I felt like I needed to express my thoughts on Mass Effect 3 somewhere, so here it is.
I wish I could make Bioware know exactly how much I loved 99% of Mass Effect 3. I want them to know how much I laughed and squealed with joy at so many things. How much I clapped and shouted YES! and cursed at the bad guys and sat on the edge of my chair giggling with glee over so many things.
I wish Bioware knew how scared I was when Kaidan got pounded up against that shuttle over and over again. How I welled up with tears seeing him unconscious and not knowing if he was going to make it. The goofy grin I had when he said he wasn’t seeing anyone and he still cared. The out of control giggling at the little date on the Citadel. How much I looked forward to each conversation with him and the rest of the crew after every mission. How hot that scene, you know, THAT scene right before Horizon was. How absolutely FLOORED I was when Kaidan got to see the truth of the Lazarus project and finally came to terms with what happened to my Shepard, something I NEVER thought they’d do.
I wish I could make sure Bioware knew how completely they broke my heart when Kaidan and Shepard said their goodbyes on London. That feeling of “I love you but I know I’ll never see you again, even though there’s hope.” Been there, done that, they tore open an old wound for me, rubbed salt in it, and it was glorious.
And I could go on and on, not just the things with Kaidan. The warm feelings of getting most of my old team back together, getting to know the new guys, running into so many characters I loved and missed. Time and again they hit the right notes.
Running up and down Tuchanka like a madman, giggling and cursing, (my pets thought I was insane) dodging that reaper beam and cheering like an idiot while the Thresher Maw took out the reaper. Weeping into my hands when Mordin sacrificed himself. Screaming in frustration when I left Thane, dying on the ground and five minutes later broken down in tears at his final prayer. The frustration of dodging that reaper beam on Rannoch and the triumph of finally beating that damn thing. A hundred other moments like that.
I wish Bioware could see the texts and Tweets I traded with my friends about it those first few days. I wish they could have heard Impsy and I talking to each other on our Xbox headsets that first night of release when we played through Mars, blurting out our uncontained excitement, observations and feelings. I wish I could tell everyone at Bioware what an awesome job they did for so much of the game.
What I’m trying to say is, Mass Effect 3 made me feel more than I’ve felt in a long, long time. Not to say that I don’t ordinarily have emotions, but it was like around every corner was a new emotional experience. Playing it left me exhausted, both from lack of sleep and from the… rollercoaster doesn’t even begin to describe the emotions it put me through. It was the best gaming experience I’ve ever had.
So many times I just thought “This game is perfection. It’s everything I ever wanted Mass Effect 3 to be, and some things I only ever hoped it would be but didn’t think it would be.” I had a teensy complaint here and there but overall, up until the last five minutes, I honestly can’t praise the game enough, and there’s so much to go back and see and do that I can’t wait.
And then the last five minutes happened.
Now, I knew going into it, it was going to be bad. I had to work full time so I didn’t get to the ending til Sunday night, well after most of my friends had beaten it and had started to warn me. I somehow managed to stay unspoiled as to WHAT happens in the ending, just that it wasn’t good. Impsy started to prepare me, and when SHE told me it was bad, I knew I’d better hold on.
Because, tbqh, if you’d have asked me two weeks ago if I was a BioDrone (the derogatory name for people who love and defend Bioware, refusing to think the company could do any wrong) I’d probably have said “Haha yes.” I liked Dragon Age 2 just fine, didn’t think it was as good as DA1 and I got what people didn’t like about it and had some of the same complaints, but overall I didn’t think it was a bad game The DLC controversy just made me roll my eyes. I bought two copies of ME3, one for 360 and a CE for PC on at release just so I could multiplayer with my 360 friends. (In fact, I own all 3 ME games on both platforms). To me, they could do no wrong, and I knew Impsy felt the same way. I’d heard murmurings about the endings before release and rolled my eyes, surely it was just malcontents who’d never be happy with ANYTHING flapping their gums.
I like to like things! I liked the endings to both Battlestar Galactica and Lost just fine! I hate it when people go around griping and hating everything! Some people just can’t be made happy no matter what, ya know? This is Bioware you guys. This is Mass Effect! Of course it’s going to be perfect and awesome! Impsy and I both kind of brushed off the unhappy murmurings and kept looking towards release date with nothing but eagerness and positivity.
But when she came to me and said it was bad, I knew it had to be bad. I knew she’d stayed even more spoiler-free than I had going into ME3 (and we’d both done our bet) and when she told me she’d finished and I had to start bracing myself, I thought I was going in prepared.
I wasn’t.
It took a minute, once it was done and the credits started rolling for it to really sink in. Impsy started laying out the implications of what we’d just seen. The Mass Relays gone. Tens of thousands of Aliens stranded on a burnt-out Earth. No food for turians and quarians.
