If by succeeding you mean keeping your artistic integrity while driving a stake into your loyal fanbase then yes. 
Another thing that angers me, and this is off-topic really, so sorry:
They appear to be going down the same path with their other IP: Dragon Age. DAII also had an ending that basically amounted to you being a bystander, and none of the choices you made during the game played ANY role in the outcome. It was maddening.
Not only that, but apparently, and in spite of the success of DA:O, and the promise of Dragon Age being a spiritual successor to BG, they are adamant on keeping the whole Mass Effect style conversation system for DAIII, as well as focusing on action based combat, instead of a more tactical approach to it.
The whole “Push a button and something awesome happens. BUTTON - AWESOME!”
I feel so burned that I don’t want to play any video games right now. I don’t see myself pre-ordering ever again or buying anything on release day. Now I’ll wait for the fan reviews to find out if anything is worth getting. I certainly don’t trust the IGNs and their ilk. So, I guess I haven’t gotten over it yet, although that sinking feeling is starting to set in that this is the end of the line for Bioware and me. This was always my fear when EA bought them.
The ME games were my favorites and it’s hard for me to let it go. If the games had always been mediocre, I wouldn’t have cared as much about them screwing up the ending.
The only reason I can think of as to why they’ve seemingly abandoned their prior format is EA. All the games are shorter now to increase the amount of DLC.
DA2 would have been fine as a stand-alone game. It didn’t fit as the spiritual successor of DAO.
Back to ME…
Here’s something to lighten the mood:
Lalalalala I can’t hear you!
I am another person who didn’t hate the ending and I think it came down to me just not being as invested in the story. I played (and replayed) ME2 and imported my character to ME3, but in the end Mass Effect is just a shooter to me.
In fact, I played ME games to take a break from RPGs when I wanted to keep gaming, but not think so much. Every level seemed linear and there was never any solution to a mission other than to duck behind a piece of cover, shoot all the bad guys and then talk about it with Miranda while the camera focused on her ass.
I think my reaction to the ending was “not bad for a shooter.”
I’d be more impressed with the artistic integrity line of argument (not that I think you’re a proponent) if they actually spoke up and defended themselves, rather than just make vague noises that they “hear us” and “are listening to fan feedback.” What they seem to be actually doing is moving the goalposts for actually committing to anything whatsoever in any direction until the game has sold every copy it’s going to.
(Which, judging by the VGChartz.com XBOX 360 sales numbers for Mass Effect 2, pretty much happens in the first two months. Considering that out of the recorded 2,1 million it sold in 2010, it sold 1,6 million in the first 8 weeks. In total they sold 2,6 million copies of Mass Effect 2 on the XBOX 360 to date, which means they sold an additional million after that, true. However, many of those copies were probably discounted by anything from 10-80% - the majority of the revenue is probably still made in the first two months.)
So, in other words, check back on May 6th. Until then they’re not going to make any move in any direction, whatsoever. The only viable move to make from a consumer standpoint would be encouraging people not to buy it until they commit and essentially treat the game like they did Stronghold 3, broken upon impact. And that’s not going to happen, because the game frankly isn’t.
I have wondered why they chose artistic integrity to hide behind. There’s no “dangerous precedent” being set because there are already many examples of books, movies, and other games changing their endings. The world isn’t going to end if Bioware makes additional endings. Hell, technically DLC changes the product and they sure love that!
And if they’re so proud of it, why aren’t they explaining it? If it’s just a case of fans not getting it, then why not explain what it’s supposed to mean. The fact that they haven’t leads me to believe that this is not really the ending. They keep dancing around the question and saying, “Wait until April!” and coyly keeping the speculation sky high with ambiguous tweets.
What I’m afraid of is that they sold us an incomplete game on purpose to try and sell the ending DLC later. This is EA we’re talking about…
I’m waiting to see what they come out with at PAX on April 6th.
So I finally freed myself from ME3’s influence on Sunday afternoon. My thoughts:
- I really like the small changes they made to the combat and skill system. I think they improved upon the already improved system from ME2 and I liked the power-recharge/weapons tradeoff.
- I like how, in general, they kept what worked and retooled or eliminated what didn’t. Though, this had the unfortunate consequence of paring things down a little too much (the “scanning” was a joke, and there’s not much else apart from the combat and the dialogue). I didn’t mind the hacking minigames from ME2, and I’d have had no problem with them being retained.
- As usual, the story, acting, and writing were top notch. I still think that ME2 holds together the best as a game, but for the most part, ME3 promised a thrilling, high-stakes conclusion to the story and did not disappoint (except for that big disappointment that everyone is talking about).
- James was pretty much a non-entity. I found his character uninteresting and I had little desire to get to know him. I think that partially has to do with him being uninteresting and a lot to do with them tossing a new character into the mix so late in the story.
- I didn’t realize that the extra character DLC was so substantial, and I avoid looking into it before finishing the game because I feared that it was tied into the ending controversy, and I was eager to avoid spoilers. Now I kind of wish I had the Day1 DLC from the beginning, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to replay the game just for that. Too much of a time commitment.
Now for spoilery opinions:
- Curing the genophage and reuniting the Geth and Quarians were totally awesome; two of the high points in the series, IMO.
- Watching that Reaper on Tuchanka get taken down by the Thresher Maw Queen (Kalross?) was also totally awesome.
