Yet another Forbes article, this one primarily detailing why reviewers and gaming media aren't particularly trustworthy. In fact, it's rather impressive that some sites manage to record podcasts with publisher dicks so firmly lodged in their throats.
Its actually rather funny to see how much of the main game media and a large part of the most rabid ending supporters (liking that the ending is fine is no problem, personal opinion and all that but there are limits) rant and rave about entitled whiners while coming across as incredible whining themselves as well as having entitlement issues as regards to main gaming media.
Getting so many laughs out of this one just because of that. and ofc the ART argument. lmfao
Ok now I feel concerned because that "ART argument lmfao" as you say it, is the main reason that made me like the ending. Also, I am myself an artist in video games, at least currently. So I will try to explain what I like, and what I dislike after having taken the time to think about it a little more with more detachement, because to be honest, I was totally confused about how I felt about it. People more generally have to keep in mind something that everyone seem to always forget, that developping a game is not about doing something "cool", or even something "that you and you alone think is fucking awesome", but is rather about doing something for consumers, here being the players. So I will try to make a difference between what are my personnal tastes and what does or does not work in terms of game developpement.
On the gameplay mechanics tied to the ending, it is where they obviously screwed the most. Everyone knows how you only get one end in different colors and how the choices made by the players are eventually more or less irrelevant. Some players might not mind because they care more about the story than their achievements, while other players think the opposite. Which basically means that half of the playerbase - if not more, considering the tendancies - are directly concerned by this and were going to be obviously pissed. And they are.
Now then, everything is not to throw into the thrasbin either, even if I think the gameplay part of the ending is the most fucked up part of all, in terms of coherence mostly. Some things were really nice, like for example the fact that you knew more or less that all your troubles are finished when Shep gets hit by the reaper railgun shot. The only thing the player have to do is to follow the cinematic and scripted feel of the following sequences, and occasionally have to do something like walking endlessly and slowly while killing the dreaded Marauder Shields. The walking part of the end, that did not seem to end, was to my opinion well done due to the sheer realism it makes the player feel. I mean, the player can directly feel what Shep is living : an endless and painful walk in the middle of bodies because he has something vital to do. Also, the quite long dialogue with the IM was interesting because it was the end, and thus it had to be important. Of course, this is a conscious choice from the developper because it might not please players that do not care particularily about the story and just want action. But the core target of Bioware has always been roleplayers and players willing to live a story, which makes sense here.
On the story now, they did something resembling to the ending of the Deus Ex series where you have to choose between several buttons to get the end you like the most, or to make the choice you prefer. In the Deux Ex series, the story is not oriented on the choices you make all through the game and how your actions change the background, but it is rather a more linear approach where everything is focused on the coherence and strenght of the story itself to offer to the player the choice to choose the ending they like the most at the end. In that, Deus Ex is coherent. Mass Effect 3 is not : the end is totally disconnected from the rest of the game.
Also, the end tends to butcher the rest of the story considering the plot holes that appear, the stretched concepts or the story points that are not adressed (dark energy, the true nature of the reapers, etc etc).
But what makes the end of the story interesting are some of the concepts, including fatality/doom (where the reapers have a role to play to prevent something bad or apocalyptic to happen), and puts back everything in perspective and tend to surprise the player. Surprise is good, unlike hollywood seems to think, where they make actually everything to stay in line with the clichés the spectator is expecting, to please him. Surprise is one of the good points of ME3's story, like when you suddenly hear about Kelly Chambers death, for example (there are plenty things like this in ME3). But in that ending, surprise is definitly there, but when the concepts you start to introduce are too weird or stretched, and before all, do not always make a lot of sense, surprise gets negative and disgusts the player, even if at first he will still continue to play in the hope to be explained wtf is going on, in the hope something will make sense after all.
At last, on the artistic direction : this is what pains me the most here. At the opposite of the very cheesy endings of ME1 and especially ME2, the end of ME3 is very, very deep and well executed in ME3, artistically. The rubbish side is not here anymore and we get a deeper, darker and more emotionnal end than ME1 or ME2 will ever achieve (where in ME1 and ME2 the end is totally spoiled by this hollywood cheesyness). In the ME3 end the player faces a great setting in London where apocalypse is the key, in a very dark ambiant atmosphere leading to a huge ray of light. Quite ominous. It gets even better after, when Shep awakes right in the middle of a mass grave of butchered bodies and ends up in a surreal and ethereal environnements in coherence with the godlike/eerie feel of the end. Of course, one can feel how much money they surely have had to put in this considering the mass amount of cutscenes and cinematics they did here, but at least it is well done. Then, we can like or dislike the abstract and dreamlike feel of that ending (especially that snowy landscape with trees and the Earth above), but artistically its definitly something. And something quite deep.
So, what pains me ? The coherence, again. This does not really fit with what we have come to see in the ME saga. ME directly comes from the pop culture (Starwars, BSG references, for instances, among many) and has a B-series / hollywoodesque feel that reminds us of the great space adventures and sagas we all know. But a difference has to be made between something very pop culture, for the masses, and a cheesy something (which was the case in the end of ME1 and ME2, with all that overdose of slowmotion and the cheap screenplay/dialogues that went with it). Anyway, the ME3 ending almost seems to belong to another game. What we get is something else, more serious, mature, and spiritual. Something that would have belonged to a more realistic, serious, dramatic and dark story. What pains me here is that everyone now is spitting on this end while it is actually a very good end, but totally stretched and strained by the fact that Bioware tried to paste it somehow to ME, where they should not have.
Or, in short, tl;dr : the only thing i loved in that ending was actually the ART. Yes.
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Topic: Mass Effect 3 - SPOILERS INSIDE (Read 30741 times)