Yes i am sad to say the people who are making those decisoins, and i have to think it is NOT  Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, whoever is doing that and releasing such arrogant statements needs to be fired. That is not only dumb and disrespectful but it is disrespectful to their own staff who do the actual work creating the amazing settings and the game...they are not the ones who decide on the plot that is the senior editors, the Game Manager and people like that. And they are just not showing very good sense. To be defensive over a plot mistake..when the entire purpose of a game and a game story is for people to ENJOY  it.... that is just poor judgement of a basic kind.

But as i said before, there is a strange beligerence on the part of some creative professionals, senior anime directors in Japan have shown the same antagonism to their own stories and characters and have gone out of their way to either kill off major characters or totally turn on their own characters or in story relationships turning things on their heads....it is called a trope in that medium and this applies to this ending of Mass Effect 3 that trashes the game story....it is a sign of a disturbed mentality or emotional imbalance on the part of the director..and hopefully this harsh lesson from the public will not be forgotten by Bioware...for they have had a pretty good record up until noow....

that artcile supposedly an interview by Sean was itself an example of what is wrong with reviewers. Neoseeker is fairly decent but...

look at how much he shares from the guy he is interviewing and how much of the text in the article is HIS...it is basciall a monologe with the poor fellow he is interveiwing given a few courtesy lines but really , Sean is talking to himself. I was not surprised ..as I have deal with the crisis of reviewers in my own profession and have seen it in the game industry for years and i no longer look at any reviewers or care at all what they say and the idiocy of the metascore is insane. If you average out the apples from a tree, say the tree has 30 rotten apples and 3000 good ones but you happen to buy 10 of the rotton ones at teh store, it was a bad tree. Tell that to the other 3ooo thousand happy customers. it is the same with reviews...they are basically making the magazines that publish them money and the reviewers money and the game companies get the feeling that someone can "judge" their work and it will affect their sales....

it is idiocy. Good games sell, bad ones dont. Gamers are not stupid and they dont buy games based on reviews..most of them. We dont need reviews..we need good games..and game developers who are given a fair shake in terms of fair handed publicity by reviews and that is that. Sadly the media of all kinds has become an ego orgy at every level, and we are in a Dark Age of journalism of all knds not just games. I am going to check out that game producers blog that may be much more interesting that that sad exxuse for an interview which was a joke.   Get a life Sean and get out of the way....

Having now completely finished with ME3, and traded it back in at the shop (wow, doesn't that tell ya how I feel about it?), I can genuinely say that it's the second most disappointing sci-fi experience I've ever had. Hencefore I will refer to Mass Effect 3 as 'The Phantom Menace' in honour of disappointing follow-ups. 

I can post a full and complete breakdown of why I didn't care for this game at all, if anyone is interested. 

hmmmm, yes i would like to know what you disliked about ME3, as I have mixed feelings towards ME3 myself.

I liked ME3 a lot until... Spoiler Alertyou start the final mission on earth, then it becomes a completely different game.The whole endgame is frustratingly linear and utterly boring. I was extremely annoyed that none of the things you did during the course of the three games mattered in the end

I have a list... and be warned, it does contain spoilers.

1- The characters. 

Spoiler AlertA large number of them die, and not always in a dramatically effective manner. Sometimes characters (namely Thane and Morden) die, and it works - Morden especially because I shot him. Other characters die just because the plot says so, like Miranda, and their deaths feel tacked-on and exploitative. You're not even really given a chance to save them, they only die because the plot says so. New characters are not especially interesting, which is fine because there's really only one new character, James. Who is basically a rock with legs. He has almost no personality and no real character arc to speak of. Then there's the romantic options, which I feel there's a good chance weren't implimented as well as I'd have liked. But then, my romantic option in ME2 was Jack, whose appearance in ME3 was minimal. With her as a choice, the romantic option if you want to keep with her comes down to "Let's go dancing, come back soon hun" Also, because I'm going to count enemies as characters... There just seems to be even LESS variety in enemies than there was in ME2. In ME2, you fought two real groups of enemies - gangsters, and collectors/geth. At very least though, you had some variety in the generic gangsters you'd fight. In ME3, you fight reapers/geth, and a bunch of about the same 4 cerberus troops over and over and over and over and over again. I mean, with an entire universe to play with, why couldn't they have used a bigger variety of enemies?

