So What Did "Mass Effect: Andromeda' Learn From The 'Mass Effect 3' Ending Debacle?(maybe spoliers -
Apr 1, 2017 18:10:02 GMT
Post by starch on Apr 1, 2017 18:10:02 GMT
So What Did "Mass Effect: Andromeda' Learn From The 'Mass Effect 3' Ending Debacle? (Obviously I did not write this but I agree with the article)
By: Paul Tassi of Forbes Magazine
News and opinion about video games, technology and the internet
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
It’s been a couple weeks since the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and while I’m sure many players are still working their way through the behemoth of a game, I figured it was time for another discussion about the ending.
I did this once already. Last time, I spoke to MEA producer Michael Gamble about specific plot points in the ending, but today I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective about what Mass Effect: Andromeda may have learned from the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle, which is one of the most fascinating gaming “drama” moments I’ve experienced in all my time covering the industry. Obviously spoilers for both Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect: Andromeda will follow.
Back then everyone knew that Mass Effect 3 was the end for at least Shepard’s arc of the story, a culmination of twisting and turning plotlines that players had forged after 100-300 hours of gameplay across three different games. The hope was that the end of Mass Effect 3 would serve both as a fitting goodbye to these characters players had gotten to know and love over three games, and that their choices would result in a distinct ending all their own, or at least one that felt that way.
The rest is history. While I would argue that 95% of Mass Effect 3 was an exceptionally great game, and contained some of the finest moments of the series (Mordin’s genophage cure), it all fell apart at the ending.
First, players leave their crew behind without so much as a second thought or goodbye as they try to and stop the Reaper menace themselves. Then, after a (pretty good) scene between Anderson and the Illusive Man, there’s the infamous “Star Child” moment, where an artificial construct of a little boy gives you three color-coded choices, either you can choose to destroy the Reapers, control the Reapers or synthesize all organic and synthetic life.
The only thing that really played into this endgame decision was your “readiness” factor, which would determine the fate of earth, your crew and Shepard in the briefest of cutscenes at the end of the game. The problem was that no matter what you’d done for three games, you only had these three choices, and choosing any of them resulting in practically the exact same cutscene as any of the others, just tinted slightly differently. No matter what, the Mass Effect relays were destroyed, Shepard was (likely) dead and your ship and crew were stranded on some random planet, if they were still alive.
Fans were not happy. They were livid, in fact, demanding simply “better” from BioWare in a rare case of outrage over specific story elements of a game, rather than technical problems or microtransactions or what have you. The ending was just plain bad, and fans demanded that it be “fixed,” somehow, some way.
Many gaming outlets ridiculed fans for their aversion to the ending, calling them “entitled” that they thought they deserved a new ending. I first attracted my first few followers because I was on the other side, I agreed that fans had a right to voice their dissent about a series they’d invested so much time into, and BioWare had the power to “fix” the problem, albeit in a somewhat slapdash way, the horse already having left the barn in many ways.
So they learned a few immediate lessons. They released an “extended cut” of the ending, which altered the final cutscene and narration a bit to focus more on Shepard’s crew and the various decisions you’d made along the way. It felt like a step in the right direction, albeit still too little, too late.
But after that? It took a while, but BioWare released its “Citadel” DLC, content that took place before the final assault on the Reapers, which did have a tiny amount of combat, but was more about getting to spend time with your crew, now knowing what was ahead, and that you’d be leaving them behind. The game allow you to have specific “moments” with various members of your crew, including your love interest, as ways to say goodbye, and the focus is on a big party where you get to relax and chat with everyone before the big fight ahead. It sounds sort of weird, but it was exactly what the game needed, and it felt like a fitting goodbye for the series at last, despite the still-mangled ending waiting ahead.
So, enter Mass Effect: Andromeda. What did BioWare learn from the original ME3 mess?
Well, the situations aren’t exactly parallel. I was originally operating under the assumption that Mass Effect: Andromeda might end up being a standlone game, as BioWare said they were not going to be pursuing another trilogy. But as I beat the game and found a number of loose ends, it seemed pretty clear more was planned. When I asked MEA’s producer for specific answer, nearly every lingering plotline was something that was going to be carried into future content and games, he said.
As such, it’s hard to compare the endings of MEA and ME3, though you can see what BioWare has learned, in a way.
