Entitled twats don't like the ending to a game

[Bucket]

http://retakemasseffect.chipin.com/retake-mass-effect-childs-play

First off, I don't want to downplay donating to a charity. Nothing wrong with that. But what I do take issue with...

Is this what happens when the Prozac Generation become discerning gamers? A petition to change a game that didn't have a Hollywood ending? Are you saying that your choices in the game, while being completely without nuance or grey morality to begin with, did little to change the outcome? YOU COULD KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER RIGHT NOW. Never before has a game given you the illusion of choice, only to funnel you to the same cookie-cutter ending. Nope, completely unprecedented.

You people seriously want sixteen endings that run the gamut of possible outcomes? OK, so what's canon when ME4 comes out? Game studios set out to write ONE story with ONE ending. Consider yourself lucky you get more than a completely inconsequential text crawl just before the credits.

[Technician]

Maybe some people are still upset with Hamburger Helper.

[Blastfrog]

Bucket said:

OK, so what's canon when ME4 DX2 comes out?

All of them.

[Gez]

The best "all of them" canon for multiple endings was for Daggerfall. There are seven possible outcomes (eight if you count "player starts the countdown then faffs around instead of completing the quest, and gets killed" as an outcome), and they all contradict each other, and they all happened. The problem of choosing which ending was canon was resolved by having a localized space-time anomaly as reality was shattered and then recoalesced uneasily. Entire kingdoms vanishing overnight, the flow of time becoming erratic, events that happened in different orders depending on the place, people experiencing a whole year of life while other simultaneously saw only a single day, etc.

The best thing is that, in-universe, it even makes complete sense.

[Phml]

Unless there's some drama around this I missed (and I'm not interested in it if so, I don't even play Mass Effect), seems like you're seriously overreacting as the page you linked is civil in tone and acknowledges the writers don't owe the players anything.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Bucket said:

You people seriously want sixteen endings that run the gamut of possible outcomes?

Serpent has 16 endings :P (though many were slight variations of each other, and most were also unlikely to happen)

[BouncyTEM]

To be fair, Bioware literally brought it on themselves with false advertising due to a fair amount of interviews prior to the game release literally stating outright that the ending ME3 had is what they would *never* allow, and that each choice would matter and make a monumental difference to the outcome, not to mention full and proper closure.

Ending didn't do any of these and betrayed just about everything mass effect was about. A backlash was inevitable.

[Mr. Freeze]

The worst part is that somewhere, some asshole executive is staring at this info and thinking "Free publicity!"

[Gez]

Quoth Penny Arcade:

The filthy secret of Achievements is that they are essentially user surveillance, and I’m always surprised to learn how many people don’t complete their games. Not that I’m always running them to the end, of course; I just figured that not getting all the way there was simply an oxide formed on my own fundamentally incomplete psyche. It’s not the case. How much money you want to spend on something a nontrivial percentage of your purchasing audience will never see is a good question, and given the way most games end, we may divine the answer.

I think that's a good point to keep in mind. "But," you'll say, "hardcore gamers do finish their games, and they are pretty vocal, so developers should pay attention to them." Yeah, in a different world maybe. The consolization of PC gaming shows that hard core gamers are mostly irrelevant, as far as business decisions go.

[Technician]

Heh, I've seen this circling the chans. Not relevant, but funny.

[DeathevokatioN]

Phml said:

Unless there's some drama around this I missed (and I'm not interested in it if so, I don't even play Mass Effect), seems like you're seriously overreacting as the page you linked is civil in tone and acknowledges the writers don't owe the players anything.

This is very true, nothing in the article really seemed out of line at all, and it was very politely written.

On the other hand lets look at some other complaints filed against it! ;)

[Jimmy]

Technician said:

Heh, I've seen this circling the chans. Not relevant, but funny.

That's... that's something I do when I want TITLEPICs/INTERPICs and whatnot. Major game developers shouldn't be stooping to my level of unoriginality, surely. :S

[Darkman 4]

People are upset because the entire story is based on the idea that your actions have a major impact on the game's universe. Hell, that's the entire point of the third game. In the third game, you can do things like broker peace between a robot race and their asshole creators, undo a semi-sterilization of an entire race, unthaw relations with humanity and a race they had a war with when they first encountered another species, and forge an alliance between one of the races that helped semi-sterilize the previously-mentioned semi-sterile species. In fact, the game measures how much you help the other species with a "war assets" meter, which impacts how the last part of the game goes.

However, each of the endings completely undoes your work and you have no control over it. Why bother trying to do things like broker peace between two species when the universe will be so radically changed that your work is pointless?

[Vesperas_]

People have every reason to be upset if they so wish. I have never played any of the Mass Effect games but I have a friend who liked the series a lot, only to be pissed with the conclusion. Darkman 4 basically hit it on the head; Bioware allowed people to upload their saves from the prior games with the promise that your actions would effect the conclusion you receive-- but that apparently is not the case at all.

Many people are probably also annoyed that they had to pay money to unlock content that was included on the disc (obvious cash-in from cut content) and possibly some of it is even backlash against Bioware and EA overall.

I do not really understand how that makes them twats. These days being a fan of almost anything just means you're ripped off at every available opportunity.

[40oz]

Darkman 4 said:

However, each of the endings completely undoes your work and you have no control over it. Why bother trying to do things like broker peace between two species when the universe will be so radically changed that your work is pointless?

