EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

[TheFeniX]

"The Matrix Revolutions wraps up the series just fine."
"Neo-BSG wraps up the series just fine."
"Gears 3 wraps up the series just fine."

See, they didn't, at least not for a lot of people. But writing is pretty subjective, especially when you're pushing a bunch of pseudo-philosophical bullshit and plot-holes that people who don't understand might label as deep. Hell, Gears 3 didn't try to even push anything like that and it was still dull. They had built up, like a lot of fiction does, this aura of mystery surrounding the Locust and their motivations, same that Mass Effect did with the reapers when they were cribbing right out of Star Control. If I've learned anything from BSG or what I bothered watching of Lost or the 4400, is that mystery sells well until you have to hack your way through an actual explanation.

But that's not really the point because I can't even think of a gaming series that has wrapped things up in any kind of "acceptable" fashion over the course of 3+ games. Halo 3 and Gears 3 still ended up being pretty enjoyable games, but to say the endings were on par for the previous in the series? Pfft, no way.

What chaps my ass is you have BW writers who think their shit doesn't stink. That too much fiction is written by "old bearded white dudes" when they've been beating said old white dude's themes to death for years. That characters you might have killed/had killed in a playthrough are alive in the sequel because they like them and fuck you, that's why. That people who are demanding better writing from devs who claim they're so fucking good are somehow entitled.

But really, that there's a subset of the gaming community that's basically telling me: "How dare you have an opinion the game writer didn't give you." ME3 might be an awesome game, but judging from what I've seen of the endings, it has me think: "This is the resolution of Sovereign's rant on Virmire? An even worse take on neo-BSG's ending?"

[Metahive]

Gears3's ending problem was that it was the about the same as the first game's, "mad dash to deploy ultimate weapon that kills all the bad guys".

I'm actually sick and tired of this sort of endings, the bad guy is so unreasonably and cartoonishly evil and completely superior that the only solution is genocide. Spares the writers from actually having to flesh the bad guys out in any interesting way or *gasp* give them some sort of believable motive other than them being EEVUL(TM). Remember when the factions with the genocidal superweapons used to be the bad guys? Imagine Star Wars as written by today's batch of hack game writers, the Rebel Alliance develops the Death Star and uses it to one-shot Coruscant and wins the war. Fanboys everwhere promptly declare this to ending to be "dark" and presenting "interesting moral dilemmas" when it's really just cheap, juvenile and going the path of least resistance.

[TheFeniX]

There's the issue of Gears being a shooter, rather than an RPG, but I never expected a deep, resounding narrative out of Epic. None of the weird interviews with CliffyB's face promised a story that would leave me thinking for years. What they were talking about was putting together a complete shooter with story elements and NPC interactions outside what we're normally used to. We got that for Gears 1 and 2. Gears 3 just felt tired: still a technically sound shooter, but when even said shooter segments feel unpolished (such as the map designs in the campaign), the story wasn't going to be any better.

But Bioware/EA marketed Mass Effect 3 on a different line: one that every choice you made previously and those you made in 3 were going to affect how the story played out. Even if certain choices had locked out a certain ending selection, it would have been better. But they pulled this shit with KOTOR years back: The most uptight by-the-book Lightside Jedi could immediately do a flip and be a baby-eating monster with 1 dialog choice and even the most evil player character could be like "Nah, I'm a good guy now."

KOTOR was a great game, one of my favorites despite it's problems, but I find very few people who wouldn't have called that particular "option" out as lazy and stupid. Modern BW fans would likely call me an asshole for bringing it up.

[Vendetta]

Gears3's ending problem was that it was the about the same as the first game's, "mad dash to deploy ultimate weapon that kills all the bad guys".

That was kind of what happened in Gears 2 as well.

Except in Gears 1 and 2 deploying the ultimate weapon that kills all the bad guys made the problem worse, and in gears 3 it fixed everything, So third time lucky I guess.

But really the problem with Gears 3 was that it trashed everything that was set up about the world and setting in Gears 2 (eg. Sires) in favour of Karen Traviss carrying on her bullshit novels that nobody read with her author self insert fanfic character who is now totally in wuv with Colonel Hoffman and apparently glowy space oil is sentient and will kill you all!. Even the whole "what is Marcus' father up to and how does he know the locust?" is barely touched upon and that was being set up since the first game, most of the resolution of that is relegated to text on collectables.

The downfall of ME3's ending wasn't just that it failed to follow through on choices you made in Mass Effect 1 and 2, but that it failed to follow through on anything you did in Mass Effect 3 itself. Literally all the things you could do resolved down to "is your number big enough to extend the ending cutscene another ten seconds and/or paint it green?"

Which was a massive step down from the many branching outcomes of the Suicide Mission in ME2, let alone from what they promised before release.