And why the FUCK did Joker run away? There’s no way he would ever run away. And not with Kaidan and Garrus. Kaidan, who loved my Shepard and had already lost her once, would never leave her behind. And Garrus had always been by her side, loyalty never wavering one bit. And Joker’s bravery was every bit as sharp as his wit. There’s no way they’d leave, but there they’d been going through a Mass Relay for no reason, and now they were stranded on some jungle planet who knows how far away, so even if Shepard lived, she’d nveer see them again.
I could sit here and type out all the ways the last five minutes are terrible, but it’s been done before, much better than I could do it.
By this guy on Bioware Social Network.
And tonight I even saw the following quote which sums it up so very well:
“I read one recent blog post where the writer basically said “the ending was awesome because it was just like a movie” and I think she was missing the point.
It is a game. Not a movie.
And more specifically, its a role-playing game. The players are *part* of the game. Part of the process of building and experiencing the game, much more so than with most other forms of entertainment.
Entitlement is really a right, for the gamer, because they have participated, actively, in the game itself.
Again, I can’t speak to the actual ending myself, because I have not played it but in generally I’d say a Role-Playing Video Game Trilogy Ending should (try to) do the following:
1. Reward the player’s choices throughout the series. The big stuff they did should be noted. They should *feel* like they had a unique impact on the world.
2. End on a positive note. This is really important for video games… life in general is full of shitty stuff happening all the time. When I invest a hundred hours into a game I need to walk away feeling like a hero.
When you waste a couple hours of a person’s life with an artsy/depressing movie or short story or even a novel, it is more forgivable because the time spent is less. And presumably the consumer knew what they were going into when they started. Certain directors create certain styles of movie. Certain writers write specific types of fiction.
On the other hand somebody playing an epic role-playing video-game trilogy is going to *expect* to be the hero and save the universe. That’s why they are playing the game. When expectations don’t match reality, disappointment is created.
It might be an artistic/creative move to go with a different style of ending but I feel its the wrong choice, especially for a videogame *trilogy*. Make your middle game bleak if you want to, but end the series on a high note.
— Brent Knowles, former lead designer/creative director of BioWare
When it comes down to it, I think maybe that’s the reason why the last five minutes hurt so much. Because if you’ve played all 3 games through once, with any sort of even mostly completionist way, you’ve spent at least 100 hours of your life on the game, with those characters.
I’ve played through ME1 about a dozen times, and ME2 6 times completely, 3 or 4 more halfway through or more. I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on masseffectsaves/masseffect2saves.com. I’ve been Bioware Tech Support hundreds of times without them knowing, for almost free. I’ve put more work and time into these games personally than I have into many things in my life.
We LOVE these characters. We love the universe. We love the way we’ve been allowed to sculpt the world. We love all the emotion we’ve felt because of the games. We love being able to discuss what happens in MY game that didn’t happen in YOUR game. We love feeling that the avatar on the screen isn’t just “Commander Shepard” but MY Shepard. Her looks, personality and circumstances were forged by us, individually.
There are many Shepards, but this one is mine.
And the ending takes away everything that we loved. It takes away our freedom of choice. It takes away Shepard’s sovereignty. It takes away her (or his) personality. It takes our best friends and lover away, turns them into cowards, and strands them far away where they’ll never see Shepard again, even if she manages to survive, which, mostly, she won’t. It takes every person on the Citadel we ever helped, or persuaded and sacrifices them. It takes every alliance we ever forged and turned those people into starving savages as bad off as the drell before the hanar, but with no hope of rescue.
Because they ARE the ONLY rescue left in the entire damn galaxy, and they’re stranded themselves. The nearest help is 100 light years away, if they’re lucky.
There is no triumph and no victory at the end of ME3. Everything we’ve ever been told in 100+ hours of gaming – that hard work, sacrifices, never taking “impossible” for an answer and finding your own path – is a lie. It snatches victory away from us, any hope we might have had for some amount of joy for our commander Shepard, is out of reach.
We worked one hundred hours to be told to fuck off, life isn’t fair, and neither are the worlds we choose to spend our time and money in when we want to escape from real life. That despair is the norm and nothing we do actually matters.
And since playing ME3 I’ve started to wonder if my own work for the ME fandom matters.
I don’t know. It’s late, I’ve barely slept in days (Not entirely because of ME3, but it hasn’t helped.) My faith in Bioware is shattered, I don’t know if I’ll ever buy another Bioware product if they don’t handle this carefully, if they don’t truly listen to what their fans are saying, listen to Brent Knowles, the guys at Gamefront and the screenwriter on BSN. If they can’t acknowledge they understand the true reasons why we’re mad and address some way to fix things, I know they won’t be getting any more of my money.
Can barely keep my eyes open.
More tomorrow.