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This article contains spoilers for Mass Effect 3.
Man, it’s tough to stick the landing.
BioWare never had a single hope of satisfying everyone with the conclusion to their epic Mass Effect trilogy. But even grading on that curve, the breadth and depth of righteous nerd rage surrounding Mass Effect 3’s ending must feel a lot like drinking a gallon of rocket fuel, then swallowing a lit match.
Anyone else wanna complain to the FTC?
Fandom’s hatchet has fallen squarely on the last 10 minutes of this 40-50 hour opus, which closes out 90+ hours of epic space opera. I’ve seen the color-coded variants of the ending (yes, it’s fair to refer to ME3’s ending in the singular, since it really only has one with minor edits), and it's not exactly shocking that almost nobody likes it. Thousands of disgruntled gamers have banded together to protest the finale and demand a new one. And of course, Hitler’s weighed in, so now you know it’s serious.
In response, BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka released an open letter to assure us the team behind ME3 is “hard at work on a number of game content initiatives” meant to stem the criticism, but that’s a mistake. A big one. BioWare should not -- and I mean absolutely not -- change the cheap, inconsistent, poorly executed, contradictory, self-defeating end to Mass Effect 3. Period.
I’ll momentarily sidestep the issue of a non-branching result to several thousand player decisions, because that is a broken promise, plain and simple. I'll ignore how building up military strength throughout the campaign doesn't actually factor into the outcome. I'll only briefly point out that tying the Galactic Readiness metric to the online-passlocked multiplayer effectively prevents second-hand buyers from earning two final "true end” cut-scenes. No, I'll focus entirely on the narrative and why BioWare should hold fast to their version of it.
For starters, I just don’t like the idea of fans dictating story to a developer. Allow me to direct you to entire libraries of fanfic and -- even better -- slash fiction to illustrate why. We get too close sometimes. I personally would never, ever have killed off Mordin. I like him too much. Garrus? Ash? Tali? Liara? The new kids? All expendable. Not Mordin. But his death scene -- both versions, really -- makes for a perfect coda to who Mordin is. It’s my single favorite moment in the entire series.
Not an atypical morning commute on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Superfans make bad story choices, ignoring what the characters would do in favor of what they want the characters to do. Not incidentally, that's why much of ME3's resolution rings hollow. Everyone suddenly stops behaving like themselves. Your team runs out on you. Shepard blindly accepts the disastrous options handed to him without protest.
But that’s what it took in order to reach the place Executive Producer Casey Hudson and his team wanted to go. I can see what they tried to accomplish, even if the means feel artificial. An epic this size required a big finish, and an apocalyptic ending to the apocalypse -- without the possibility of a happy ending -- certainly qualifies. I couldn’t go five minutes in Mass Effect 2 without someone talking about our suicide mission...which everyone survived. You ain’t getting off so easy this time, junior. You’re up against an army of gods. Maybe you actually can’t win this one without paying too high a price. Not a very American attitude, perhaps, but a realistic one.
So Hudson made the brave, admirable choice to say you’ve got to destroy intergalactic civilization in order to save it. Cue the really big explosions. Goodbye mass-effect relay network. It lays down a few interesting possibilities for Mass Effect 4, too. A few dozen species and their war fleets suddenly marooned in our solar system (also the new home of the Citadel) can make for plenty of new allies to recruit and new problems to shoot.
Meanwhile, the Normandy crew who ditched you stays out of the picture, re-discovering fire in their new jungle-paradise home. Your paramour can hook up with Joker and live happily ever after in a world without conflict.
Suggest shooting blue thing-boy repeatedly in head. Renegade interrupt. Most satisfactory.
I understand why that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, and it shouldn’t. It panders to an audience who feels betrayed by the entire scenario. But, and I’ve got to be brutal here, get over it. After The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, you should be used to this sort of thing, and you'd better know by now that there are no do-overs. Even when BioWare releases Ending 2.0, I guarantee you still won’t be happy. You wanted it to go one way, and it doesn't go that way. Details might change, you might get more catharsis and more closure, but the destination will remain the same.
Now, if Hudson and his team decide to add a few alternate endings based solely on your different story choices, I’m okay with that. So long as they leave this one alone.
It can’t be easy to program a satisfying conclusion when your player potentially screwed everything up two games ago, but at least it would feel earned. Didn't win your crew's loyalty or treated them like crap? Sure, they'll split on you. A surly renegade bastard who takes shortcuts with extreme prejudice will detonate those relays without hesitation, you bet. The peacemaker who brokered alliances between races with centuries-old grudges? That sounds like someone who takes a drastically different path, and that should be represented in the game.
The decisions we make must carry weight going into the final fight (i.e. make the War Asset metrics actually matter beyond who we see in a cut-scene) and into how we solve the final problem. As-is, they don't. I'd love to see this corrected.
Wow, grandpa! Thanks for leaving in The Shepard's freaky alien-sex scenes!
That said, I’m not convinced any changes can provide remedy at this point. If you finished Mass Effect 3, your experience of it is complete. Nothing BioWare does now changes what you saw or what you felt. Good, bad, or indifferent, you’ll never get that taste out of your mouth. The damage is done. So let the game stand as a tribute to the execution of an uncompromised vision...and as a monument to failing audience expectations. Maybe the next developer will learn from it.
The ending is the ending. If BioWare blew it, it’s still the ending. Analyze it. Slam it. Justify it. And move on to better fare.
