Between the Olympics and preparing to move out of this country, some time ago I actually managed to finish Mass Effect 3. I want to talk about it a little, while trying not to spoiler it, even if by now most people have seen it/have heard enough about it.
So, the ending....when the game was released, and the complains about its ending started to be heard everywhere, there was a comment that Bioware was going to release some kind of expansion, or epilogue or something. Since I didn't have that much time to play anyway, I waited for a while...and when they finally released the expansion, I started to seriously play. Therefore, I never saw the original ending, but I did search for it afterwards, and yeah, it was really really bad...
The reason that it was bad it's that in the original one, they don't show anything. This game has a huge detailed mythology around it. The universe where things happen has a huge backstory, you could literally spend hours reading about it in the in-game encyclopaedia. The attention to detail is impressive. Therefore, if you finish the game with a big explosion, a couple of characters surviving it, and a fade to black, that's really an insult. It clearly shows that whoever did the 3 games did not participate in this ending. It has no explanation whatsoever of the consequences of your choice.
That said, the expansion is much better in my opinion. Things make slightly more sense, and you get a little epilogue, where you can see the effects of your last actions. If that was the original ending, there would have been some muttering about the lack of sense, but I doubt it would have reached the levels that the original ending created. And while watching this ending, one gets the real impression that some company directives tried to sell the ending as a DLC, and when the shitstorm hit them they backed away and offered it for free.
Nevertheless, the expanded ending is still...lacking. To explain that, I'll use the review and article made by Yahtzee. For those who do not know him, he's a games critic that always shows the negative points of a game. I like his reviews, even if I disagree with several of them. He did not like Mass Effect, for example, and I believe that he misunderstood the point of the game. But it's still a good article.
In his article, Yahtzee mentions that Mass Effect gets an ending, even if you don't like it, and that the ending serves to finish a story. And no matter what you did before, this way everybody gets the same ending, and the story has a clear beginning, centre and end, which is the same for everybody. He mentions that that was the ending creators wanted, and the fanbase should not be able to change it, because it would create a bad precedent
I disagree with that. Games are interactive storytelling, which is a very modern storytelling technique, that can be approached in very different ways than traditional storytelling. Mass Effect shows a perfect basic example in its ending: Instead of one ending, you have 3 of them. That's something really innovative, that you cannot do in a book or a movie (there have been books that tried to do it, but it doesn't work really well with them). Well, it's innovative in the sense that game are innovative, because almost since they had more complex plots than "eat yellow pills, avoid ghosts", games offered multiple endings.
The problem with that comes when the difference in the ending is like the one in Mass Effect: You have a couple of options, each one gives a different ending. This causes the feeling that no ending is really the true one, because with a simple load you can get back there, choose a different one, and see what happens. It's a lazy basic mechanic, to show off the "interactivity" of a game compared with a movie.
There are games that go further than that and really explore the storytelling capabilities of interactive media. Let's put as an example Silent Hill 2, a Yahtzee favourite. The game has a number of different endings, I believe that there are 3 normal ones, a joke one, only available after clearing the game once, and a 5th one that only appeared with an expansion. Let's focus on the original 3....
Each ending depends on how you played. I don't mean a decision you took, but literally how you played. Did you receive a lot of damage and didn't heal often? Did you spent lots of time checking on a character and trying to talk with them? Did you check certain objects a lot, and ignored others? That's how the game decides the ending.
The effect this makes is that the story is consistent with your gameplay. You can argue that it's actually 3 different stories. Your different gameplay shows a different story. And when you reach the end, there's not a damm thing you can do to change it. That's the one you chose, voluntarily or not. Do not try to reload, it won't change. To see a different one you would have to replay whole sections of the game, or start a new one directly.
This is what games offer when telling stories. The option to have a lot of different stories. You start from a common point, and then each branch goes somewhere different. Maybe some branches cross each other later on, but in the end they do not, each one going their separate way.
Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the first 2/3 of 3, follow this logic. Depending on your choices in the 1st and 2nd game, there's entire characters and plots that some people will never have. And this is awesome. That's what games offer. It's very complex to pull off, and programmers will have nightmares thinking about how to do it. But it has been done, and it's possible to do it.
Mass Effect 3 should not let you choose and ending. It should not translate decisions into little points that showed how close or far you were from completing the game. It should have taken all these plots and subplots, and offer you N different endings, each one depending on who you saved, who you killed, and who you met. But I guess it would have been too brave to do that and tell players that if they wanted a different one, they better started Mass Effect 1 again....and that was an incredible missed opportunity to show games' true potential.
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