A plea to Casey Hudson.

Canadian health care sounds horrible.

Nupe, he's still a class A liar/salesman/douche.

I give Hudson credit for all the work he did on the ME games, despite my hatred for ME3s ending.

He just had a very bad habit of making promises he couldn't keep, like saying the ending wouldn't be A, B or C and then having it be exactly that except with RGB.

Does anyone remember Casey Hudson was the master author behind the RGB ending?
Hudson couldn't keep on schedule and EA wanted a finished product. Starchild! Booyah! Sheez...

It's all over anyway.

You want him back now?

Didnt you all despise him after what he did with ME3s endings?

False. He directed it. Mac wrote every word of it.

Also, to other guys above, I never cared that much about the RGB endings. Yes, I was incredibly disappointed when I realized all 3 endings had the same cutscenes but to me I was never under the impression that my choices would seriously change the entire narrative but of course I hoped BioWare could work their magic... it's just that whenever they didn't I understood because I understood games enough back in 2012 to know that this wasn't all simple to do.

What bothered me was simply the execution of the linear, underlying narrative. That's all that matters to me.

The worst thing is not even that they ripped off Deus Ex for the choices but that they ripped off LOST's way of ending the story and they even ripped off the showrunner's lies and excuses. When asked about the ending in The Final Hours of ME3 and whether they knew the answers they didn't give regarding the Reapers Mac goes "Oh yeah, we know!" and you can just tell he's on the spot and really they had no idea. Casey then talks about how it was important to him that the endings weren't something you'd forget just like Damon Lindelof told a guy on The Verge "at least you remember being disappointed!" and he also talked about how the ending raised questions such as "Should we incorporate synthetics more and more into our bodies, and things like that." It's the story that made my shit boil - the part where they announce the meaning you should take away from the plot. It was also LOST that promoted the 2Deep4U kind of garbage that was popular. Remember, LOST ended in 2010, right around the time when ME3 started being made. The entire run of LOST probably gave Mac and Casey faith that "winging" an ongoing series would turn out fine and they were in the same boat as the LOST series creators who kept saying "We know the answers, we know where it's going" when behind the scenes that was BS.

Casey kept saying throughout ME1 and ME2's promotions that they had a plan for the story.

Here is Armando Troisi, the Cinematics Designer admitting openly that BioWare had no plan.


The statement, denoument or wrap-up, whatever you call it, is Mac's writing... all of it except the Buzz Aldrin scene which I suspect Casey wrote. The plot does not die at the Buzz Aldrin scene, that was just tacked on for no reason other than to give you an impression of how vast the universe is both literally and the Mass Effect-verse, but it's the scene with the kid that destroyed the story with the "Organics and Synthetics" reasoning taking center stage in a story that wasn't about that, and as much as Casey were the guy who probably told Mac they had to make it more meaningful than the Crucible, the entire conversation with the Kid could have made sense to what the series had been about even when tackling a theme of organics and synthetics but Mac's script turned it into the worst possible thing it could've possibly been, because as with any other part of the story, whether it's the kid in the intro or Cerberus and Udina's coup, Mac was too obsessed with making it appear meaningful rather than putting proper reasoning into it.

He destroyed the Trilogy's endings, he can stay where he is... in a very dark abyss. Now, if only Mac Walters would kindly join him...

Edit: Like, okay, he did the extended cut and all but it wasn't enough. High EMS Red Ending people deserved closure for their Shepard and never got it. 

Shortsighted people.

Casey Hudson is a fantastic game developer and it was obvious that he leaving Bioware would hit the company hard. Although I didn't think it would that hard, in many ways MEA feels it was made my amateurs, not veterans from the trilogy. 

I do agree, I think they didn't have enough experienced people working on the game instead of just being "overseers", but the problem is the fans chase away people too.  I am pretty sure we only hear about a small fraction of what people who call themselves fans have done over the years to the people at BioWare and a few of them question why I even bother communicating with the community at times.

One of the things that unfortunately I think has contributed to the problem overall is people just stop coming to places like this because they get tired of all the negativity towards BioWare, so when something happens that isn't perfect people will come to a place like this and rage over their grievances and there isn't a lot of people to shout them down.  I have been seeing it more with Andromeda then prior Mass Effect games for there are enough people saying "the game is fine, it just wasn't perfect" and I think that voice is what needs to be heard more.

I'm one of the people who dont feel all that negative about either Bioware or MEA and I for one dont see any point engaging with the people here who complain endlessly, its a fairly small, loud, number and you see the same names in every topic. I mainly spend my time playing the game, if others dont enjoy it, too bad for them but no amount of ranting, shouting, insulting or trolling is going to bring back an imaginary past. Which it what it is, imaginary.

A few of the more egregious mistakes deserve to be harped on till they are fixed but overall I agree that MEA isn't a bad game at all.  Flawed, very much so at times, but not bad.  You just need to keep in mind that internet forums aren't known for being a nexus of rainbows and sunshine and not let the negativity get you down.  Every person is going to have their own thing they harp on and collectively that can look like a big sea of whining but I think you would find only the most ardent trolls would say the whole game is truly terrible.

A pattern I've noticed is that the harsher the tone the forums tend to have toward a game, the more I seem to actually like it. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.