Mass Effect 3 team to provide 'clarity' and 'closure,' details in April
BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka promises that the Mass Effect 3 team is paying attention to feedback, and planning "a number of game content initiatives to help answer the questions" left by the ending.
Even if you've tried to avoid spoilers, you've probably heard by now that fans are a bit miffed at the ending of Mass Effect 3. The trilogy's conclusion has inspired a level of fervent outrage and activism that real problems like poverty and world hunger could only dream of. BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka wants you to know that they have heard your pleas, and they are working on something to ease your worries. But, what? Spoilers follow, obviously.
The ending results in a color-coded choice and the crew of the Normandy stranded on a jungle planet, presumably to repopulate it with whatever happens when you cross-breed every sentient species. Responses have ranged from "it was alright" to "BioWare must burn." A statement from Muzyka promises that the studio is looking at content that will preserve its vision for the ending, but provide more closure for fans.
"Exec Producer Casey Hudson and the team are hard at work on a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey," he wrote. "You'll hear more on this in April. We’re working hard to maintain the right balance between the artistic integrity of the original story while addressing the fan feedback we've received. This is in addition to our existing plan to continue providing new Mass Effect content and new full games, so rest assured that your journey in the Mass Effect universe can, and will, continue." We can expect more details in April.
The revelation isn't entirely new, since BioWare has teased post-ending DLC before. To venture a wild guess, it sounds like Shepard's somewhat contentious choice will remain untouched, but we'll get more detail on what happened to your beloved crew mates. We imagine it will be just like Robinson Crusoe, except with more Asari and sexy robots.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Mass Effect 3 team to provide 'clarity' and 'closure,' details in April.
BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka promises that the Mass Effect 3 team is paying attention to feedback, and planning "a number of game content initiatives to help answer the questions" left by the ending.-
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Same. It was a huge letdown for me. The gamer inside is really disappointed with how they approached the game to end the series.
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Wait, so what they are saying is "We will make another CRUCIAL DLC that should've been a part of the game in the first place and charge you extra for it" or did i miss something?
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Nope, you got it.
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How silly of me, EA is known for giving out lots of free dlc.
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They will take a further reputation hit if they try to charge for a "Clarity/Closure" DLC that the fan base has been wanting since discovering the endings.
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I don't see anywhere in their response anything remotely close to "we messed up and we will fix it" what he is saying is "we know you didn't like it and you want more, so we are working to sell you more"... and i hate how he is mentioning how they are HARD AT WORK! They are doing their job and doing it poorly! and still charge u more than anyone else on the market (for the most part)
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I think they are allowed one free DLC. It depends on what ever contact they have with Microsoft and Sony. They will probably patch it in as part of a title update.
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It's free to people who buy a brand-new copy at full price or buy an online pass for $15
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That's quite disingenuous, there are proper channels and ways of communicating with the company.
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God I am sick of gamers throwing a little fit. They did something different (With everyone complaining about things being the same who could blame them). It was an attempt to have an artistic, vague ending to the series. The fans (Meaning YOU) complained because they wanted to know what happened. So, after the game is made and the fans have given feedback, BioWare announces that they will make some DLC with a more concrete feel, to explain what happens after the artistic bit. Someone please explain to me how this is a scheme by EA to get more money? Or maybe how this is them "fixing" the ending? They are listening to your feedback and adding extra, unplanned DLC to give us all more closure. Whiny little gamers are why so many games look and feel the same. Ugh.
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The big thing with the Mass Effect endings mostly how they marketed the game to be honest. You don't see people petitioning to change the endings they don't like in other games. It has mostly to do with how they sold us on the idea that our choices mattered then failing to delivering on that. Its not about the artistic direction it is fullfilling statements they made about the game.
As far as myself goes I only wanted a brief Fallout/Dragon Age: Origins style Epilogue which doesn't retcon any of the endings. I don't need or want a purely happy ending just a satisfying closure/Wrap up to a 100+ hour game series that I had enjoyed. I still enjoy the Mass Effect series in fact but you can't lump all the disappointed fans with the more destructive ones.-
AGREE!!! if during all 3 games all you do is try to make is think that choice is what matters in this game and then say, nah, you know, it doesn't matter, here is a few pretty colors for you to enjoy... BAD EA/BioWare!
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IAWTP
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There are a lot of games that do a great job using so called artistic approach with their games and they do it just fine!
This game was always about the choices you make and how we get to know the character, and after all they decided to change what the game is about and be all artistic on us?
I don't know about you mate, but that does not sound right to me and the fact that you have to buy a DLC to get an appropriate ending for the game... plain wrong! -
I don't think anyone is entitled to a new ending, but they have every right to complain about an ending they don't like. It's not limited to gamers. People complain about movie, TV show, book endings all the time. So, you might want to dismount from that particularly high saddle.
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Garvin has the right idea. They do have every right and gamers are a particularly nasty bunch when they are upset.
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That's nice. It doesn't take away from the fact the ending was lazy and completely out of left field. THAT is the issue gamers have with the ending, not something as simple as BioWare going for something "vague." It was just pathetically lazy and looked like it was slapped together in the final hours prior to release.
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? Mass Effect is trying to push video games forward by emphasizing story and player interaction in a Mass-Market game.
However the down side of that is when you have elements of the story that are bad or have large inconsistencies with the existing story/background people have the right to complain. Same goes for when you push a game about player choice and interaction then remove that choice people have the right to complain.
Hell even the writer of the story of the first and second Mass Effect games has come out and said the ending is not what was originally planned. -
Ya, I don't care for the bitching at all. I don't care if it was a bad ending or not, I can't get behind any of these rants. Tons of movies had terrible endings but I never felt the urge to file a lawsuit.
