Will Mass Effect 3 have a happy ending?

Posted by on June 26, 2012 in Games

How extended is today’s Extended Cut DLC for Mass Effect 3? Nearly two gigabytes, that’s how extended! Electronic Arts says they’re not actually changing the ending. According to the download page, here’s what upset fans get:

Additional scenes and an extended epilogue reveal the impact of Shepard’s choices on the future of the galaxy.

In other words, speaking more slowly and explaining more stuff about things that were intentionally ambiguous. Everything I needed to know I learned while playing Mass Effect 3. But the thinking is that more middling writing is just what this otherwise good sci-fi RPG shooter needs, which says a lot about the fans, the writers, and now the publisher.

I’ve lost interest in the whole issue, but I wonder if angry erstwhile fans will find any satisfaction in these two gigabytes. They’ve done very real damage to a series they supposedly loved, out of all proportion with their complaints. It’s shameful how they’ve hijacked Mass Effect on so many levels: as a story, as a franchise, and even just as a darn good standalone game about an alien invasion. But I’m mostly disappointed that Electronic Arts legitimized their complaints with this DLC. The ending of Mass Effect 3 was no better or worse than the ending of most videogames. And while the Extended Cut may not actually change the ending, it certainly changes the narrative.

  • Joe

    I had hoped they wouldn’t have to go the Vanilla Sky route, breaking out the charts and diagrams to explain what just happened. But maybe they’ll do it better than VS did.

  • Chris Dunkley

    Well said man.

    I’ve been talking to a friend about the changes and my responses to him always sound far too angry.

    I just feel like additional explanation is rarely what any story needs. I think Bioware were trying to be a little poetic with the original ending (albeit in a Babylon 5 sci-fi kinda way) and removing mystery only lessens the chance of them reaching that poetic ideal. It kills the romance.

  • vinraith

    Having only just picked up ME3 (as a gift, the timing is a coincidence) and having avoided spoilers, I’m not sure what to do here. I guess, as long as it’s possible, I’ll play through with the original ending first and see what I think. The DLC is something I’d have to download and install, right, not something that’s just going to automatically add itself?

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    I love the hubris of Bioware responding to people saying, “We hated that ending” with 2 gigabytes of, “Ah! You just didn’t understand it. Let us explain it to you slowly, laboriously, without ambiguity. Once you *get* it, we’re sure you’ll like it!”

  • ByteSizeRick

    With all due respect, Tom, I am going to have to politely disagree with your flippancy on this point. Even if you don’t agree with the premise that the Mass Effect endings just plain weren’t good (for any number of reasons which I won’t waste your time with in this forum), surely you can imagine a scenario in which an otherwise well-told story is dissatisfying at its end. Lost? Battlestar Galactica? Farscape? Prometheus?
    As a pure hypothetical, imagine if Mass Effect had simply ended at the Act break, with the reapers still coming and nothing resolved at all. Would that be defensible? And if not, why wouldn’t it be right for the fans to clamor for something different. There must be a line somewhere were something is just so unsatifying that it is acceptable to stand up and be counted..
    Now lest you think I simply wander about looking for things to “retake”, I admit to not being as upset about this particular narrative string as I have other games in the past (remember Soul Reaver), but I AM amenable to the concept that something could be so bad that its fans should not simply sit back and take it.
    From the sounds of things in your post it doesn’t seem like you agree with that premise, and that to me, is a little bit sad.

  • Joe

    Yes, I think Elemental and the latest SoTS release were worthy of “standing up and being counted”. Mass Effect 3, not so much. This just seems to be a trend lately where certain online communities go around bullying developers into giving into their demands, however trivial the issue may be.

  • Codicier

    “The ending of Mass Effect 3 was no better or worse than the ending of most videogames.”

    Except it really was, when one of the pillars of Mass Effect is player agency. (Not to mention the numerous plot holes that arise from the ending).

    I don’t believe in the ridiculous “Indoctrination Theory” and I didn’t participate in any “Hold the Line” craziness, because I do agree that trying to force a new ending is kind of a weird thing to do.

    I accept that it was one of the worst game endings I’ve experienced and then I move on; and a unfortunately condemn Mass Effect to a set a games I have little to no interest in replaying and Bioware to a group of developers whose output I no longer implicitly trust.

  • Pogue Mahone

    I still feel invested enough in the Mass Effect universe to give the new content a shot with a second run-through. I was one of those middle of the road guys, thought the ending wasn’t great or all that terrible, so the new ending has my interest piqued, at least.

  • Nightwish

    Sorry, Tom, ME3′s ending makes no sense at all and is completely disjointed from everything that the character fights for 120 hours.
    I’ve had enough of that Deux Ex Machina and content that doesn’t mean anything in the end with Lost and BSG.
    This is just another nail in the coffin of trying to play games/trilogies before knowing if the ending completely invalidates whatever your character does.

  • tomchick

    Rick, my main issue with how you put it is that I disagree with your premise that the ending is that bad. At least in the context of everything else in the Mass Effect series.