2- The Day-One DLC

Spoiler AlertMy real problem with this isn't the fact that it's a blatant cash-grab for fans. You can download a new party member - Javick, the last surviving Prothean. But here's my problem with Javick... he's a dick. Let me explain here. Javick is a Prothean warrior. You may remember from previous games that the Protheans were a galactic-spanning race of scholars, wise men and so on, full of some of the greatest minds of the universe. Then they got turned into Collectors. But no, that's not the case, not according to Javick. See, this benevolent race of Protheans were in fact a massive evil empire who enslaved other races, often uplifting them purely to enslave - when they're not gleefully torturing them. This is a race who are so empathic that they can experience other people's memories and feelings just by touch! What kind of race who has that kind of psychic ability would be happy to rip their prisoner's limbs off? A bloody great EVIL empire, that's who! Darth Vader would be proud. And aside from the massive dicking-over of lore, there's the charater of Javick himself. Namely his dialogue. Imagine a character whose dialogue primarily consists of saying things like this - "We're all doomed. Your entire puny race doesn't stand a chance. You're just a stupid monkey. Look at how stupid you are. Oh look, that Asari has learned how to write! Your stupid brains can't handle how doomed you are..." Yeah, Javick spent most of his time in the ship rather than coming on missions, and that's only because there wasn't an option to stick him back in his stasis pod! And remember, you have to PAY EXTRA for this character. This is just like Bioware saying to you "Give us extra money, and I'll have this sadist follow you around to insult you at regular intervals." Yeah, thanks guys.

3- Multiplayer.

Spoiler AlertTo win this game, you need to get a set amount of 'war assets' - points, basically. These assets represent the allies you've made and so on. This has the downside of making all of your work like recruiting the Krogan, dealing with the Salarians etc, feel like you're just grinding stats. But you can ignore that with suspension of disbelief. What you can't ignore, though, is that the war assets is crippled by the game's insistance that you play multiplayer. Let me explain. Say you do a mission in the game, and get a Krogan batallion worth 100 points. Your points value is divided by something called 'galactic readiness', which is a percentage value that can only be raised by playing multiplayer. At the start of the game, your readiness is at 50%. This brings the effective point value of your Krogan batallion down to 50 points. Let me phrase that this way - if you don't want to play multiplayer, the points you earn through the game is cut by half. The game penalises you for not playing multiplayer. While it IS possible to get a good ending without playing multiplayer, the 'perfect' ending is not possible without raising your readiness. I wouldn't be so annoyed about this if it worked the other way around, with the multiplayer inflating or 'buffing' your point values. But no, the choice in development was made that the game should PENALISE you for not playing the multiplayer option. I don't like multiplayer. The attraction of Mass Effect has always been the strong narrative and characters of the single-player game. Strangely enough, I never had to put up with some loud-mouthed 14 year old kid screaming homophobic abuse during single-player Mass Effect. Now, if I want to get the perfect ending, Bioware has decided that you need to put up with that. Nice one.

4- The lack of follow-through, your choices are meaningless.