The ending of MEA is more like the ending of the original Mass Effect, where effectively you have to get to the same end result, Saren had to die. In MEA, the Archon has to die. There’s no option to get him to talk himself to death like in ME1, so far as I can tell, perhaps a casualty of the dismantled Renegade/Paragon system, so instead you just have a big, traditional boss fight. Also unlike ME1, I think you actually have to finish the game with your crew alive and intact. There’s no “choose between Kaiden and Ashley” moment here, so your final crew should be exactly who you started with, unless I missed some tragic plot turn somewhere.
However, you do see a lot of the Citadel DLC “fix” in Mass Effect: Andromeda. That DLC was so good it calmed down an entire angry playerbase (for the most part), and it’s clear they’ve ported certain aspects of that here. Near the end of the game, you get a “moment” with pretty much every member of your crew before the final push. You go rock climbing with Vetra, you play soccer at an outpost with Liam, you get into a barfight alongside Drack, you have crazy asari sex with Peebee, etc. It’s not a “goodbye” per se, but it does feel very similar to Citadel in that you’re getting these nice little vignettes with these characters that doesn’t involve just face-to-face “stop by their room” conversations, or shooting things in the wild.
Similarly, the Citadel DLC’s central party is sort of recreated in the game’s long-running Movie Night quest, where you’re tasked with getting movies and snacks throughout the course of the game, eventually leading to a lengthy extended cutscene with your entire crew as you watch a Turian action flick and goof around while doing so. It’s a nice moment, or at least it would have been had one of the game’s worst bugs not cropped up for me, erasing the entire questline before I got to finish it. I had to watch it on YouTube. Sigh.
But the point is, you can see a lot of what made the Citadel DLC work here in Mass Effect: Andromeda. Elsewhere, the actual ending has very little to do with ME3’s multiple choices, and I would actually call MEA’s ending a little safe. I think they were trying not to rock the boat with the ending really at all, making it end much more like a traditional game than anything that required branching decisions or tough choices. What variance there was involved which allies came to help you, based on your decisions throughout the game, but your squad never seems to be in any real danger, and you’re not tasked with some big final choice at the end. Just kill the guy, expect to kill more guys later, that’s really it.
So MEA avoids the nightmarish ending of ME3, but partially because it’s a totally different type of chapter, an introduction not an ending, and partially because it plays it really safe, creating an ending that it’s hard for anyone to really have a significant problem with. It worked for me, but I still wish more loose ends had been tied up, and I hope however Andromeda does end, that more thought is put into the finale this time.Save
By: Paul Tassi of Forbes Magazine
News and opinion about video games, technology and the internet
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
It’s been a couple weeks since the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and while I’m sure many players are still working their way through the behemoth of a game, I figured it was time for another discussion about the ending.
I did this once already. Last time, I spoke to MEA producer Michael Gamble about specific plot points in the ending, but today I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective about what Mass Effect: Andromeda may have learned from the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle, which is one of the most fascinating gaming “drama” moments I’ve experienced in all my time covering the industry. Obviously spoilers for both Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect: Andromeda will follow.
Back then everyone knew that Mass Effect 3 was the end for at least Shepard’s arc of the story, a culmination of twisting and turning plotlines that players had forged after 100-300 hours of gameplay across three different games. The hope was that the end of Mass Effect 3 would serve both as a fitting goodbye to these characters players had gotten to know and love over three games, and that their choices would result in a distinct ending all their own, or at least one that felt that way.
The rest is history. While I would argue that 95% of Mass Effect 3 was an exceptionally great game, and contained some of the finest moments of the series (Mordin’s genophage cure), it all fell apart at the ending.
First, players leave their crew behind without so much as a second thought or goodbye as they try to and stop the Reaper menace themselves. Then, after a (pretty good) scene between Anderson and the Illusive Man, there’s the infamous “Star Child” moment, where an artificial construct of a little boy gives you three color-coded choices, either you can choose to destroy the Reapers, control the Reapers or synthesize all organic and synthetic life.
The only thing that really played into this endgame decision was your “readiness” factor, which would determine the fate of earth, your crew and Shepard in the briefest of cutscenes at the end of the game. The problem was that no matter what you’d done for three games, you only had these three choices, and choosing any of them resulting in practically the exact same cutscene as any of the others, just tinted slightly differently. No matter what, the Mass Effect relays were destroyed, Shepard was (likely) dead and your ship and crew were stranded on some random planet, if they were still alive.
