This post will contain spoilers for all three Mass Effect games.
The Mass Effect trilogy was groundbreaking not just for Bioware, but for gaming as a whole, as the idea of personal choices having consequences and results spanning an entire trilogy was something new in an industry lately at risk for stagnation. The series, with its various "decision points," and carrying those decisions forward to each game, has been in some ways a grand experiment in game design, and as such, Mass Effect 3, the final stage of that experiment, was perhaps the most anticipated title to ever come out of Bioware. Expectations follow naturally from all that anticipation, and after Mass Effect 2, Bioware had a monumental task ahead of them in rising to meet all that anticipation and expectation.
In terms of engaging the customer base, much of Bioware's work was already done by the first two games in the series. Judging by sales figures for the first two games, somewhere around two million fans were waiting to carry their personally crafted Commander Shepard into Mass Effect 3 to see how the story would conclude. Both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 offered the player a number of key decision points that could have unforeseen consequences as the series drew to a close. In Mass Effect, on the planet Virmire, you're given a chance to talk down the krogan battlemaster Wrex, who disagrees with destroying a laboratory that may hold the key to curing the genophage, a fertility plague infecting his people. Alternatively, you can shoot him and end it there. Later, faced with the impending nuke detonation, you have to make a choice to save one of two crew members: Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams or Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko. In another scenario, you're forced to decide between destroying the last queen of the rachni, an insectoid race that once threatened the galaxy, or allowing them a second chance. In Mass Effect 2, you're tasked with gaining the loyalty of your squad before tackling a seemingly impossible suicide mission, and non-loyal crew members have a high chance of not making it out alive. Along the way, you might re-write Reaper-worshipping geth heretics or destroy them, and you have to decide whether questionable research into the nature of the krogan genophage is worth saving.
These examples are only some of the major decision points in the two games. Along the way in each, you interact with a number of non-player characters, and your interactions with them are tracked by the game and determine whether or not they appear in later games in the series. You also have the opportunity to pursue romance in each game, and this comes with its own decision points: your potential partners from the first game are present only in supporting roles in the second, but you have an entire set of new "fish in the sea." Do you abandon your former partner for a newfound fling or do you remain true to them throughout the second game?
Even in Mass Effect 2, the results of your choices in the first game could be seen, such as when Wrex becomes a clan leader among the krogan if he survives your confrontation at Virmire. You meet the survivor of Ashley and Kaiden briefly. When fans felt Liara (one of the most popular romance options in the first game) had too minor of a role in Mass Effect 2 was lacking, Bioware produced a massive downloadable mission expanding on her character, and, if you choose, on your relationship with her as well. Naturally, seeing decisions from the first game carry over into the second game left fans clamoring to find out how the decisions they'd made would carry on into Mass Effect 3. In terms of creating a strong selling point for Mass Effect 3, Bioware's work was done once Mass Effect 2 was on store shelves.
Their real task, then, was delivering on the implicit promise that Mass Effect was really the fan's story, since scarcely any two play throughs would be exactly the same. Fans were somewhat apprehensive after Mass Effect 2 (as the general plot of the game remains the same, regardless of your choices) and following the release of Dragon Age II, which was viewed by many as a lackluster title. Bioware knew what they had to do to quell the fears of these devoted fans: they needed to convince the fans that their story was going to come to a magnificent conclusion, and that it was truly going to be their story.
For fans worried that choices in Mass Effect didn't have a huge impact on Mass Effect 2, Bioware sent the message that many things would have an even greater impact on Mass Effect 3. Following that, in numerous interviews in the year or so prior to Mass Effect 3's release, Bioware representatives hammered that point home: this was your story, and the ending you got would be different from the one your friend got. The fans had no need to worry, as Bioware knew exactly what they were doing. Mass Effect 3 was going to deliver, and deliver magnificently. The game was in good hands.
