Mass Effect 3 Director Discusses Game’s Endings, Editorials

The endings to the Mass Effect trilogy have generated quite a lot of discussion among the gaming community, with disgruntled fans going as far as starting a petition for BioWare to change the endings. Mass Effect 3’s director Casey Hudson has recently commented on the studio’s choice for the endings in an interview on Digital Trends, and doesn’t seem to regret it:

What are your thoughts on the reaction to the game’s endings?

I didn’t want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people debating what the endings mean and what’s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in. That to me is part of what’s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it’s a story that people can talk about after the fact.

How closely do you keep track of the fan reaction when it comes to that kind of stuff?

Oh, we pay very close attention to it. It’s very important to us and we will always listen to feedback, interpret it and try and do the right thing by our fans. That’s why if you look at Mass Effect 2 we knew that people wanted to spend more time with a character like Liara, and so we created an ongoing storyline with her as part of the comics and then built it into the DLC stuff, and we’re always listening to fans. We have some really great multiplayer content and some really great single-player content coming over the air, and their feedback will become part of how we design that.

Of course, Hudson was hardly the only one to comment on it, and Matt Barton of Matt Chat fame chimed in with his (favorable) opinion of the endings (spoilers follow, of course):

You have to be thicker than a Rachni omelet not to see this coming, because the game has hammered you repeatedly (and I do mean repeatedly!) with the theme of how tough it is being a leader, because you are often forced to make very difficult and painful choices–choices in which nobody is really going to like ANY of the outcomes. Shepherd’s first choice is either to destroy ALL synthetic life forms, including the friendly Geths and damning the galaxy to another cycle–in which they will inevitably create another race of too-powerful robotic beings (the choice represented by the “old soldier” Anderson). The second choice is to try to take control of the synthetics himself, but that will destroy everything he is, or some such. I didn’t take that choice, so I’m not sure what happens (though I am sure curious about what it’s like, and will definitely try it next time I play through the game). At any rate, I infer that it has something to do with absolute power corrupting absolutely–the choice represented by The Elusive Man. The third choice, if you can call it that, is just to let yourself be shot by The Elusive Man and get a game over (the wussiest choice imaginable). In any case, you’ll lose your friends you took with you, which isn’t exactly pleasant stumbling over your girlfriend’s body to reach the end. (End Spoiler).

The moral of this story is that quite often a leader must make a difficult decision and live with the consequences. You might regret it, wish you could’ve done something else, but what’s done is done. Agonizing over it–or claiming the benefit of clarity, hindsight, and information that you didn’t possess at the time–will ultimately destroy you, sometimes far more effectively than any actual enemy.

First off, Bioware did a brave and really inevitable thing here. It’s not the first game to have a real downer for an ending (The Black Mirror comes to my mind; utterly forgettable otherwise), but they are still much rarer than movies with tragic endings. The problem is that we’re too used to thinking of games as pure entertainment–the equivalent of Hollywood “feel good” movies. We want to play them in a sort of half-cognizant adrenaline rush and then see some big friggin’ explosions at the end and everybody walks away thinking all is Pollyanna (until the next one). It’s like being stuck in Schwarzenegger mode. The last thing any gamer wants to do is walk away from a game feeling disturbed, confused, perhaps even anxious or guilty about what he or she has done…

Meanwhile, GameFront has an editorial where they wonder whether the game deserves the outstanding reception it garnered, with criticism towards the game’s RPG systems, choices and consequences and multiplayer mode:

But for all the important moments of choice that really do matter to the way the story unfolds, there are many in Mass Effect 3 in which BioWare pretends that you’re making a meaningfully different choice, when the outcomes are really pretty much the same but with Shepard gritting her teeth more. We saw a lot of this in the demo/opening moments of the game, and a second playthrough quickly exposes the (behind-the-curtain) moments in which the game tricked you.

Don’t get me wrong plenty of these carry some extreme emotional weight, and if your choice is actually meaningless, you might not necessarily know that, and the story works just fine. But pull the curtain back on a second playthrough and you start to see that much of Mass Effect 3 is like an old western movie set, filled with pretty facades that don’t have any buildings behind them. That kills replayability, as well as the power of being a meaningful actor in the story.