Fans were not happy. They were livid, in fact, demanding simply “better” from BioWare in a rare case of outrage over specific story elements of a game, rather than technical problems or microtransactions or what have you. The ending was just plain bad, and fans demanded that it be “fixed,” somehow, some way.
Many gaming outlets ridiculed fans for their aversion to the ending, calling them “entitled” that they thought they deserved a new ending. I first attracted my first few followers because I was on the other side, I agreed that fans had a right to voice their dissent about a series they’d invested so much time into, and BioWare had the power to “fix” the problem, albeit in a somewhat slapdash way, the horse already having left the barn in many ways.
So they learned a few immediate lessons. They released an “extended cut” of the ending, which altered the final cutscene and narration a bit to focus more on Shepard’s crew and the various decisions you’d made along the way. It felt like a step in the right direction, albeit still too little, too late.
But after that? It took a while, but BioWare released its “Citadel” DLC, content that took place before the final assault on the Reapers, which did have a tiny amount of combat, but was more about getting to spend time with your crew, now knowing what was ahead, and that you’d be leaving them behind. The game allow you to have specific “moments” with various members of your crew, including your love interest, as ways to say goodbye, and the focus is on a big party where you get to relax and chat with everyone before the big fight ahead. It sounds sort of weird, but it was exactly what the game needed, and it felt like a fitting goodbye for the series at last, despite the still-mangled ending waiting ahead.
So, enter Mass Effect: Andromeda. What did BioWare learn from the original ME3 mess?
Well, the situations aren’t exactly parallel. I was originally operating under the assumption that Mass Effect: Andromeda might end up being a standlone game, as BioWare said they were not going to be pursuing another trilogy. But as I beat the game and found a number of loose ends, it seemed pretty clear more was planned. When I asked MEA’s producer for specific answer, nearly every lingering plotline was something that was going to be carried into future content and games, he said.
As such, it’s hard to compare the endings of MEA and ME3, though you can see what BioWare has learned, in a way.
The ending of MEA is more like the ending of the original Mass Effect, where effectively you have to get to the same end result, Saren had to die. In MEA, the Archon has to die. There’s no option to get him to talk himself to death like in ME1, so far as I can tell, perhaps a casualty of the dismantled Renegade/Paragon system, so instead you just have a big, traditional boss fight. Also unlike ME1, I think you actually have to finish the game with your crew alive and intact. There’s no “choose between Kaiden and Ashley” moment here, so your final crew should be exactly who you started with, unless I missed some tragic plot turn somewhere.
However, you do see a lot of the Citadel DLC “fix” in Mass Effect: Andromeda. That DLC was so good it calmed down an entire angry playerbase (for the most part), and it’s clear they’ve ported certain aspects of that here. Near the end of the game, you get a “moment” with pretty much every member of your crew before the final push. You go rock climbing with Vetra, you play soccer at an outpost with Liam, you get into a barfight alongside Drack, you have crazy asari sex with Peebee, etc. It’s not a “goodbye” per se, but it does feel very similar to Citadel in that you’re getting these nice little vignettes with these characters that doesn’t involve just face-to-face “stop by their room” conversations, or shooting things in the wild.
Similarly, the Citadel DLC’s central party is sort of recreated in the game’s long-running Movie Night quest, where you’re tasked with getting movies and snacks throughout the course of the game, eventually leading to a lengthy extended cutscene with your entire crew as you watch a Turian action flick and goof around while doing so. It’s a nice moment, or at least it would have been had one of the game’s worst bugs not cropped up for me, erasing the entire questline before I got to finish it. I had to watch it on YouTube. Sigh.
But the point is, you can see a lot of what made the Citadel DLC work here in Mass Effect: Andromeda. Elsewhere, the actual ending has very little to do with ME3’s multiple choices, and I would actually call MEA’s ending a little safe. I think they were trying not to rock the boat with the ending really at all, making it end much more like a traditional game than anything that required branching decisions or tough choices. What variance there was involved which allies came to help you, based on your decisions throughout the game, but your squad never seems to be in any real danger, and you’re not tasked with some big final choice at the end. Just kill the guy, expect to kill more guys later, that’s really it.
So MEA avoids the nightmarish ending of ME3, but partially because it’s a totally different type of chapter, an introduction not an ending, and partially because it plays it really safe, creating an ending that it’s hard for anyone to really have a significant problem with. It worked for me, but I still wish more loose ends had been tied up, and I hope however Andromeda does end, that more thought is put into the finale this time.Save
