Posts tagged mass effect 3 ending
SUPPORt a better ending for Mass Effect 3: http://www.facebook.com/DemandABetterEndingToMassEffect3
“Disengage and head to the rendez-vous point.”
So apparently Hackett orders Joker to disengage the fight on Earth, take his squad and just leave Shepard behind in his darkest hour.
To achieve this, Mac Walters had to break Hackett’s character, because the Admiral had just held a speech 20 minutes earlier where he explained that we can’t fall back and we must stand together.
Hackett was one of the few characters that the original ending hadn’t broken yet.
Guys, remember before Mass Effect 3 came out and we were all excited, and literally screaming and crying every day before it came out?
like this
and now we look at it after we’ve all finished it and we’re just like this:
“I loved you once.”
DAMNIT.
Bioware, don’t tell me, show me!
(Sorry for the rant, but Bioware community manager Jessica Merizan pisses me off to no end. I wish she would just shut up.)
To me, one of the rules of good quality writing is that you need to show the audience what you mean, without having to explicitly tell them what you mean. Your writing must be suggestive of what happens.
What does this mean exactly? Well, first example I could think of, take the nightmares that Shepard has throughout ME3. They are clearly meant to show you the psychological pressure he is under, the anxiety, how the burdens of continuous warfare wear down on him and so on. And because those scenes are well written, you don’t need to be told that Shepard is under a lot of stress and is struggling with combat fatigue. It is evident, because the narrative SHOWS YOU that.
The same goes for the ending. Bioware SHOWS you that the Citadel is destroyed, SHOWS you that the relays are blown to smithereens, SHOWS you that your crew maroons on a Jungle planet, SHOWS you that everyone is stranded in the Sol system… but then it comes right back and TELLS you that no, the Citadel is not really destroyed, TELLS you the Mass relays didn’t really blow up, TELLS you that your crew isn’t really stranded, and TELLS you that everyone doesn’t really get stuck in the Sol system.
Well… I’m sorry, but THAT DOESN’T WORK. It doesn’t stand. You cannot show the audience one thing and then tell them a completely opposite thing.
Probably my favorite strip yet in this series.
Retake Mass Effect - M&M campaign
To learn about the lovely M&M campaign, please visit this page.
In short, it is a campaign to send customized M&Ms to BioWare to encourage them to change the ending.
The first shipment will have a picture of a heart, ME1, and We Still Believe.The second shipment will have a picture of a heart, ME2, and the message UR Biotic Gods.The third shipment will have a picture of a broken heart, ME3, and the message This Hurts Us. A picture from the Group Photo campaign will be used for a poster and shipped to BioWare to put a human face on the message.The fourth shipment will be two simultaneous shipments with the following messages: ABC, DLC, Keep Calibrating, Remember Promises, Hold The Line, You Are Legendary.
It’s incredible, the amount of love this franchise is getting. This alone should humble the devs.
A month and a half after the endings, and people are STILL spirited about making it right.
I continue to be blown away by all of our campaigns. There’s always something happening. People do not falter. It ain’t over till it’s over.
The journey. You’re supposed to enjoy it.
EA, this hurts you
The Mass Effect 3 sale counts can be found here. According to this website, word of mouth matters. We hurt their bottom line.
“Figures show Mass Effect 3 sold between 1.3 - 2 million copies worldwide. Figures also show Mass Effect 3 shipped between 3.5 - 5 million worldwide. After the first week, sales plummeted by over 78%. We held them accountable.” - fellow Retaker.
I am conflicted. Don’t know if I should be happy or sad. Am happy because EA/Bioware deserves it, am not happy because Mass Effect deserved better.
(PS: Above all else, Mass Effect deserved better from its own devs. From EA/Bioware. We were right to react like we did. I would do it again in a heartbeat. But I am sad that a series I love had to end on such a bitter note.)
"All were thematically revolting"
A professor tells us that the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy failed due it’s failure to follow the internal logic of the game. He also has a great response to the “entitled whiner” argument:
If I go to a concert, and pay top dollar to be entertained by the beautiful music of the orchestra therein, why would I be called a whiner when at the very end the musicians throw away their instruments and start playing death metal? Am I not entitled to expect the end to the concert to be what I have paid for?
This narrative has not until this point been about dominance, extermination, and the imposition of uniformity – indeed, Shepard has spent over a hundred hours of narrative fighting against precisely these three themes. And if one of these three (and only these three) options must be selected in order to sustain life in the universe, then that life has been so devalued by that act as to make the sacrifice meaningless.
He says it so much better than I ever could.
Very nice. Everyone should read this. It’s what we’ve always said in the Retake movement. The ending is objectively bad from a narrative point of view, and anyone who has studied literature for more than 5 minutes can see it. This literature professor gives a detailed account of why this is so.
And I fully agree with the excerpt above.
We either live free, by our rules… or we die. This has always been the ONE core idea driving Shepard forward. He had a one track mind. The current ending simply negates the Shepard character entirely.
Is it depressing that I wished we could have taken the Reapers head on until the last Human, Turian, Geth and Prothean breath is extinguished, instead of yielding?
If the combined forces of the galaxy cannot defeat the Reapers and we need to forefeit our very beings in order to survive, then that survival is not worth the sacrifice. This “choice” was taken away from us. We were FORCED to react exactly how the Geth reacted about being allied with the Reapers. Shepard inquired about why the Geth heretics allied with the Reapers and asked Legion “Is losing free will preferable to extermination?” and Legion responded “Evidently so.”.
Well, maybe it was preferable to the Geth before they became fully evolved AIs. But after that, the loss of agency just wasn’t going to cut it. The ending didn’t reflect this, instead it assumed we react like semi-evolved networked intelligences.
Don’t believe EA propaganda.
Hold the line.
Good question indeed. For you, what was the last twist of the knife with the ME3 ending?
