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Trast posted:I always find it amusing how often games or stories get called out for borrowing from the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k series. You'd think with all the homages that it would be much more popular and mainstream than it is. Instead if you showed people picture of a tyranid or a space marine they'll think its Starcraft. And if you show them Starship Troopers the movie they'll just stop taking you seriously. To be fair, Warhammer 40K, in the beginning, was mostly inspired by Aliens. The first game in the whole brand (not counting Laserburn) was Space Hulk, which are Space Marines (not Adeptus Astartes, as that was retconned later) clearing out corridors filled with Alien-esqe Genestealers (before they were connected to the Tyrannids). Even the respawn points for the Genestealers were signified by a chit with a motion-tracker blip. Ash1138 posted:Speaking of an EA game "borrowing" from WH40k... Hahaha, that's pretty blatant steal. Especially that Baneblade. What would've been even more hilarious is if they ripped off a Tau Crisis Suit, because then it would be a three-way between EA, GW, and Harmony Gold.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:11 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 04:19 |
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Young Freud posted:three-way between EA, GW, and Harmony Gold. I just imagined a schlurping sound that will take up residence in my nightmares.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:14 |
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AngryBooch posted:He doesn't want to come right out say that they've released an inferior product due to the timeline imposed on the project. The game was clearly rushed. Just look at the thing they call a quest log. I realize that, but why imply that there was a longer ending already planned if he's trying to hide the fact that the game was rushed? After seeing the information leaked from the Last Hours app, it's pretty clear that he's full of poo poo about having a longer ending (unless he's referring to cutting out Starkid's extended BD explanation, which I certainly hope he isn't), so I don't understand why he would say this unless he's actually trying to dig a bigger hole. Then again, that may be asking too much out of someone who pretty much lied about the endings right before the game was launched. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I want to reiterate this again, even though I said it a couple hundred pages ago: Same. It's been obvious for a while that video game ratings are completely useless, but it's nice to actually see game journalism get exposed for what it really is. Pineapple Salad fucked around with this message at Apr 12, 2012 around 20:22 |
| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:17 |
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Just a reminder that one of the Penny Arcade guys (the artist, I think) literally admitted he was too dumb to understand Hugo-award winning The City and The City and didn't finish it because "he just couldn't understand all these cities". I don't know why this is a surprise. The running gag for the entire history of PA was that the artist was dumber than a sack of hammers. I think at one point it was revealed that he only read Star Wars: EU books.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:17 |
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It's funny because from what I remember the quasi-mystical treatment of the divided cities and the supersociety of breach agents and all that stuff is explicitly revealed at the end when the guy from out of town simply reveals them and other "divided cities" to be a culture of wackjobs that the rest of the world has to treat with kid-gloves so they don't flip out when their insane rules are broken. Spoiler alert?
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:22 |
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I really don't have a problem with the idea that the entire last game can be considered an ending of the franchise. The journey, not the destination, blah blah blah. The problem in this case is that people (legitimately, I'd argue) view the ending as the game invalidating not only the whole of the journey in ME3, but also the journey through the entire franchise. There's some things people can accept or ignore - look at the ewoks in ROTJ, for example - but it's not true in this case. The flaw is at a major section of the plot and it's damning. It's not like you can sever or quarantine the ending, it's final and definite. I have to admit I'm morbidly looking forward to the mental gymnastics they're going into to get themselves out of this in the extended edition. So yeah, you can argue that the ending of the ending doesn't undo all the fun you had getting there, but in this case... yeah, yeah it kind of does. I enjoyed 99% of ME3 but now I just can't be bothered to replay it (which I was originally intending to do immediately upon finishing). Also, they do a pretty poor job, at least in my opinion, of bringing outsiders up to speed on the universe, which is a shame because it seems to be at the root of some of the more wrongheaded design decisions and it didn't even work. I was even desperately confused because the last DLC I played was Lair of the Shadow Broker. After that, especially with the leak stuff, ME fell off my radar. I didn't play Arrival, and the game doesn't reference it well if you didn't, so at the beginning I thought I was in jail for flying around with Cerberus in ME2. Only after finishing the game did I realize I'd killed 300,000 Batarians. poo poo.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:26 |
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Thundercracker posted:I don't know why this is a surprise. The running gag for the entire history of PA was that the artist was dumber than a sack of hammers. I think at one point it was revealed that he only read Star Wars: EU books. Clearly, the man(child) knows art!
