It
appears if you have enough points, over 5000, and pick the Destroy ending the earth is saved, the Reapers are killed, your ship/crew survive, and Shephard lives (gasp at the end). That is a relatively happy ending. After seeing
Kotaku's piece on the endings it really reminded me of the ol' King's Quest games, in particular VI which I remember well. In KQ the story is fairly linear, as in here, but depending on what you did / did not do the ending was slightly variable. e.g. You may not have saved your parents and so you won a bride but were sad because the King and Queen were not saved, and so forth. Ironically the ending in King's Quest VI was (a) determined by your activity throughout the game and (b) had a high degree of detail-variable. The ending was fairly static--best the antagonist, win the girl--but all the details about how successful you were in righting wrongs and restoring the kingdom were dependant on how many "side quests" you accomplished.
In this regards the ME3 ending seems more simple but the difference is the endings are totally different. I can feel for those who say their actions throughout the game don't impact the endings much. It seems it just lets you choose whatever ending? It would seem that being an asshat throughout the games should open some different options and close off others? Also, as I mentioned before, it is a tad ironic that a game that emphasizes choice has a fairly linear end game, but that is more of a limitation of the story ark. It would be a little too epic of a game if they had a dozen totally different endings, some accessible only by different traits like Paragon, with 3-5 variables (e.g. the Normandy surviving) based on things you did in the game, e.g. the Normandy survived the crash only if you had upgraded it to X amount or whatever. It isn't as if they didn't include some deviations but I could see how a game that emphasizes your choices would have an ending that related to those choices. It seems you really only get 3 choices and only so many variables from such.
That said what I have seen looks like some entertaining scifi. The quandary of choice versus a unavoidable series of endings really isn't a negative in that it is the old freewill versus predestination argument. Heck, I wouldn't count out an Mass Effect 4 and fans to discover that regardless of the ending they choice Bioware finds a way to quickly dispatch your choice to reconcile them all together and then you start afresh on "new" choices that, again, lead to the same inevitable conclusion. It is the illusion of choice
That, and it allows for sequels!
I am not too offended by the man in the machine (literally, lol) or the "seed planters" concept. It kind of hits back at the issue of choice as well as purpose, how we got here, and the relation to all the other races (maybe Bioware watched Matrix: Reloaded too many times?) as well as answering mysteries.
But it isn't "my game" to say if the ending is good or not as I did not invest time in the series. The 2nd comment on Kotaku pretty much answered my statement that I thought the best Destroy ending was good when he responded to someone who made the same statement: "
Problem with the endings isn’t the endings themselves, but the way that show that you had zero effect in the galaxy beyond the 3 final choices. Mass Effect is a game built upon choice and consequence; throughout the 3 games you are constantly weighing up whether or not this is the right or wrong choice to make in terms of future decisions (some which can come back to hurt you). The endings take all the choice away from you and make you pick from 3 slightly different cut scenes that show zero effect of what the choices you’ve made in the previous games. It’s harder to explain to people who haven’t invested the hours into the 3 games. "
I can see why someone would be upset by that... but I am not sure how Bioware could avert such. I guess if Mass Effect 3 was really it, the end, and they really invested in the time to create a wide array of endings with permutations of each based on your achievements and morals and opened, and closed, options based on such you could do such... But it seems the budget for such is quite astronomical in today's games. I don't think I would want to be the one who had to create the technology and story that both was very open but yet still had to get the player to set points AND then also offer them branches from there. I guess you would design it as is and depending on what you did in the series only certain options are available and from there how good that option plays out depends on how well you played the game. That still seems fairly static. I was playing Flotilla a couple months back and your game can actually END during it and back in the old days with Starflight you had a timer and whatnot and all kinds of secrets that could be totally skipped if you did not play well... or missed a planet. But they don't make games like that anymore because back then it was just an issue of text here and there to branch the story. Now there is major investment in the scenes and art. It is an interesting dilemma and I guess I better understand why people are upset but I am not sure Bioware really could have delivered even they had set out to.
For those upset,
how would Bioware have done differently? Simply more endings, your choices impacting which ones you are offered, and your performance dictating how good/bad that ending is?