Except that it wasn't. Rather, it seems like those hands got all buttered up and dropped the game when it came to the conclusion. For whatever reason, the conclusion to Mass Effect 3 (and indeed, the series as a whole) failed to live up to their statements in interviews. Fans were angry. "Hundreds of hours" invested in the series, they said, were wasted. "Their choices never mattered," they complained. Was the fan dissatisfaction warranted? Had Bioware promised more than they were able to deliver? The best way to answer those questions (since Bioware has been pretty tight-lipped since the whole controversy exploded) is to take a look at those interviews, find out what they said about the game, and whether the game was what they said it would be.
Almost one year ago, in a video interview with GameInformer, Casey Hudson (executive producer for the franchise) had this to say:
“For people who are invested in these characters and the back-story of the universe and everything, all of these things come to a resolution in Mass Effect 3. And they are resolved in a way that's very different based on what you would do in those situations.”Assuming that, in context, Hudson was referring to the game as a whole, Mass Effect 3 lived up to this statement admirably. Long-standing plot-lines, such as the problem of the krogan genophage are resolved in masterful sequences of gameplay and narrative. Key decisions from the previous games come in to play, and if, for instance, Wrex is dead in your story, his replacement is a vengeful warmonger, giving your decision on whether to cure the genophage or clandestinely sabotage the cure vastly different context than if Wrex survived all the way back in Mass Effect.
But there's one plot-line that doesn't get this kind of resolution, and that's the one that has to do with the Reapers (you know, the primary antagonists). Throughout Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, they're depicted as unknowable, Lovecraftian forces of evil and destruction. They taunt you with their unfathomable motives (through Sovereign in the first game and Harbinger in the second). The goals and purpose of the Reapers was one of the series' greatest mysteries, and Mass Effect 3 attempts to shed some light on that mystery.
In the game's conclusion, you are introduced to an entity called the Catalyst, who explains the Reapers and their motivations in only a few lines of expository dialogue. Commander Shepard asks the Catalyst if it knows how to stop the Reapers, after which the following exchange occurs:
CATALYST: "Perhaps. I control the Reapers. They are my solution."The problem is that there's nothing unfathomable in this at all, and this provides an unsatisfying resolution to the mystery of the Reapers. In five simple, short, and straight-forward lines of dialogue, the Catalyst explains to Shepard (and the player) that the Reapers are a "solution" to the problem of a technological singularity, in which artificial life can outpace and threaten organic life. This presents a whole range of problems, as it stands, as other interactions with the Reapers tell us they view organic life as a "an accident" and they don't seem to be motivated by anything resembling preservation instincts (other than self-preservation, anyway). For those fans deeply invested in the lore of the setting and in trying to solve the mystery of the Reapers, this whole explanation is ultimately empty.
SHEPARD: "Solution? To what?"
CATALYST: "Chaos. The created will always rebel against their creators. But we found a way to stop that from happening, a way to restore order for the next cycle."
SHEPARD: "By wiping out organic life?"
CATALYST: "No. We harvest advanced civilizations, leaving the younger ones alone. Just as we left your people alive the last time we were here."
SHEPARD: "But you killed the rest..."
CATALYST: "We helped them ascend, so they could make way for new life, storing the old life in Reaper form."
SHEPARD: "I think we'd rather keep our own form."
CATALYST: "No, you can't. Without us to stop it, synthetics would destroy all organics. We've created the cycle so that never happens. That's the solution."
Now, this post is already far longer than I thought it would be originally, so I'm only going to provide one further quote (this one also from Casey Hudson) as an example of how Bioware didn't live up to the hype with which they surrounded their game. In another interview with GameInformer given only two months before the game's release, Hudson responds to a question wondering whether the same complexity found in Mass Effect 2's ending would be found in Mass Effect 3:
"Yeah, and I’d say much more so, because we have the ability to build the endings out in a way that we don’t have to worry about eventually tying them back together somewhere. This story arc is coming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lot more different. At this point we’re taking into account so many decisions that you’ve made as a player and reflecting a lot of that stuff. It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C.