Spoiler AlertI've alluded to this already, but here's I'll expand on it a little more. When I was taking the game back to the shop, I was in the shop and got talking to someone else. This person was also trading in his copy of the game. We got to talking, I mentioned that at one point in the game, I had decided to bring the Salarians into the war as my allies. To do this, I sabotagued the Krogan genophage. To make sure this was effective, I shot the doctor who was trying to cure the genophage, Mordain. The person I was talking to told me that he'd have not been able to do that, as he felt too attached to Mordain. "It doesn't matter in the end anyway" he said, "Because when Udina betrays the council later on, the Salarians join the war anyway." So as it turned out, the only effect that my choice had made was to trigger a scene later in the game in which Wrex discovered my betrayal of the Krogans, and tried to assassinate me while I was at the Citadel. Being the ruthless bastard I am, I killed Wrex too. What was the end result of this? How did this trail of blood and death affect the events? It didn't. I suspect that there may have been a change in the war assets numbers, but it was so minimal that I didn't even notice. There was no point in the battle where the Krogan pull out their support, or even try to turn on Shepherd for his actions. All they were in the end were just numbers. I saved the Rachnii queen. What was the end result of that? Did we see the Rachnii swarm the inside of the reaper vessles? No, they were just numbers in the end. I recruited the Blue Suns, Blood Pack and Eclipse Mercenaries. What was the end result of that? Did we see them at the forefront of the battle? No, they were just numbers in the end. Same with Zaied, I downloaded him for ME2, he had a moment in ME3 where he says he'll offer you support in the end battle. And in the end battle, does he get a cutscene? No, you get to chat to him on the telephone.

Spoiler AlertI could go on and on with examples like this, but the real crux of the matter is this; in ME3, the only thing you feel that you're doing is grinding your war asset stats. You never see any of these 'allies' you're recruiting during the final battle, because the whole game is really just so utterly linear and the only 'choices' you make are purely cosmetic. Sure, it may be a depressing idea to see the Krogan being cut down by the reapers, while Grunt screams "Hold the line" right to his dying breath - but damn it, it'd be SOMETHING! You know what the biggest thing that shatters the illusion of choice was, for me? It wasn't the ending. It was Morinth. Samara's daughter. I chose to let her live in ME2. She killed Samara and took her place on my crew. Throughout ME3, I was waiting to see her again. When a mission mentioned an asari temple, I was expecting to see her again. I didn't. Turned out, you were meant to see Samara on that stage. But no sign of Morinth. She didn't make the cut. Zaied made the cut, but not Morinth. We did see Morinth though - in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment wherein a generic reaper mob has her character name assigned to it. That's all. The game doesn't even achnoledge it - there's no cutscene in which Shepherd makes reference to Morinth, nothing. I'm not even a big fan of the character, really. But this just seems so lazy, especially when it would be so easy to drop her into the asari temple stage. They have the character model, the voice acting could easily be the same, it'd have been insanely easy to do. But no, the most she gets is a name-swap with a generic mob. And why is that? Because in this game, the choices you make are purely cosmetic. Which brings us to the crowning point of just how choice-less and linear the game is...

5- The ending.

Spoiler AlertI'll try to minimise the spoilers here. At the end of the game, in the last scene, you are given the choice of walking through one of three 'doors'. I need to remind you, your choices here are laid out nice and clearly. These aren't choices that are made for you due to the actions and choices you've made during the game, or something involving or interesting like that. No, this is just 'pick a door for your ending'. You pick your option, and the game goes to a cutscene. In this scene, Shepherd sacrifices himself so that the giant Prothean superweapon (and really, wouldn't the game have been better WITHOUT a super-weapon? Y'know, so that the reapers are defeated by the perseverance and determination of the heroes and their allies, rather than some deus ex machina?) fires, blowing up all the Mass Effect relays with a flash of green/red/blue energy. The colour of that energy is the only thing that's substancially different, as near as I can tell. The Normandy tries to outfly the explosions, and crash-lands on an alien world. The real problem here is that there's so little genuine difference between these endings. They all feel rushed, your choices don't amount to anything of any real significance. And it all leads to the thing I hate the most...

6- This is essentially 'Evangelion'. 

Spoiler AlertInitially I thought the game was more like Phantom Menace, in just how disappointing it was turning out to be. But nah, that was before the last big reveals. First, a few words about the big reveals of the game. It turns out that all life in the universe is caught in cycles of evolution. Life evolves, they make synthetic lifeforms (like the Geth) which then revolt and spread chaos. The Reapers were made to come around at the end of these cycles and harvest the organic lifeforms. Now here's a thing - organic lifeforms being caught in cycles of creating synthetic life which will destroy them? Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Battlestar Galactica. Noticing this, an ancient lifeform from way before the Protheans builds the Citadel and the Reapers to do its work. But the Citadel, and the Crucible, have another reason - to force an 'evolution' in the organic lifeforms, fusing them with the synthetic lifeforms so that they can find harmony. An unknown and ancient alien lifeform using artifacts to artificially 'evolve' a race? Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, 2001 A Space Odyssey. But thing is, I like those two. 2001 is a great movie, and despite its flaws, Battlestar Galactica was a good tv show. But Mass Effect is far closer to one other show, one I really can't stand. Let me spell it out.