- I’m a bit annoyed at some of the cause/effect (or lack thereof) that occurs in the game. For example: if you spare the Rachni Queen in ME1, the Reapers capture her in ME3 and start turning her children into Ravagers. According to the ME Wikia, this happens even if you killed the Rachni Queen in ME1, the only difference being that it’s a “clone” queen. I know eliminating the Ravagers as enemies would have had major gameplay implications, but to hand wave the effect of your previous choice away like that feels like a huge cop-out. I had been hoping that the ending was the only major example of that kind of choice-neutering.
- Harbinger should have had a larger role.
And now, for spoilery ending-based opinions:
- I was certainly left disappointed by the ending. There was little to no closure. Joker fleeing the explosion with your London squadmates made no sense. The introduction of The Catalyst Kid at the end and the brief, unsatisfying explanation for the Reapers was unfortunate. I agree that the destruction of the relays kind of makes every ending a losing situation anyway, so what’s the point?
- My first choice was the “blue” ending. I didn’t think it was fair to wipe out EDI and the Geth (sounds like an Elton John song, “E-E-E-EDI and the Geth”), after rallying them to fight for my cause. As for the “green” ending, I interpreted the dialogue as “this will crunch up all organics and synthetics in the galaxy into a new, raw DNA from which a new generation will form,” so I thought that was a jerk thing to do to everyone, as well.
- The circuit traces on the leaves and everyone’s skin in the “green” ending was asinine. And why did EDI have circuit traces?! She was already synthetic! Shouldn’t she have had freckles or something?!
Maybe more opinions later.
Here’s a great video on why it fails basic story telling. It’s almost 40 minutes long, but it’s well done.
Anyone read this Mass Defect article on the New Yorker? I was about to burst in a fit of explosive anger, then I just rolled my eyes and went meh.
I don’t know how real the other threats to PC gaming, such as game renting and piracy, are but the time when the pretentious artsy type reigns in games is when the industry dies.
I’m not surprised that a writer for The New Yorker is a pretentious idiot without a clue.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…Miranda has the best ass in the history of asses.
Yeah, forget any plot holes in the ending, I have a harder time with the idea that women in the future go into combat in latex and hooker boots.
I posted that already - #344
But it’s so good it should get posted twice.
Doh!!
Whew! Thanks for the save.
That’s not latex, that’s advanced dermal…adaptive…something.
Advanced dermal adaptive hotpants.
This ‘artistic integrity’ defense is a funny one, because if we believe in taking art seriously, we muddy the waters if just anything counts as art. Never mind that artists themselves have been doing just this for decades. Look at it this way: if you hire a wedding photographer, and he takes a bunch of pictures with his thumb in frame, then you would object, not only because you don’t want thumbs in your wedding photos, but because this is a recognizable marker of poor photography skills. But suppose that the photographer objects that what most people see as signs of incompetence obscuring or overshadowing what the pictures were supposed to represent, and the photographer claims that if he gave into your demands for a refund or a reshoot that he’d be violating his own artistic integrity. The name of art itself is invoked in a circular argument in defense of artistic failure.
People making the ‘artistic integrity’ argument are defending incompetence or indifference in the name of art. As the veteran of many writing workshops, whatever you think of that institution, one of the things they for the good of mankind is beat out of your heads the idea that the audience owes the artist something. It’s the other way around. This isn’t to say you can’t subvert the audience’s expectations – but subverting is not the same as ignoring or failing to understand. The artist owes the audience something for their time, and there are tried-and-true ways of achieving this, and well-trampled paths of error, known from antiquity and as a public service drummed into the heads of would-be writers.
The points I’m about to make are related to each other, and to how the ending of Mass Effect 3 is in itself evidence of its failure as art.
Ars est celāre artem - A somewhat smoother restatement of Ovid’s observation. The art is to conceal the art. One is reminded of this whenever someone attempts to justify something that doesn’t make sense by invoking Art as a blanket license. If something doesn’t work without the audience having to appeal to Art Itself as some kind of ineffable, infallible authority, then it’s failed as art.
Before a wooden leg can be a symbol, it must first be a wooden leg - Flannery O’Connor was talking about one of her own short stories. I believe it was in the Mystery of Manners collection, but the upshot was that there was a wooden leg in the story which served as a symbol. But in her own explanation it was absolutely essential that the wooden leg actually be an object in the world independent of its symbolic meaning, and that to bear the symbolic weight its literal role in the story had to be important to the story on the literal level. You can’t just toss shit in to be symbolic.
The gun on the mantle - Chekov famously observed that if there’s going to be a gun in the third act of a play, it had better be introduced in the first act – there for the audience to see. And, just as importantly, if there is a gun sitting on the mantle in the first act, it had better come into play in the third act, otherwise you’re wasting the audience’s attention by making them wonder about it.
Mass Effect 3 violates all these principles of story telling. It breaks immersion to force you into a ‘look how deep this shit is’ sequence. It introduces shit at the last minute that is supposed to be symbolic, but clearly doesn’t have the connectivity to the literal story to bear the weight of the symbolic significance. Furthermore, it puts a lot of guns on the mantle in the first act which are mysteriously replaced with three galaxy-buster bombs in the third act.
The artist is there to serve the art, not the other way around. The artists job is to win the audience over. It’s not the audience’s job to gratify the artist’s ego.