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:27 |
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Holy Calamity! posted:This is the main thing I can't logically deduce on any level. If your EMS is low enough, destroy is the only option. If your EMS is high enough and you choose destroy, Shep survives. As I said before, if they "clarify" things to show that the starchild was right and destroy is the worst option and the only reason your Shep survives is to witness the chaos ushered in by him/her I will laugh for days. It will be the ultimate "gently caress you" to the indoctrination theory. More like an ultimate 'gently caress you' to the player. The only ending in which Shepard survives is the worst ending? And you have to have the highest EMS and do the most in the game to get it? I'm sure that would go over really well with the player-base.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:28 |
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:I'd still see it that way, as a most of the threads were tied up before the ending, and didn't really have anything to do with the final ending. Humanity's role and the Genophage were themes carried through the whole series, the Quarian/Geth stuff was more from the second, as was taking out Cerberus. Except they didn't even tie up these subplots at all. Do the krogan get a spot on the council and reform their ways? Wage another Krogan rebellion and have to be put down? Do the Quarians make it back to Rannoch (p.s. you blew up the Geth lol)? Even in the the most sympathetic view possible towards Bioware (why anyone would take this position I still don't know), the "ending", if you are going to call all of ME3 that, STILL fails to bring closure.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:32 |
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Dapper Dan posted:More like an ultimate 'gently caress you' to the player. The only ending in which Shepard survives is the worst ending? And you have to have the highest EMS and do the most in the game to get it? I'm sure that would go over really well with the player-base. Not really. Low EMS Destroy also explicitly destroys the Earth, the fleets (which in low EMS were pretty much torn up before you even reach Earth), wrecks a whole lot of other technology, and generally injects a massive cost above and beyond the relays. High EMS Destroy has unique "Collateral damage" restricted to killing the geth and possibly EDI. They're the same color energy and kill the Reapers, but whether you have a polished and perfect Crucible and healthy fleet or just the minimum that will do the job changes a whole lot of the further implications. It's the difference between something nearly as bad the "universe totally hosed" theory some people had, and the more optimistic one since given. So it does make a hole in Indoctrination, but it's not terribly nonsensical in the main ending: the "best" Destroy and the "worst" destroy have pretty intensely different implications on civilization in general and humanity in particular.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:42 |
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DMBFan23 posted:Except they didn't even tie up these subplots at all. Do the krogan get a spot on the council and reform their ways? Wage another Krogan rebellion and have to be put down? Do the Quarians make it back to Rannoch (p.s. you blew up the Geth lol)? It brings closure to the part you played in those things. "But that's a story for another time" is a lovely note to end those things on, but there it is. Your job with the Genophage was to either cure it or not. Also, the Quarians and whoever getting home and the fate of the Geth is irrelevant to what I was talking about, as it is part of the ending of the game.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:44 |
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I just keep thinking about Mac Walters wanting to blow the poo poo out of the Mass Effect Universe, and it's just headslappingly stupid. The more I think about it the more I'm convinced that the major victory from all this was not making the end of Mass Effect destroy every loving thing Shep fought so hard for. Bioware can keep their stupid Deus Ex Machina StarChild and their 3 button ending and their nonsense synthesis if it means that the series didn't end on just about the most downer, nihilistic note possible.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:46 |
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I hope the extended ending explains how an arbitrary point count determines how the Catalyst works or the specific effects of the color of beam you choose. "The Geth and your pilot's robot fuckbuddy would have been destroyed, had you not had Grunt along with you doing... something." As to the blowing the poo poo out of the universe thing, sometimes I wonder if Walters and Hudson didn't look on vast galleries of their characters loving varren, lengthy discussion about Tali's sweat, and all the other inanity in the fandom and just say "gently caress this poo poo, burn it to the ground." I don't think such a view would be justified, nor would I empathize with it, but I would, to a degree, understand it.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:49 |
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:It brings closure to the part you played in those things. Good thing this doesn't count as "those threads all being tied up", like you claimed. The whole reason these decisions were important is because they had impact on the universe, and not knowing that impact is at the root of a lot of peoples' complaints. Mr.Unique-Name posted:"But that's a story for another time" is a lovely note to end those things on, but there it is. Yes, exactly. If you admit this, then I don't see why you are arguing?