It’s more like there are some really obvious things that are different and then lots and lots of smaller things, lots of things about who lives and who dies, civilizations that rose and fell, all the way down to individual characters. That becomes the state of where you left your galaxy. The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them. It would be interesting to see if somebody could put together a chart for that. Even with Mass Effect 2’s..." [the interviewer cuts him off here]Here, we see the implicit promise that all of the branching paths from the first two games result in a wide variety of endings for Mass Effect 3 and the ending for the trilogy as a whole. Because Mass Effect 2's ending gave you a great degree of control over how you tackled the final mission (by assigning squad mates to various tasks) culminating in who survives the final mission (influenced by crew member loyalty, how much you've upgraded your ship, and what assignments you give out), fans had a template through which they interpreted this statement.
The ending delivered in the game, however, doesn't coincide with Hudson's statement here at all. Shepard, after his conversation with the Catalyst (excerpted above) is presented with a choice on how to defeat the Reapers. Depending on your war assets score (essentially, how much of the galactic fleet you've gathered for the final assault on Earth), you're presented with up to three choices on how to use the anti-Reaper Crucible to win the battle. Your choice, flavored again by your total number of war assets, results in the game playing a a single cutscene with seven variations. Most noticeably, your choice determines the color of the explosion that fires from the Crucible to defeat the Reapers. Depending on your total war assets, the explosion may or may not destroy Earth as collateral damage.
After this cutscene, another plays that shows your pilot, Joker, flying your ship away from the battle and becoming stranded on a garden-like world. The Mass Relays (ancient devices that make instantaneous space travel possible) are all destroyed, potentially stranding much of the galactic fleet Earth's solar system. Galactic civilization, which depends on the Mass Relays for trade and transit, will likely collapse, and that's before taking into account all of the damage the Reapers did to the galaxy during the war that plays out throughout Mass Effect 3.
Hudson is right in that you do, in the course of the game, decide the fates of three major civilizations, but these decisions that you make have no bearing on the ultimate state of the galaxy after the game's ending. No matter what choices you make throughout all three games, the ending to the game is largely the same. Galactic civilization has crumbled, and the game's epilogue scene (depicting a grandfather telling a grandson the legend of "The Shepard") indicates that it takes as least as long as it does for the story to become a legend for galactic civilization to rebuild.
Hudson had to, at this point, have known the game's ending. Normally, games take six to eight weeks to become certified and ready for distribution, so Mass Effect 3 had to have been complete by January (roughly) if it was to make it onto store shelves in time for the March 6th 2012 release date. In an attempt to maintain hype for the game, he (perhaps unwittingly) mislead the fans into thinking they were going to get something very different from what the game actually delivered.
There are numerous other interviews and quotes from folks who worked on the game, like the lead writer, Mac Walters, and Mike Gamble, the associate producer. A handful of them are collected here on the GameFAQs message boards for Mass Effect 3 (PC version). All of them indicated that the game would take far more into account regarding all the branch points leading up to the conclusion than it actually did, and this played no small part in fostering the fan anger that lead to the entire fan movement to "Retake" Mass Effect.
There's no doubt that Bioware was attempting to do something massive with Mass Effect 3. Trying to account for so many decisions across three whole games in the game's conclusion was like standing before the sheer cliff face of Mount Improbable. Ultimately, they weren't able to deliver as well as they probably hoped in this regard. Where they truly failed, though, and sowed the seeds for this massive fan backlash against them, was in all these little quotes and sound bites that led the fans to believe Bioware had actually succeeded at their monumental task.
In the end, they probably would have been better off letting the hype machine of the two previous games do its work. Their comments on the game, contributions to the hype machine itself, did little more than add fuel to the fire when the bomb inevitably went off. Coming soon, I'll be taking a detailed look at the ending itself, which is really where most of the kindling for that fire came from before eventually tackling Bioware's response to the fan outcry, which made the whole thing explode like a "freak gasoline fight accident."
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