[Phillip Hone]

Like I said, it wrapped up the story just fine, FattyNerdsTM just didn't like it.

What did you like about the ending? I've actually never talked to anyone before who liked it. I agree with you that it got a lot of crap for "FattyNerd" reasons. Spoiler

Like Shep needing to be an invincible and stuff, which Shep dying fucks up a bit.

. On the other hand, I do think it was genuinely bad writing and there are plenty of valid reasons for disliking it.
Spoiler

I think the main one would be that it's as literal a Deus ex Machina as you can make. Also the simple "A,B,C" decision at the end determining everything with basically no influence from any other "decision" made in the game ... true of the rest of the series, arguably, but here it was more annoying because it was the last decision.

[Zinegata]

The thing with ME3 is that there wasn't even a lot of clamor for an invincible Shep to begin with. The two big "alternate" endings were "Indoctrination" and "Golden" ending, neither of which actually had "Shepard survives" as a central goal.

"Indoctrination"'s main selling point was that it was an attempt to explain away the retardedness of suddenly collaborating with the villain for no reason in the last 5 minutes of the game; with the resolution being that Shep ultimately sees through this deception and finally kills the galaxy-ending threat.

"Golden" ending meanwhile has the galaxy win using conventional means - affirming the theme that "we are stronger together" that was built up through ME2 & 3's team-building centric narrative.

Neither ending required Shepard living to work - they're merely affirmations of themes repeated over and over again in the series ("sanctity of choice vs forced worship" and "we are stronger together").

Which is really what makes Bioware's "entitled audiences" and the FattyNerd elitism so bafflingly stupid and offensive. Neither position actually ever addresses the real problem of the ending in favor of being smug about things not very many are even complaining about. Deus Ex: HR suffered far more unwarranted backlash for a "clipshow" ending; and really it took the sheer awfulness of the ME3 ending to make a lot of people look back and realize that the Deus Ex ending actually made total sense except for the "Adam kills everyone" bit.

====

They had built up, like a lot of fiction does, this aura of mystery surrounding the Locust and their motivations, same that Mass Effect did with the reapers when they were cribbing right out of Star Control.

See, the thing about Star Control is that they actually did a good job of making you feel bad for the Ur-Quan. They may be genocidal monsters, but they only became that way because they were forced to endure something worse than genocide.

And despite making you feel for and understand the Ur-Quan, the game does not suddenly try to make you ally with them at the last minute for no reason at all. For all of the weighty motivations behind the Ur-Quan's actions, ultimately they must still be stopped and the ending was still you vs them.

[Grumman]

With regards to the Reapers, I think the ending of Mass Effect 1 would have been sufficient. The Protheans screwed with the Reapers' Plan A (remotely activate the Citadel relay), and we stopped their Plan B (Sovereign goes to the Citadel to activate the relay) in Mass Effect 1. I would have left them there, possibly stranded in deep space but possibly flying back the slow way, to become an existential threat in a hundred years or ten thousand. Mass Effect 3 instead put them just five years out, which defeats half the purpose of the Citadel relay, and treated them as a villain for us to thwart again instead of as a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire galaxy while we focus on the galaxy and more mundane conflicts.

[Vendetta]

Well yeah, but really they should have done that in the end of ME2, ME2 should have had the Collectors building another _citadel_ in the core, which is activated allouwing the Reapers through, but meaning the Reapers are stuck _there_ because you blow up the Omega Relay at the end, so they're in the galaxy but it will take time for them to find a safe way out of the core without that relay.

It would also have made ME2 not a giant sidequest (despite it being the best actual game in the series, it doesn't actually affect the overall plot until the last DLC when all of a sudden the Reapers are hours away).

And yeah, the whole "citadel ploy fails, they just drive out of darkspace, takes about five minutes" is nonsense, I mean they do this every fifty thousand years, the process takes a century or more, and they come up with an elaborate and complicated timesaving trick that saves them about two years tops.

It's like inventing a portal gun to get the bacon out of the fridge to make your breakfast a bit more convenient to cook.

[DaveJB]

The first game seemed to be trying to imply that the real advantage of using the Citadel was being able to wipe out the heads of government, then shut down the mass relay system and pick off the galaxy's races at their leisure, and that without that it'd be a much more even battle. But the third tossed that out the window and showed that nope, being unable to access the Citadel was of minimal inconvenience to the Reapers.

[Imperial528]

Well, frankly, part of the issue for the Citadel races was that they didn't prepare for the war, or even consider it outside of specific individuals who believed Shepard, until the reapers were literally on their doorstep. Having the citadel house a reaper control center is, imo, a much bigger problem. Why would a reaper even need to activate the citadel, either by itself or via signalling the keepers, when the damn thing controls them?