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:51 |
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What I don't get at all, even from people who didn't like the ending (I did), is the argument that it makes them lose the incentive to play 3, or even 2 and 1 again. If you consume video games or popular TV at all, by now you should have developed the ability to selectively block out parts. The more you iterate again and again with the same chewed out arguments, the more you will hate it and the larger the problem with enjoying the inarguably fantastic rest will become. Bioware has stated that it's not going to be changed, so all the Hold The Line-esque reiterating serves exactly one purpose: making yourself unhappy. Also, this has probably been touched upon, but I haven't seen it in this thread - the whole RGB joking is fine and all, but why wasn't there the same outcry with the ending of 2, which does the exact same thing, only with one color less to choose from?
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:54 |
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I don't get it, either. Granted, I'm not one of the  Bioware fanboys spamming their Social network about Bioware betraying them AGAIN (seriously, what the Hell was up with them and Dragon Age 2?), but if anything, what happened in ME3 (Tali's death, Zaeed dying, etc) made me want to go back to Mass Effect 2 (I am a dirty, dirty PS3 owner, cannot afford a 360 or a PC) and try to save everyone.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:56 |
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Killer robot posted:So it does make a hole in Indoctrination, but it's not terribly nonsensical in the main ending: the "best" Destroy and the "worst" destroy have pretty intensely different implications on civilization in general and humanity in particular. Ah, I see what you are saying, makes more sense. The real hole in the indoctrination angle is the simple fact that if Anderson and TIM were figments of Shepard's imagination, you have to get Keith David and Martin Sheen back into the recording booth to play out what happens to the characters in reality. Which is extremely expensive and something I doubt EA would approve of. That and the fact that Bioware can't write subtle for poo poo and Mac Walters said everything after ME 3 was a wasteland so...yeah, it wasn't what they intended. Though, if the extended cut is still poo poo, I'll have no problem just accepting this interpretation. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I just keep thinking about Mac Walters wanting to blow the poo poo out of the Mass Effect Universe, and it's just headslappingly stupid. The more I think about it the more I'm convinced that the major victory from all this was not making the end of Mass Effect destroy every loving thing Shep fought so hard for. Bioware can keep their stupid Deus Ex Machina StarChild and their 3 button ending and their nonsense synthesis if it means that the series didn't end on just about the most downer, nihilistic note possible. Even over a month later, it still really boggles my mind how they thought they could get away with this. And how they are still defending it, which makes people more pissed at them.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:56 |
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DMBFan23 posted:Yes, exactly. If you admit this, then I don't see why you are arguing? I'm not, you are. I was just explaining that point of view, one that I explicitly said was a non sequitur in regards to complaints about the ending. Also I specifically said the Genophage and Quarian/Geth conflict were wrapped up. Not that the future of the Krogan or Quarian races was.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:57 |
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Schurik posted:Also, this has probably been touched upon, but I haven't seen it in this thread - the whole RGB joking is fine and all, but why wasn't there the same outcry with the ending of 2, which does the exact same thing, only with one color less to choose from? Because prior to that everything else you had in the game had an impact on the success/failure of your mission in a direct and tangible way. Choosing to save or destroy the Collector's Base was one choice of many, not the be-all/end-all choice that defined everything. The ending was the sum total of everything you did in the game and the choices you made during the mission itself, even if it wasn't hard to get an optimal outcome. Also it wasn't the ending of a trilogy and the assumption was that any shortcomings would be made up for in ME3.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:58 |
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Schurik posted:Also, this has probably been touched upon, but I haven't seen it in this thread - the whole RGB joking is fine and all, but why wasn't there the same outcry with the ending of 2, which does the exact same thing, only with one color less to choose from? This is a false equivalency. ME2 specifically ended with the idea that your choices would carry forward into 3, that your agency mattered. ME3's ending totally invalidates all you choices up to that point. It also jars thematically with the rest of the series, invokes magic technology that was never foreshadowed and makes no sense, and includes terrible cliched imagery under the pretense of art.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 20:59 |
