Mass Effect 3 Director on Endings Backlash, Editorials
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For the last eight years, Mass Effect has been a labor of love for our team; love for the characters we've created, for the medium of video games, and for the fans that have supported us. For us and for you, Mass Effect 3 had to live up to a lot of expectations, not only for a great gaming experience, but for a resolution to the countless storylines and decisions you've made as a player since the journey began in 2007. So we designed Mass Effect 3 to be a series of endings to key plots and storylines, each culminating in scenes that show you the consequences of your actions. You then carry the knowledge of these consequences with you as you complete the final moments of your journey.
We always intended that the scale of the conflict and the underlying theme of sacrifice would lead to a bittersweet ending to do otherwise would betray the agonizing decisions Shepard had to make along the way. Still, we wanted to give players the chance to experience an inspiring and uplifting ending; in a story where you face a hopeless struggle for basic survival, we see the final moments and imagery as offering victory and hope in the context of sacrifice and reflection.
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But we also recognize that some of our most passionate fans needed more closure, more answers, and more time to say goodbye to their stories and these comments are equally valid. Player feedback such as this has always been an essential ingredient in the development of the series.
I am extremely proud of what this team has accomplished, from the first art concepts for the Mass Effect universe to the final moments of Mass Effect 3. But we didn't do it on our own. Over the course of the series, Mass Effect has been a shared experience between the development team and our fans not just a shared experience in playing the games, but in designing and developing them. An outpouring of love for Garrus and Tali led to their inclusion as love interests in Mass Effect 2. A request for deeper RPG systems led to key design changes in Mass Effect 3. Your feedback has always mattered. Mass Effect is a collaboration between developers and players, and we continue to listen.
Drew Karpshyn, lead writer of the first game and co-lead on the second replied to people asking him for the supposedly originally planned ending to the trilogy, where he also note he hasn't had the time to play the final game of the trilogy yet:
Of course, some of you are also pinging me to find out what the (original) ending of the series was when we started planning out the trilogy. Sorry, but that's not something I'm even going to attempt to answer. The collaborative creative process is incredibly complicated, and the story and ideas are constantly evolving as you go forward. Yes, we had a plan, but it was very vague. We knew we wanted to focus on some key themes and bring in certain key elements: organics vs synthetics; the Reapers; the Mass Relays. Beyond that, we didn't go into detail because we knew it would change radically as the game continued to evolve.
A good example of this is Cerberus. When we wrote ME1, Cerberus was basically a throw-away group of pro-human radicals: a name we dropped for some side missions to play the role of villain. We didn't even have a concept of who was running them, and we didn't think they were that important. Obviously by the time of my Ascension novel and ME2, that had changed radically. The Illusive Man and Cerberus became central to the story and themes that never would have happened if we had nailed everything down and refused to make changes to the story.
So I don't like to say (here's what we originally were thinking) because it gives a false and very distorted impression of the process. Mass Effect was the creation of a huge team, with contributions coming in from many people at many stages of the project. Some things I liked ended up getting cut, some stuff I wasn't sure of worked its way in. That's the nature of the beast with collaborative works, and I think in the end it makes the final product stronger. But talking about the changes after the fact feels like I'm sitting on my throne and proclaiming, (That's not what I would have done!) It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say (I would do this or that), but it's very different when you're part of the process, working with multiple ideas, trying to piece it all together and still hit your deadlines. Anyone who wasn't part of the ME3 team is an outsider even me and whatever they say about the creation of the game is just unsubstantiated speculation.
Penny Arcade dedicated a fair bit of coverage to the ending controversy too, of which I'm going to quote a snippet that covers the request of change by the fans and the writer's own (positive) reaction to the endings:
To make a long story short, Gabriel likes his ending (green) and I'm fine with my ending (blue) but I understand how someone could feel cheated - especially if they got the worst ending, or if they aren't in the habit of reading classic science fiction.
There's a countercharge now, in response to anger about the endings, that describes Bioware's output as sacrosanct in some way - beyond criticism. This is fundamentally batshit, or as noted (speculative fiction) author Harlan Ellison might say, bugfuck. I'm fine with the ending, which to my mind started as soon as I ran the executable - the whole game is denouement - but I revolt against the idea of Authorial Divinity almost at the molecular level. I bet Ken Levine would take a redo on Bioshock, for example. To hear them tell it, there is plenty about Deus Ex: Human Revolution the developer would change. Fallout's (Broken Steel) DLC actually does modify the ending considerably. There's also a school of thought that says, hey, maybe these are not (strictly speaking) real endings anyway, and I'm always down for a rabbit hole.
They're very much endings of the Hard Sci-Fi school: work predicated to a certain extent on Interesting Answers but far, far more of a piece with Interesting Questions. The Interesting Question posed here is: what next? We know this is the question, because regardless of any particulars, the very structure of Galactic society is destroyed every time. And the alliance you've jammed together with gum, glue, and tape is now sitting in the equivalent of a ten by ten room, all of them armed to the teeth. We know that something survives, and lives well - (the Shepard) has passed into legend, and The Stargazer talks about interstellar travel as though it had all the complexity of crossing the street. But what next?
Finally, GameFront lists five reasons they think the fans are right on the money with their criticism. Here are the writer's conclusions:
We know, we know. BioWare doesn't '˜owe' anything. It's their game, after all and presumably they released the product they thought should be released. But BioWare has always had a strong relationship with its fans. Casey Hudson even said 2 weeks ago that fans helped write the game. That's part of the reason this push for a new ending even exists. If the company cares at all about the legacy of their otherwise beautiful series, or about their relationship with the player community and we think they do they ought to at least acknowledge that fans are not happy with things as they are, and why. And as of this posting, they have not offered any kind of statement on the matter
The fans don't want to scrap the bleakness for some kind of enforced happy ending. They don't want to replace one linear experience with another. What they want is the chance to experience the game BioWare explicitly advertised and for which they paid a substantial sum of money. They want to see how their unique experience plays out to the very end, and if they choose, to start over and make a completely different set of decisions just to see what happens that time. Ultimately, it's BioWare's call, but it couldn't hurt for them to very carefully listen to what that community is saying, and seriously consider working on some calibrations.
