Many are upset by the final moments, a three-way decision that is not impacted upon by the rest of the game, as if this invalidates everything that came before it. And, well, that's bloody brilliant, isn't it?
It's just, those consequences occurred on my long path toward the ending. So many, on so many of the characters, in so many ways. "Grunt went on to form a band, Grunt And The Tube Babies, who had 91 top ten hits in the Galactic Billboard, thanks to Shepard's love and support." I loved and supported Grunt! That means my choices were meaningful!īut here's the thing: My choices did have consequences. But I'd argue it robs the player of so much potential for those characters. Like an Eighties movie freeze-framing at the end and telling us who went on to discover a cure for cancer, and who finally settled down and had three kids, it certainly gives an immediately satisfying sense of closure, and perhaps would have dealt with a lot of the grumbling. I feel like so many of people's complaints about Mass Effect 3's apparent lack of consequence would have been addressed by something as tacky as Dragon Age's flash-card descriptions of what had happened to the characters in your party. And that's great! Because BioWare had a story to tell, and they were going to tell it. Even in a game like Dragon Age, where our choices lead to what feels like a unique conclusion just for us, we still fought the same big dragon, still followed the exact same path, and merely received cosmetic differences, none unique but shared by tens/hundreds of thousands of others. That notion makes sense in a game like Minecraft, but applying it to narrative, pre-scripted projects like the Mass Effect series is just naive. The distinction with gaming, you see, is you get to make choices, and those choices have consequences, and thus the game is unique to us. All of them.Īnother trap gamers have fallen into is the sheer disgust with which the notion of "being told a story" is met.
Mass Effect 3 tells a story, and I'm here to defend it.Ĭlearly this post contains spoilers. But however we've come to this place, it's one that fails to recognise the real pleasure of being told a story. Perhaps it's a result of having been indoctrinated by a lifetime of movies with "surprise twists", or stories so poorly written that they rely on their final hook. The obsession with endings is a peculiar one.
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