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colonelslime posted:This is a false equivalency. ME2 specifically ended with the idea that your choices would carry forward into 3, that your agency mattered. ME3's ending totally invalidates all you choices up to that point. It also jars thematically with the rest of the series, invokes magic technology that was never foreshadowed and makes no sense, and includes terrible cliched imagery under the pretense of art. I still think even a New Vegas-style slideshow with voiceovers would even be a lot better than what we were given. There's also the fact the reveal about the Reapers comes completely out of left field and clashes with what Sovereign and Harbinger constantly spew at you through the first games. Note: When giant Eldritch ships explicitly hate, despise, and consider you nothing but genetic trash to be experimented on and exterminated to advance their own race, you do not say they're trying to preserve species.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:02 |
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Schurik posted:Also, this has probably been touched upon, but I haven't seen it in this thread - the whole RGB joking is fine and all, but why wasn't there the same outcry with the ending of 2, which does the exact same thing, only with one color less to choose from? Mass Effect 3, being the end of the series or current arc or what have, should have no need of designing choices so that a direct follow-up can be released in 2 years. You can't end Mass Effect 2 or 1 with wildly different outcomes because then the next game has to account for those wildly different outcomes while maintaining production values -- ballooning development costs to an absurd degree. Mass Effect 3 should have had wildly different endings based off the decisions your Shepard made over the course of the entire series, not due to a choice made in the last 5 minutes of the game which pretty much renders the remainder of your decisions moot due to its enormity. To this end, the previous games lose their replay value as well.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:02 |
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ImpAtom posted:Because prior to that everything else you had in the game had an impact on the success/failure of your mission in a direct and tangible way. Choosing to save or destroy the Collector's Base was one choice of many, not the be-all/end-all choice that defined everything. The ending was the sum total of everything you did in the game and the choices you made during the mission itself, even if it wasn't hard to get an optimal outcome. colonelslime posted:This is a false equivalency. ME2 specifically ended with the idea that your choices would carry forward into 3, that your agency mattered. ME3's ending totally invalidates all you choices up to that point. It also jars thematically with the rest of the series, invokes magic technology that was never foreshadowed and makes no sense, and includes terrible cliched imagery under the pretense of art. Not trying to shoot you down, as your arguments make sense, but that's not what I'm getting from most of the bile towards the ending choices. Most of the stuff I come across is "lol, the ending has 3 colors, poo poo sucks" or an equivalent, and while, like I said, your arguments make sense, I still don't get the overall reaction to this specific point.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:02 |
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JackMackerel posted:I still think even a New Vegas-style slideshow with voiceovers would even be a lot better than what we were given. The Reapers preserve species in the sense that I preserve Chicken McNuggets.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:03 |
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I never even considered the collector base decision to be the "end" of the game. I think there were more larger and more difficult decisions earlier in the game. The base just seemed like TIM being TIM, and if anything forshadowed his dealings with the Reaper tech in 3.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:03 |
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Schurik posted:What I don't get at all, even from people who didn't like the ending (I did), is the argument that it makes them lose the incentive to play 3, or even 2 and 1 again. If you consume video games or popular TV at all, by now you should have developed the ability to selectively block out parts. The more you iterate again and again with the same chewed out arguments, the more you will hate it and the larger the problem with enjoying the inarguably fantastic rest will become. Bioware has stated that it's not going to be changed, so all the Hold The Line-esque reiterating serves exactly one purpose: making yourself unhappy. Probably because choosing whether or not to give TIM the Collector Base was actually a pretty interesting moral choice that made people reflect on their experiences over the game and make a judgement call about whether you can trust him or not and whether its worth the risk to give it to him. Also because the entire Suicide Mission was very well done so its easy to forgive any problems you might have with the final choice. Also because people knew it wasn't the end. It was the end of the game but not the series.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:04 |
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Schurik posted:Not trying to shoot you down, as your arguments make sense, but that's not what I'm getting from most of the bile towards the ending choices. Most of the stuff I come across is "lol, the ending has 3 colors, poo poo sucks" or an equivalent, and while, like I said, your arguments make sense, I still don't get the overall reaction to this specific point. Because quite literally the only difference between the three is the color of the explosion and certain parts trimmed/cut out of the scene, and glowy green lines in Synthesis. It is the same cutscene regardless of your choice. Not even like a different voiceover. EDI will even show up in Destroy for no clear reason. For the ending to a trilogy based around choices that's really unsatisfying and limited. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at Apr 12, 2012 around 21:08 |
| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:05 |
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Schurik posted:What I don't get at all, even from people who didn't like the ending (I did), is the argument that it makes them lose the incentive to play 3, or even 2 and 1 again. If you consume video games or popular TV at all, by now you should have developed the ability to selectively block out parts. The more you iterate again and again with the same chewed out arguments, the more you will hate it and the larger the problem with enjoying the inarguably fantastic rest will become. Bioware has stated that it's not going to be changed, so all the Hold The Line-esque reiterating serves exactly one purpose: making yourself unhappy. It stems from the whole "Shepard just hosed up the galaxy" line of belief. It feels useless to completely any of the missions in the games or get immersed in the story, because ultimately none of it will matter in the end. Some people are capable of blocking out the ending, but others simply can't. As far as the ME2 ending goes, even though saving/destroying the collector base didn't change the ending of the actual game, players knew that ME3 would come out eventually, and so they were excited to see how their decision would affect the next game. Also, while the ending itself doesn't vary that much, it is perfectly appropriate to the story, and your choices do have an effect on who survives the suicide mission and who doesn't which, once again, plays into what your experience will be in ME3. Of course, if you do totally gently caress up, Shepard can actually die, so there's that too. Edit: So basically, what Nephthys just said.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:06 |
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Schurik posted:Not trying to shoot you down, as your arguments make sense, but that's not what I'm getting from most of the bile towards the ending choices. Most of the stuff I come across is "lol, the ending has 3 colors, poo poo sucks" or an equivalent, and while, like I said, your arguments make sense, I still don't get the overall reaction to this specific point. I agree that the level of vitriol sometimes seems high for a goddamn videogame, and that the ending doesn't ruin the entire series for me, though it does taint it a bit. I honestly wouldn't have thought anything other than "eh, just another good series ruined by writers panicking under time constraints", had Bioware not tried to defend their schlock under the pretense of "Artistic Integrity". I won't begrudge them their right to make a stupid ending, but when you call the fans stupid for "just not understanding" it, that's when I take offense. I know they never explicitly stated this, but the whole argument reeks of the Fountainhead "the plebes are trying to ruin my masterpiece" argument.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:07 |
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AngryBooch posted:To this end, the previous games lose their replay value as well. Again - I don't understand this at all. How is anything invalidated? I heard the same kind of stuff back with the Matrix sequels, with people complaining that it ruined the first movie for them, and I didn't get that either. Is is really so hard to enjoy parts of a whole on different levels (or not at all), without letting them color the rest of the experience?
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:08 |
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colonelslime posted:This is a false equivalency. ME2 specifically ended with the idea that your choices would carry forward into 3, that your agency mattered. ME3's ending totally invalidates all you choices up to that point. It also jars thematically with the rest of the series, invokes magic technology that was never foreshadowed and makes no sense, and includes terrible cliched imagery under the pretense of art. That's just it though. The whole claim "totally invalidates all your choices up to that point" is absolutely dependent on the idea that all of galactic civilization was destroyed to never recover either way. Which a lot of people assumed once, sure, but now that it seems pretty clear this isn't the case it's pretty weak as a central claim.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:08 |
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Mass Effect 1 and 2's endings also made sense thematically in regards to how you could have played your Shepard at that point in the story. In ME1, choosing how to deal with the Council and the human Councilor encapsulates how you've treated the issue of humanity in the galaxy (as peaceful co-inhabitants working together or natural superiors who don't need Others in the way). In ME2, it plays off the whole "ends justify the means" that was supposed to be the "dark and gritty" moral stuff of ME2. Give dangerous tech, based off the deaths of countless innocents, to a radical in the hopes that it will save the galaxy for the greater good, or give the final rejection of that ideology and destroy the base so you can face the fight without compromising your moral integrity. In ME3, the overarching theme is... uh. We fight or we die. Everybody stand together. There's not really any major moral or social conflict to play off of there. I was expecting something similar to the past two games, with a Renegade option to save Earth at the expense of the greater galaxy and the relays or whatever, and a Paragon option to sacrifice Earth so the rest of the galaxy can be saved from the Reapers. Instead it's all "solutions" to the "problem" of the "chaos."
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:09 |
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ImpAtom posted:Because quite literally the only difference between the three is the color of the explosion and certain parts trimmed/cut out of the scene, and glowy green lines in Synthesis. It is the same cutscene regardless of your choice. Not even like a different voiceover. EDI will even show up in Destroy for no clear reason. For the ending to a trilogy based around choices that's really unsatisfying and limited. no no you see Jessica Merizan said on twitter that EDI wasn't made of reapertech so what this means is that she is a hack
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:09 |
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Schurik posted:Again - I don't understand this at all. How is anything invalidated? I heard the same kind of stuff back with the Matrix sequels, with people complaining that it ruined the first movie for them, and I didn't get that either. Is is really so hard to enjoy parts of a whole on different levels (or not at all), without letting them color the rest of the experience? Some people literally have different brain chemistry than others, so yes it really is hard for them, in the same way that some people have trouble concentrating, some people have trouble blocking out external stimulus, etc. etc. I am truly envious of your ability to block that stuff out, 100% serious about that.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:10 |
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Schurik posted:Again - I don't understand this at all. How is anything invalidated? I heard the same kind of stuff back with the Matrix sequels, with people complaining that it ruined the first movie for them, and I didn't get that either. Is is really so hard to enjoy parts of a whole on different levels (or not at all), without letting them color the rest of the experience? A major selling point of ME is that (at least from ME2), it would be a trilogy that was at once three games and a whole self-contained meta-game. ME1 and ME2 leave a lot of things unclarified specifically to be resolved in ME3. Without those things being resolved (or with them being resolved unsatisfactorily), that selling point loses meaning to people. There isn't really another game on the market like the ME trilogy and so it is hard to compare, but it takes something where the illusion of choice exists and shatters it. Some people won't care if that illusion is shattered. For others though it ruins the game, and since ME is sort of a giant interconnected metagame, can ruin the franchise.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:14 |
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colonelslime posted:I agree that the level of vitriol sometimes seems high for a goddamn videogame, and that the ending doesn't ruin the entire series for me, though it does taint it a bit. IMO it was just a bit of a bad choice of words. Artistic Integrity doesn't really fit what's being talked about, as it (and everything else about ME) is polished, quality pulp, but I do agree with them saying that they have the right to do whatever the gently caress they want with the ending. The last part of your post is just it, though, as it's exactly what a few badly worded statements have been blown up into. I don't care enough about large companies in general to feel the need to defend them, but most of the stuff I've read (mostly on other sites) is just plain idiotic.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:15 |
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Killer robot posted:That's just it though. The whole claim "totally invalidates all your choices up to that point" is absolutely dependent on the idea that all of galactic civilization was destroyed to never recover either way. Which a lot of people assumed once, sure, but now that it seems pretty clear this isn't the case it's pretty weak as a central claim. No, it invalidates you agency by having your decisions have basically no effect on what happens at the climax, beyond filling up a meter to get dubiously "better" choices. The Catalyst means that it's not Sheppard, or humanity, or the big alliance of species that save the day, it's some AI that could have acted at any time, but didn't. It renders all you battles against the unstoppable foe meaningless, since they were just puppets for an AI that never dinged to bother explaining itself to the species it was wiping out, for no reason. The hackneyed symbolism they use at the end reinforces this, because everything is tailor-made for you to make a simple button push, so it's not like it was Sheppard who had to make the choice, it could have been anyone who happened to be there. Schurik posted:IMO it was just a bit of a bad choice of words. Artistic Integrity doesn't really fit what's being talked about, as it (and everything else about ME) is polished, quality pulp, but I do agree with them saying that they have the right to do whatever the gently caress they want with the ending. The last part of your post is just it, though, as it's exactly what a few badly worded statements have been blown up into. I don't care enough about large companies in general to feel the need to defend them, but most of the stuff I've read (mostly on other sites) is just plain idiotic. Maybe for Bioware itself (though I still think the PR job they did was not "mishandling", so much as it was deliberately insulting), but the gaming journalism media, which much of the anger is also directed against, was in many cases pretty explicit about it's contempt for people who didn't like the ending. "You just wanted a happy ending" was a common one, and was a deliberate negation and trivialization of the reasons why people found the ending bad. Cordyceps Headache fucked around with this message at Apr 12, 2012 around 21:18 |
| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:15 |
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Some people literally have different brain chemistry than others, so yes it really is hard for them, in the same way that some people have trouble concentrating, some people have trouble blocking out external stimulus, etc. etc. As I said, in this case I didn't need it, because like I said, I didn't think the ending was the best thing ever, but it went along with what I was expecting and was presented well enough to not color the rest of the experience. So I enjoyed it. Where it comes into play for me is with stuff like the amnesia subplot in the first season of 24 - I groaned when it came along, but that was about it. I realized I was watching a pulp action thriller serial and took it with the rest, and the rest was exceptionally tense television. Just play ME1 again, I promise if you enjoyed it the first time around, you will again. I just started my second ME3 runthrough after the nth 1 and 2 playthroughs, and they're still amazing games.
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:20 |
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colonelslime posted:I agree that the level of vitriol sometimes seems high for a goddamn videogame, and that the ending doesn't ruin the entire series for me, though it does taint it a bit. Ha, I like your Fountainhead parallel. This whole thing has been Fountainhead as gently caress. I hated that book. At times it felt like IGN was advocating for all the brilliant creative minds to leave our society and go start their own haha ...that'd show us!!
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:21 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 04:19 |
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Killer robot posted:Wrex leading his troops knowing that he's got a kid on the way, and how that changes everything for him Funny you should mention... 
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| # ? Apr 12, 2012 21:21 |
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