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Oh yeah man, how dare people actually want a decent conclusion to the story to a game series they've dumped so much time into.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this site supposed to inform gamers, not make passive-aggressive slights at them? I mean, I already decided not to buy Mass Effect 3 when it went Origin only, so I could care less about the story, but what's with so many 'reporters' being uppity about gamers wanting to have a decent end to a storyline that doesn't read like it's written by a bunch of half-retarded chimps banging their heads against keyboards? -
A good step in the right direction but we'll see how it turns out. For me, this ending and how it was conceived (lead writer created it without any feedback from the rest of the writers unlike the rest of the series) was but one of the mistakes this series has made in my opinion.
The continuity errors in the last tie-in novel, changing Drew Karpyshyn's overall series arc in the final game of the trilogy, the poorly done attempt to add emotional weight to shepherd via dream sequences instead of actually going back into your shepherd's past to drag out some real skeletons that the player had experienced before.
I love the Mass Effect universe because it's so damn cool, I don't hate the ending because I hate artistic vision, I hate it because this series deserves better. And make no mistake, this ending was set up so that they could make new games in the series without any of your choices mattering. They'll put out an epilogue mission where the normandy survivors find hints of a new threat and then leave it at that. The next game will be set in the future and star a new cast of characters with a new (male or female) human main character out to stop some other galactic threat. -
Spoilers :
My ending had Liara, Joker and EDI crashland on a planet after Shep throws herself into the beam, somehow merging human and synthetic DNA into one [giant WTF/HOW/ORLY]. That part in itself with Joker and EDI was somewhat poignant, but the part with some dude and a kid telling a story while staring at a tree, and saying it happened a long time ago, - I still don't know WTF that was related to.
Whatever they do, doesn't really matter. I'm back to playing Skyrim.-
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BSG had a similar ending.
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Yeah pretty much this. I actually enjoyed the ending of Mass Effect 3...and BSG.
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Right up there with the end of the Dark Tower series. Choke!
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Reset button stinks.
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So he warned you, but you kept reading anyway, and now you're mad?
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He should have warned me before I read thousands and thousands of pages and bought all the books.
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in a weird twisted way...all of this craziness is good (as mentioned on Giantbomb by Patrick K) because is shows how much a lot of people give a crap about the games they play. It represents a mature/ acceptance of the medium. I haven't seen this kind of thing since the end of Lost.
That said, I think it would be cool if the DLC was able to wrap up the loose end but maintain the ending.
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Here's three EASY things Bioware could've done to make the ending way better. Massive (lol) spoilers ahoy!!!
1) Mass Relays aren't destroyed by the beam. Neither is the Citadel.
2) Illusive Man doesn't off himself even with a dialogue check. Look you've already fucking done that with Saren, and Martin Sheen is an awesome actor, we need more of his corrupted badassery in these games, not less of it! Also the "hijacked motor functions" Jedi bullshit that the ME Wiki talks about is ridiculous. Axe that nonsense, he doesn't have a CASIE augmentation.
3) The narrator at the end is actually an Asari matriarch who is descended from one of the first Asari installed on the new Council on the Earth Citadel after the Reapers were defeated. When the child asks about what happened to everyone else, she sits down and goes through what Shepard's decisions precipitated with closing scenes reminiscient of the ending of Fallout 1.
And it doesn't even have to be lollipops and gumdrops! It's ok to pull some nasty stuff and say, hypothetically, "the Turians were wiped out when dark energy (remember ME2? wink wink) caused their homeworld to be wiped out by a supernova because Tali's data wasn't made publicly available" or something.
That would've been so much better than what we have now. :(-
Yeah the citadel above earth would have made for a more interesting starting point going forward. Humanity goes from being on the outside to being at the center of galactic civilization.
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4. In the game towards the end Liara T''Soni started a project to document the history of the galaxy, the reaper invasion and Shepard's efforts as way to help the next cycle should they fail. They could have a future civilization or future Earth/Colony find it and do a B5 "Deconstruction of falling stars" ending like another poster suggested.
5. Have the companions eulogize your character or remember shepard's choices or actions in various ways. Just google Dragon Age: Origins Ending to see how they could have ended. -
#2 isn't guaranteed, if the dialogue check doesn't work you get a renegade action to shoot him before he shoots Anderson
Frankly it makes sense since both Saren and The Illusive Man were both acting for essentially the same reasons, and neither of them were fully controlled by the Reapers because of the mental degradation that would occur. Both of them were obviously extremely driven, and that kind of anything goes drive would let them commit suicide if they were convinced they were actually helping the Reapers rather than harming them.
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What the hell are game content initiatives?
My main beef with the ending, other than there being a metric shitload of holes (If the AI controlling the Reapers is the Citadel, why did Sovereign need to go there to open the Citadel relay up? is just one). Its that the entire series choices are all homogenized into a simple points system (that also relies on MP to increase).
Get more points, get a slightly different ending. Getting x species on board dosent make any difference at all, you dont see them during the final battles. Saving characters dosent change anything, they dont show up except for one last non-interactive-interactive scene. Everything comes down to those points. You could get 100% via MP and just do the bare minimum and get the same ending as someone who never played MP but made amazingly prescient choices in all 3 games and saved everyone, united warring factions and turned the Normandy into some sort of peace wagon.
Its a terrible cop-out of a way to close the series.-
Fancy way of saying DLC.
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Face facts: Bioware is going exactly where Origin and Bullfrog went. Down the pan.
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Don't be stupid. Mass Effect 3 is an amazing game, regardless of the internets general hate over the ending.
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They are slipping. Can you find this level of disgust when talking about BG, NWN or KOTOR? No, because they weren't using dubious practices back then. They made quality games, that is all.
EA have corrupted the creative brilliance Bioware used to have, and that will be the death of them. Perhaps it already has been.
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