    But I also disagree with the idea of fans clamoring for something different, even in an interactive medium like a videogame. Player agency is a thin consensual illusion in videogaming, and the stories we get — particularly in scripted RPGs like Mass Effect — are ultimately not that much different than a TV show or book. Yet people who hate endings in TV shows and books never demand changes. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the very concept of that happening is the premise of a Stephen King horror novel called Misery, isn’t it?

    All that said, I hope the Extended Cut DLC makes you a bit happier with the ending. I do look forward to hearing from fans how they feel about the new content. I don’t care enough to play it myself, but I’m curious what Bioware did with their two gigs.

  • ByteSizeRick

    Tom, that’s fair. My main objection with your post was that it seemed to me that there could never be a time when “airing of grievances” was called for.
    That being said, I think there are plenty of times when fans have expressed discontent with a given ending (the TV shows I mentioned, the Dark Tower book series, the Matrix trilogy), and the question then becomes what the appropriate outcome is from such protest. Now from my own perspective, I comment on those things because I think its important to “incentivize the future”, if you will, by letting the producers of future works know what I did and didn’t find satisfactory (I try to be just as quick to laud the things I love for the same reason).
    My intent would not have been to get EA/Bioware to change the ending of Mass Effect 3, but I did find it unsatisfactory and I don’t have any categorical objection to the powers that be deciding that a change was in order. That’s just my position and I certainly understand you or someone else having a very different one.
    Also in response to one commenter below who pointed to Elemental and Sword of the Stars 2 as being justified protests, I think those examples are competely accurate, but seem to limit the field only to effectively “broken” games in terms of gameplay. I believe, and have long believed, that narrative can be just as “broken” and that fixing that is something worth attempting to do. I know that is not a prevelant position in the games community, but it is one I have always stood by.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Sören-Höglund/799188495 Sören Höglund

    I’m perfectly fine with developers going back and changing an ending after they’ve evaluated the audience response, if they think they failed to communicate what they intended, but the last thing I wanted was *more* of Mass Effect 3′s ending. It’s conceptually wretched, and explaining further isn’t going to fix that.

    Me, I wanted dlc that cut *out* ten minutes or so of the end, but I didn’t feel entitled enough and was too busy doing worthwhile things to mount a campaign.

  • Alan

    Tom, I’m one of the people who think that the furor about the ending was completely overblown, and giving in to fan rage was the wrong step — and that most of the narrative complaints were compltely hyperbolic. That said, personally my problem with the ending wasn’t that it was a bad ending — I expected Bioware to be unable to deliver the quality there — but that it was incredibly unsatisfying. They couldn’t even do a Fallout voiceover and still-picture ‘where are they now’ for all the crufty little societies you ‘interact’ with throughout the franchise, something Bethesda (one of the few RPG companies with writers WORSE than Bioware’s) managed.

  • Barac Wiley

    Mass Effect 3′s original ending doesn’t read as intentionally ambiguous to me at all. It reads as rushed and truncated, a quick squirt of disconnected scenes that make no sense and have no context. Inception ending without revealing whether the top continued spinning was intentional ambiguity. (Which, as I recall, you hated.) This, not so much.

    And, if the new extended ending sequence is in fact more coherent and reflective of player choices during the game, I would argue that the angry fans haven’t done damage to the series at all – they have, functionally speaking, improved it. I’m skeptical, because I think the ending was bad as much because of what it was as because of how opaque and perfunctory it was – I simply don’t think that any of the stuff with the ghost boy was a good idea – but I’ll reserve judgment until I play it. Which probably won’t be anytime soon because I was done with the game months ago. Maybe if I ever finish my female paragon run (currently stalled midway through ME2).

    Then again, I was never one of the shouty folks about the whole thing.

  • Barac Wiley

    I suspect that would have better results than extending and expanding upon those last few minutes, but I guess we’ll see.

  • My Opinion

    “The ending of Mass Effect 3 was no better or worse than the ending of most videogames.”

    I would agree but it didn’t need to be that way and I think that is why a lot of people are upset. Not me though I gave up on the series after they revive a presumably charred corpse with both memories and personality intact. I know stupider things have happened in videogames but when I’m meant to care about the story more than anything I’d at least like the writers to not insult my intelligence.

  • http://twitter.com/Balasarius John Jeffrey

    Correct.

    But I really, really don’t recommend that. It’s horrible, enraging stuff. Insulting, even.

  • Kevin Cardoza

    Sorry you didn’t enjoy it, but it made perfect sense to me, to the degree of me shouting out loud “Of course!” when finding out the reasoning behind the Reapers. To me, it actually matched perfectly. The entire series was about Shepard fighting (a) People in power who made bad decisions because they thought they knew better and (b) People doing terrible things but thinking it was necessary for a greater good. Is it any surprise that the beings behind the Reapers were no different?

  • Steve Griffin

    So exactly how is the Mass Effect franchise “damaged” by what the fans have demanded and what Bioware did? What exactly was “damaged” that wasn’t already “damaged” by the crappy ending? You’ve made an assertion, so provide some evidence.

  • Nessy

    Perhaps you have not heard of Farscape. Or Le Femme Nikita. I am so sick of people in games thinking they have some sort of mythical “different” and better existence from the rest of media. Do-overs have certainly happened in the past… and will continue to do so.