Everything else is just opportunistic spin. They’ll blame the worst community members they can find and play their own actions as noble but at the end of the day they screwed up badly enough that people high up were going to have to face consequences and while grasping at straws to fix it they defaulted to ‘just whip the drones harder’. They changed it because they very obviously sank their IP. BioWare employees could have begged to change it, offered to work for free, and the hierarchy they work under would have still said no if the only goal was to please fans. Player reviews and petitions mean less than nothing to them. We all know EA/BioWare wouldn’t change a god damn thing based on fan response. I think way too much focus is given to the community here. Hopefully something was learnt here though, about crunch, how much sway a community should have, artistic integrity, but also honesty and owning the choices made during development even if they are unpopular. What makes that harder in this scenario is it was the last game in the trilogy so you couldn’t come back with the next game and tweak it, plus that whole controversy with the leaked script. I do think there is a place for community feedback on creations, and acknowledgement that perhaps the direction chosen could have been different. It’s not canon to me because it just feels so out of place in my playthroughs. These days if I do play ME3, I generally just stop playing before I get to the starchild part. It’s just not my place to force a change, I just merely showed my disappointment with my wallet. My biggest gripe with it wasn’t “these endings are bad because they are the same” it was “these felt rushed with no consideration for what came before, and might come after.” It’s a shame, because it turned me off buying any of the DLC, which my friends said was stellar. I felt the extended cut was pointless anyway and didn’t really solve the issue that the original endings left the universe in. I absolutely hated the ending, but as someone that creates, I completely understand the desire to keep a vision intact even if the viewer doesn’t agree with it. In any event, the online harassment campaign that precipitated it was heinous, and unfortunately became something of a blueprint for fans of other blockbuster games. While some of the people interviewed who worked on Mass Effect 3 shared criticisms of the game’s final scenes, others were adamant that it was creating bad precedent when it came to the creators’ ownership over their art vis-à-vis fans. One ex-BioWare developer People Make Games spoke with likened the decision to create a new ending to opening Pandora’s box. “I don’t normally attribute much of that to Mass Effect, but it is safe to say that like, around that time a lot of people were starting therapy.”īioWare has been criticised for a crunch-heavy culture as recently as 2019’s disastrous launch of Anthem, though that game didn’t spark a similar level of vitriol from longtime fans. “I remember us being pretty ok, but within two years once we got into Dragon Age: Inquisition … everybody was fried, everybody was completely destroyed, morale was incredibly low,” ME3 cinematic designer Zachariah Scott said.
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