio.
I’m still going with the assumption that Bioware did not intend for the game as it stands to be the final word, that they were instead experimenting with the way an adjustable medium as video games now are can be exploited to create new kinds of suspense and controversy. Story content is now injectable, and maybe you can do something really terrific with that. But one of the reasons this attempt turns out to be a terrible misstep is that it’ll now be hard to distinguished what they added to the game in order to put out the fires they started and what really was the stuff they meant to add later in their original ‘artistic vision.’
Enjoyment is subjective.
Coherence, thematic consistency, lore consistency, etc… are objective.
You’re allowed to enjoy something that objectively ruins coherence and consistency.
Well, fair enough, but the only thing that’s changed in the secret ending is that Shep isn’t dead.
All the inconsistencies, etc… are all there. The galaxy is still doomed to, at best, slow starvation for most of the populace. And those solar systems with mass relays in them have been wiped out. And nothing you do changed any of that.
And I don’t think it’s at all impossible that the ending was slapdash. You’ve got a team of writers, the ending isn’t done yet, and the boss says “come up with something”. They come up with something, and, well, it’s a thing and the boss says “okay, go for it.” But there’s plenty that indicates it was slapdash, from the Star Child to violating series lore about the energies released from destroying a mass relay and so on.
I agree that a line have to be drawn; an artist (or a creator) cannot give in to the whims of all the members of the audience. However, where is the line drawn? I guess this is what Tolkien meant by sometimes the work takes on a life of its own. The product has its own consistencies and logic, and I believe that a fan outcry is justifiable when that consistency is violated, as in the case of the ending.
It would be like Tolkien (or his son, or grandson) suddenly adding fire-ball tossing and other D&D style wizardry into Middle Earth. I’m sure there will be a justifiable outcry at that too.
At a certain point, your creation ceases to be your own. Technically, it’s still yours, but your fans may also abandon it. What is the point is your created work then?
Not if the Indoctrination Theory is true. And I think it is. [spoiler]If you go with the blue or green endings, you give in to indoctrination and as far as Shep is concerned, that’s it. He’s broken. Reality doesn’t matter any more. But if you go with the red ending and have the knowledge and confidence that you’ve fixed the galaxy, that you’ve beaten the Reapers and proved their creator’s assumptions about biologicals and synthetics wrong, the horror of what gets thrown at Shep doesn’t break him. He breaks free of the mindfuck and wakes up on Earth, since he never went to the Citadel at all. The Mass Relays were not destroyed in reality, only in the mindfuck. The Normandy never crash-landed on some random planet, it’s still over Earth.
I don’t know, it makes sense to me.[/spoiler]
This is an awesome way to explain it. Very succinct.
I went looking for the ME3 leaked script from several months ago, the one that supposedly has a different ending. Well I found a copy of it.
I’ll save you the trouble – the ending in that leaked script is nearly the same (the same three choices), but with a few references about dark energy in the expositional dialog (i.e. plundered ideas from the first writer Drew Karpyshyn’s original script for ME3).
It really looks like Bioware screwed the pooch on this one, which is what happens when non-writers ‘design’ an ending. It makes no logical sense, is not a result of the story that preceded it, but it got through because “everybody signed off on it” during the script approval meeting.
For me, I find it strange that many people in the industry are using the ‘artistic integrity’ defense. Why?
For AAA games over years, it has been all about the bottom line. Streamlined interfaces, appeal to the mass, simplified mechanics, catering to the common crowd and even dropping ‘unpopular’ genres for the profit. Are there any high ideal or artistic vision while those decisions are made?
So it’s strange when fans are complaining about a rushed ending that makes no sense they would use ‘artistic integrity’ to defend themselves. Games aren’t art because of their fantastic CG or music or writing, but because of the uniqueness of interaction. That ideal has been long gone. How is Bioware, or those industry writers, justified in using the art defense when they have long ago forsake ideals for profit?
If they have cared about ‘game being art’, the industry would have stick to its guns about providing innovative and exciting gameplay first. Since that’s gone when the corporate suits take over, what right do they have to claim the artistic integrity defense? True, they are still entitled to what they have created and I may be talking about different things together, just that looking at the overall picture I find the entire situation…rather ironic.
It makes perfect sense to me too, but it’s quite evident that they haven’t made it clear enough.
If Shepard had said, “Something is wrong.” during the Citadel scenes I would have immediately picked up on it. I was suspicious already because of the kid dreams and how everything went wonky after the beam. If the purpose was to never let on and to basically indoctrinate the players themselves then I can see why they chose this route. I doubt they ever imagined this amount of backlash although the “speculation” note seems to indicate that they at least expected some. I will be completely satisfied if there is (free) DLC where my Shep wakes up still on London. Their Tweets seem to indicate that this is the case.
Given that everyone is up in arms about a story they loved and were deeply invested in being ruined, this seems a double standard. It’s a fantastic science fiction story that got utterly ruined to you, but to them it’s just money so they should be appeasing their customers. That seems wrong somehow. If it’s meaningful to the players, can’t it be meaningful to the creators?
Not really, I am not saying that they are revising the ending only for the impact on the bottom line, though it is one of the reasons. Hopefully the ending crafted is meaningful to the creators. However, the cynical me is saying that it is a rushed work, and they aren’t that invested in it. Of course, I have no solid evidence on that, and I am willing to change my mind on that.
Perhaps I could be clearer - for me, it’s strange that all the while they are making changes to gameplay and mechanics to suit the audience and suddenly use the ‘artistic integrity’ defense for the ending.
Moderator’s Note: I’ve been remiss in my duties here and this thread is completely spoilered. I’ve added a warning in the thread title and the OP to warn off anyone who should wander by and would like to take the occasion to allow anyone who wants a low/no spoiler discussion of the game to open a separate thread. I could split up the threads, but that would just disrupt the conversation and make the thread largely illegible. Sorry about the lapse.
- Gukumatz,
Game Room Moderator
An interesting post from one of the writers for ME3 was briefly up on the Penny Arcade forums before being taken down. A copy of that post can be read here.
An excerpt (discussing the ending):*
This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft. And honestly, it kind of shows.
…
The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he’s not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending.
*
Thank you Gukumatz!
You know, I think it’s perfectly possible for the ending to be the product of overly rushed, underly edited economic pressure, AND for the writers to feel artistically invested in it. To read that it was the product of two people shut up in a room together in a massive push makes perfect sense. They were desperate, and they came up with something that seemed profound and appropriate to them in those circumstances, with little opportunity for reflection or outside input. I think anyone who has studied writing has had that horrible realization during a workshop of “Holy shit, they’re right - this is crappy. Why did I think doing it like this was a good idea?”
The problem here is that the criticism happened after the “final product” was published, and it was very emotionally charged and very public. Again, anyone who’s had their writing workshopped knows how hard it is to not take it personally, even in a closed setting where you get to turn around and criticize the critics’ work right back, and you signed up for the criticism in the first place. I can really see the writers being hurt and flummoxed by the reaction.
Their writing is still objectively crappy, as so eloquently described by **FinnAgain **above, and IMHO subjectively crappy. But I understand how it could have come to be and how they could genuinely feel hurt by the response.
Edit: and when I say that the ending was crappy, I’m saying it as a really smart and monumentally analytical person. I don’t think that part of the explanation makes sense.
I’ll just delete this in light of new info. :smack: