Mass Effect: Andromeda

Casey Hudson wrote:"This story arc is coming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lot more different. At this point we're taking into account so many decisions that you've made as a player and reflecting a lot of that stuff. It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C."
"It's more like there are some really obvious things that are different and then lots and lots of smaller things, lots of things about who lives and who dies, civilizations that rose and fell, all the way down to individual characters. That becomes the state of where you left your galaxy. The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them."

Skarjo » Sun Apr 20, 2014 8:14 pm wrote:The Tuchanka mission still stings, because that was so unbelievably well executed in every way; from the strong narrative coherence, the way it builds on storylines that ran through all instalments, the way it incorporates all your previous choices from the preceding games and still manages to expand on them by giving you genuinely meaningful choices with genuinely large ramifications in how you want to conclude that whole arc; that it just made the ending that much more bitter a pill to swallow. And then watching that huge sand-snake thing taking down a reaper.

I mean, how they could get Tuchanka so right and the ending so wrong is just baffling.

Patrick Weekes has been writing Mass Effect story from the first game, but ever since the scandal about Mass Effect 3′s ending broke, Weekes revealed that he and others were locked out of game’s ending, leaving the conclusion to none other than franchise executive producer Casey Hudson. Many have reached out to Hudson for a response on this latest revelation, however he’s said nothing.

This whole problem stemmed from Bioware advertising Mass Effect 3 as having many, many endings, but when gamers played the game, they realized it didn’t matter how they played, or what class they chose, Mass Effect 3′s ending was the same. A massive failure on Bioware ‘s end, who’ve, in the past, made multiple endings for the popular WRPG.

Patrick Weekes’ Tells All

When the scandal became overwhelming, Mass Effect writer Patrick Weekes decided that he’d reveal what really happened behind the scenes, making known that he and others had nothing to do with how the game ended because they were essentially banned from even giving input, adding that what you experience in Mass Effect 3′s conclusion is completely Casey Hudson’s take on the franchise.

Here’s Weekes:

“I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn’t automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali’s goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft.

And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn’t need to be peer-reviewed

And again, it shows.

If you’d asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I’d break them down as:

Galactic Alliances

Friends

Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay — a deliberate “nothing happens here” area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the “nothing happens here”-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me — every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn’t have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here’s the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here’s the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be — something that I’ve been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson’s goodbye.

For me, Anderson’s goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he’s not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.

And then, just to be a dick… what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked “Destroy the Reapers”. When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you’d show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory

b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.

c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren’t in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don’t know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it’d be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to “which color is stuff glowing?” Or maybe they ARE in, but they’re too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that’s… yeah.

Okay, that’s a lot to have written for something that’s gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn’t tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn’t have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don’t even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes — all three of them.”

In recent days we’ve seen Amazon and Origin refund disgruntled gamers, and the ‘Take Mass Effect Back‘ movement collect more than $40,000 to raise awareness of the RPG’s ending. We’ll reach out to Hudson for a response on this damning write up by Weekes.

In the whole ME3 furore it was the gamer's at most fault for demanding Bioware go back and change the ending.

Kanbei » Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:32 am wrote:Apart from the ending Mass Effect 3 was fantastic. The multiplayer was enjoyable as well.

Hexx wrote:0

Alvin Flummux » Mon Apr 21, 2014 1:05 pm wrote:Realistically speaking, what are the odds that a rewrite of the ending could happen?