Mass Effect

[liquidcalm]

I don't think that's the problem. I've not seen the ending for myself but it seems as though the problem is that the ending is the same (bar a couple of colour palette changes) no matter which choice you make, no matter whether you're Renegade or Paragon, no matter anything you've done over the entire course of the three games.

Again, I've yet to clear it to see what the fuss is all about but if this really is the case, I can see why people are pissed.

I would say the choices you make in the first 2 games make a pretty big dent on the whole game of 3 rather than just the end. I can see how if people weren't there, solutions wouldn't present themselves. The ending has a choice, and without going into spoilers, it questions your emotional attachment to everything you have done be it renegade or paragon. In one way it asks the player to actually *think* of the choice their Shepard would make, with the experience of the 3 games behind them.

I just took a gander at some of the other endings (and might consider doing a new play through from 2 onwards) and yeah the end scenes look similar, but what they mean not just for your character but the galaxy is entirely different depending on what you choose.

[Wretchedest]

I would say the choices you make in the first 2 games make a pretty big dent on the whole game of 3 rather than just the end. I can see how if people weren't there, solutions wouldn't present themselves.

That's actually not the case though. If certain people aren't there, they're actually just replaced with someone else, and your choices throughout the game AND in the end are essentially identical, regardless of which choices you made in the previous games.

And I would say that it's difficult to understand what the differences in the ending truly mean. I think those things are what frustrate players. If the differences were in any way clear, I think it would have been a lot more satisfying...

[liquidcalm]

That's actually not the case though. If certain people aren't there, they're actually just replaced with someone else, and your choices throughout the game AND in the end are essentially identical, regardless of which choices you made in the previous games.

And I would say that it's difficult to understand what the differences in the ending truly mean. I think those things are what frustrate players. If the differences were in any way clear, I think it would have been a lot more satisfying...

Yeah, I looked up a few things in the wiki and found they just overwrote the fact characters weren't there, thats more of a cop out than just letting the player have to figure something out themselves. That said it wouldn't be much of a game if it locked out half the next in the series just because someone you didn't care about dies at the end of the second. Although choices you make in the first and particularly the second can condemn whole races, I wouldn't say that was a small thing. Its the same problem Heavy Rain had really, you can try and give players all the choice in the world but in the end you need to tell a cohesive story and stories have beginnings, middles and ends. I still really enjoyed Heavy Rain, and I really enjoyed Mass Effect, from 1 to 2 to 3 I don' think I've felt as invested in a series for a long time. I still think the end was a great way of bringing a lot of the underlying themes to the foreground. It was climatic enough to not make me think they are just going to jump in with a Mass Effect 4 or have a cliffhanger or something dumb.

[Wretchedest]

Yeah, I looked up a few things in the wiki and found they just overwrote the fact characters weren't there, thats more of a cop out than just letting the player have to figure something out themselves. That said it wouldn't be much of a game if it locked out half the next in the series just because someone you didn't care about dies at the end of the second. Although choices you make in the first and particularly the second can condemn whole races, I wouldn't say that was a small thing. Its the same problem Heavy Rain had really, you can try and give players all the choice in the world but in the end you need to tell a cohesive story and stories have beginnings, middles and ends. I still really enjoyed Heavy Rain, and I really enjoyed Mass Effect, from 1 to 2 to 3 I don' think I've felt as invested in a series for a long time. I still think the end was a great way of bringing a lot of the underlying themes to the foreground. It was climatic enough to not make me think they are just going to jump in with a Mass Effect 4 or have a cliffhanger or something dumb.

I don't think it should have been about just locking out something, but potentially tading one thing for another. That way you get dfferent stories, and replay value! My second playthrough in ME3 was so depressing because I did everything so differently, and things turned out astonishingly similar, you know?

I'm curious just what the hell they'll do with this DLC ending thing...