Spoiler AlertSo, the Synthesis ending. Just like Evangelion, this is a conclusion that ends with the characters experiencing an artificially-created evolutionary step. The protagonists struggle with the plans of a sinister man looking to guide this process to his own whims, a man who often appears only in hologram. In both Mass Effect 3 and the Evangelion movie, characters are killed in pointless and occasionally seemingly mean-spirited ways. Both end with the characters (now with off-colour eyes) stranded on an inhuman landscape with no means of escape. Before I get any Eva fanboys insulting me for this, let me state - Yes, I understood Eva, I got all the psychological elements, I understood the reams of religious symbolism, I'm quite aware of the whole concepts of the Lilith/mother/Rei/womb death/love/rebirth concept. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't actually LIKE any of the characters, and found the entire thing to be written in the style of a writer who was having a nervous breakdown as his scriptwriting continued (which was exactly what was happening). If you like it, good for you, I'm pleased for you, but I can't stand it. I can't watch it without shouting at the characters for being so inept and implausible. And seeing Mass Effect decide to take the same storyline turns in the last 10 minutes just made me give up all hope for the franchise.

thank you Mr E i will save this post for when i finsiht he game, but from what i see i may just stop at the start of the last mission,

they clearly made a major blunder and will pay dearly for it i fear..for they were too slow in realizing it and still are dragging their feet in making ammends. A new ending patch is essential i believe if they are to save the series..and they did assure us that ...well Spoiler AlertShepherd is NOT dead, the exact words of the Bioware staffer was  ..this is not the last you will see of Shepherd

MJEccles, i only read most of your points diagonally, because you almost did everything exactly in the opposite way, my Mordin died in ME2 for example, wrex died, so i skipped those parts.

Spoiler AlertAlso in my game, Miranda didn't die

But I think i agree on most of your issues. 

Spoiler AlertI too find it very annoying that ultimately none of the choices you made seemed to matter and you don't know the ultimate fate of most characters or the universe itself. I still don't get the part where the normandy crashes on some planet and part of the crew walks out, doing what exactly? How did my companions get back on the normandy and why did they abandon me in the first place???ME3 lacks closure. In ME2 the endgame is done perfectly, every tiny detail matters and every playthrough will be different. I was genuinly surprised Mordin died last time, although he was loyal to me

Spoiler AlertBut i did like most of the rest of the game, because from what i've read from your post many things did differ in my playthrough. So there's still a lot to discover in ME3. It just absurd how they handled the whole endgame and tried to integrate the multiplayer into the single player campaign. I still prefer ME3 over ME1 though, the side quests are much more interesting and there's much more to discover, but when compared to ME2, this one feels rushed.

ChrisGer: oh, now that's news to me. Spoiler AlertI don't even know what happened to my Shepard in the end, how absurd is that eh

ya i heard about it all from some guys at the company but i havent played it yet myself..just started Mass Effect 2 and am liking it so far, love the settings and the detail and the music and the overall effect, they certainly did a fantastic job and i cant wait to get that main space station it is so beautfifully done.   I guess we dont get a driveable vehicle in 2 but i will enjoy whatever they do.  Have to balance between two Bioware titles, SWTOR and ME2

 Bioware has listened to their disgruntled fanbase.

Now i'm hopefull we will finally have some form of closure and see the effects of our choices throughout the games. 

http://kotaku.com/5899605/the-extended-mass-effect-3-ending-will-add-variations-not-choices

I read MJ Eccle's spoiler about the multiplayer.  I was busy looking for my ME2 disc so i could finish that, because i was thinking of finally giving in to the lure of ME3, but  nah. Bioware has become something completely different now, and so have their products. I spit on you, EA.