I don't know if this analogy translates very well or is relevant, but I search for secret areas and seek out all monsters in each map I play in Doom even though it doesn't affect the end result of me saving the world.

[Technician]

40oz said:

I don't know if this analogy translates very well or is relevant, but I search for secret areas and seek out all monsters in each map I play in Doom even though it doesn't affect the end result of me saving the world.

Doom promised you no luxuries for completing all the secrets or kills. Mass Effect was a trilogy of games where you had many pathways to choose from to accumulate to a different ending. They had the different pathways, but none of them achieved anything like they advertised.

[eargosedown]

Wow, they raised 43 grand?

They can be "twats" all they want to in that case.

[Darkman 4]

40oz said:

I don't know if this analogy translates very well or is relevant, but I search for secret areas and seek out all monsters in each map I play in Doom even though it doesn't affect the end result of me saving the world.

In Doom, you don't affect the game's universe outside of "kill the final boss to save the world!". There's no NPCs you can talk to and no optional objectives that affect how the greater world like finding a special computer. Hell, I'd argue that "affecting the game's universe" itself is a very minor goal compared to goals like getting out of the level alive, getting 100% kills, or even getting an item you really need.

[BouncyTEM]

also, this image *is* relevant to the discussion.

[DoomUK]

Personally I wasn't even bothered by the ending and I don't know what people are getting upset about.

But if this has somehow raised $44 thousand so far, good for them.

[printz]

Too much rage in the thread title.

[Phml]

In Doom, you don't affect the game's universe outside of "kill the final boss to save the world!". There's no NPCs you can talk to and no optional objectives that affect how the greater world like finding a special computer. Hell, I'd argue that "affecting the game's universe" itself is a very minor goal compared to goals like getting out of the level alive, getting 100% kills, or even getting an item you really need.

For all you know, there might be another marine left alive in the base. Until you took that box of shells and deprived him of munitions at a crucial point. If only you'd have left this box of shells, then Johnny McRandom would have lived, helped you take down the Icon of Sin, and, managing to get himself in a prominent spot within the new government, would have managed to stop the Plutonia Experiment events before any of it even started.

[printz]

Phml said:

For all you know, there might be another marine left alive in the base. Until you took that box of shells and deprived him of munitions at a crucial point. If only you'd have left this box of shells, then Johnny McRandom would have lived, helped you take down the Icon of Sin, and, managing to get himself in a prominent spot within the new government, would have managed to stop the Plutonia Experiment events before any of it even started.

I'm still waiting to play a ZDoom, Vavoom (or spin-off) mod that has that kind of dynamics

[Coopersville]

Entitled

I sure hope this doesn't catch on as the new gaming buzzword.

[Technician]

Coopersville said:

I sure hope this doesn't catch on as the new gaming buzzword.

Great, soon they'll be called liberal gamers.

[Darkman 4]

Coopersville said:

I sure hope this doesn't catch on as the new gaming buzzword.

Heh, I've been using that term for whiny PC gamers for years. Now I'm going to have to find a different one so that people don't get confused.

[Snarboo]

I recently read a very interesting article about this subject.

I'd say it's perfectly fair to complain about the ending to a series you've invested a lot of time and money into if it doesn't meet your expectations, especially when the ending choices amount to:

Spoiler

The bad guys have won, and any choice you make will fuck over the galaxy. How do you want them to win? Also, what color explosion do you like?

You never see anyone arguing that moviegoers are "entitled" if they don't like the ending to a film. Obviously, EA and Bioware have done something very wrong if fans are demanding they change the ending.

[Maes]

Snarboo said:

You never see anyone arguing that moviegoers are "entitled" if they don't like the ending to a film.

That's due in no small part to the Hollywood blockbuster script rules dictating that there should always be happy endings and that the audience should not be left hanging, disturbed, bitter, or without even a ray of hope/a sequel that will "rectify" things. MOvies that violate this are so few and far between that yeah, you don't get to hear a lot of complaining.

European cinema has a quite opposite approach to this matter, as does most of the non-Hollywood world cinema.

[Shaviro]

I loved the ending.
The problem is of course that they're almost 100% the same.

But come on. Endings are hard.
How should it have ended? An unconditionally happy "NOW IT'S TIME FOR A NICE HOLIDAY" hollywood ending would have had no staying power whatsoever. Happy endings certainly _can_ work beautifully, but there has to be some sort of significant sacrifice for the protagonist for them to work together with the entirety of the game. If not, everything in between the beginning and the ending will be null and void.

What I'm talking about here will often end up with a bitter-sweet ending, which is exactly what ME3 was.

[DooM_RO]

Shaviro said:

I loved the ending.
The problem is of course that they're almost 100% the same.

But come on. Endings are hard.
How should it have ended? An unconditionally happy "NOW IT'S TIME FOR A NICE HOLIDAY" hollywood ending would have had no staying power whatsoever. Happy endings certainly _can_ work beautifully, but there has to be some sort of significant sacrifice for the protagonist for them to work together with the entirety of the game. If not, everything in between the beginning and the ending will be null and void.

What I'm talking about here will often end up with a bitter-sweet ending, which is exactly what ME3 was.

The reason people hated the ending is because they wanted a happy ending, an ending where we just barely defeat the reapers and sustain heavy casualties and an ending where the reapers win.Also we never find out what happened to our crew and the other races.