I didn't mind the ending. I mean yes, it was awful from a storytelling perspective but it was overshadowed by the rest of the game which was even worse. The characters and environments just weren't very good. While the first two games introduced us to a swarm of interesting characters and had us explore vibrant environments, ME3 was just a series of missions where you land on a planet, shoot things and go back to the ship.

Also, what happened to the characters from ME2? Thane didn't show up at all, neither did Jack, and all the characters I liked died - Tali, Mordin, Wrex, Miranda.

Originally Posted By walsh (7 APR 2012 1:44am)

 

Also, what happened to the characters from ME2? Thane didn't show up at all, neither did Jack, and all the characters I liked died - Tali, Mordin, Wrex, Miranda.

That's the beauty of ME3, they might not have appeared or get killed in ME3 in your playthrough because of some choices you made during the trilogy. 

In my playthrough both Jack and Thane were very interesting characters, they'd become much more fleshed out in ME3.

Huge spoiler concerning Thane: Spoiler AlertThane dying in the presence of his son in hospital was the most emotional moment of the trilogy for me and should be used as a prime example how stories are told in games.

In my case Kasumi was missing and something really weird had happened to Morinth.

Oi, with all the spoilers jumping around (thanks for telling me who dies)  I really don't have to play ME2 or 3 for the story at least...

LOL, and I got hit over the head with a hammer for revealing the vague whereabouts of a giant that just stands there, in Skyrim...   irony doesn't even begin to start applying.

As in Mass Effect 2 the whole crew may stay alive or die, depending on your decisions.

Your playthrough can be totally different than mine, so those aren't spoilers 

Originally Posted By markornikov (7 APR 2012 6:29am)

As in Mass Effect 2 the whole crew may stay alive or die, depending on your decisions.

Your playthrough can be totally different than mine, so those aren't spoilers 

 

 

Ok, just sayin'... still - I'm still wondering how the giant was a spoiler, but nevermind...         I guess we're quits then...     

Originally Posted By markornikov (7 APR 2012 2:01am)

That's the beauty of ME3, they might not have appeared or get killed in ME3 in your playthrough because of some choices you made during the trilogy. 

 

In my playthrough both Jack and Thane were very interesting characters, they'd become much more fleshed out in ME3.

 

Huge spoiler concerning Thane: Spoiler AlertThane dying in the presence of his son in hospital was the most emotional moment of the trilogy for me and should be used as a prime example how stories are told in games.

 

In my case Kasumi was missing and something really weird had happened to Morinth.

Oh. Well in my case I didn't have any decisions, though I'd played ME1 and 2. I didn't see any point for importing my player since I ended both those games with maxed out powers, and it wasn't like Quest for Glory where importing seems an obvious choice.

Originally Posted By markornikov (7 APR 2012 2:01am)

 and something really weird had happened to Morinth.

Less said about that utterly lazy and dismissive 'twist', the better.

Originally Posted By walsh (7 APR 2012 6:52pm)

 

Oh. Well in my case I didn't have any decisions, though I'd played ME1 and 2. I didn't see any point for importing my player since I ended both those games with maxed out powers, and it wasn't like Quest for Glory where importing seems an obvious choice.

 

That strikes me as an odd thing to do, the trilogy is based on decicions and learning their impacts.

During ME3 i felt i was living the story of 'my' Shepard, frequently my actions of the past events were questioned by various teammembers and i often wondered  how things would have been different...

If I'd started with some random shepard, it would have felt wrong, that wouldn't be my Shepard

Your stats only partially cross over to the next game, so it won't make the game any easier if you import a maxed out shepard.

Spoiler AlertAnd that's also the main reason why the ending was so bad, none of the decisions had a real impact on the various endings

Maybe I'll do a replay someday then. The thing is, I played 2 first, then 1 and then 3 and each time my Shephard looked different.

just in case you didn't know...

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, Bioware is developing Mass Effect 4