Mass Effect 3 Postmortem: We Didn’t Expect People to Look for Different Endings

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Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters explained at a panel that the team did not anticipate the ending controversy because they believed each player would have been satisfied with their ending and not have looked for different ones.

During a Writers Guild of America panel discussing writing in video games, Walters addresses the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy and how the writing team ended up creating the red, blue, and green endings. “We felt our energy was better spent creating one good ending rather than trying to make three separate endings,” Walters begins, “Our thinking was that people would be so awed by how they thought their choices changed the ending that it didn’t matter if the other endings weren’t actually different because they would not bother looking for them.”

“We also expected that when people told each other about what ending they got, they would tell their own version of it and how their choices all the way from Mass Effect 1 changed their personal ending,” Walters explains, “We thought it was a very powerful message that there could be so many different takes on what was essentially the exact same thing. People would not have realized they all got the same ending if things had gone our way.”

When asked about how long they had been planning the ending, Walters replied, “We never thought about the ending until near the end of development on Mass Effect 3. I personally did not see it was such a big issue that we needed an ending that felt satisfying. The best endings are ones that make you question what the writer was thinking and why they believed it would be good. The greatest movies and books leave people with that exact same feeling. I think I ended up accomplishing what I had set out to do.”

Walters concluded his section of the panel talking about writing for Mass Effect 4 saying, “The only way we can be free as writers is if we limit the choices players can make during the game.”

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So. I’ve never liked Walters.  He always came across with a seriously arrogant and creepy male gaze going on to me, but seriously.

Why would a company that markets itself as one of the best at story-driven gaming hire someone who thinks endings don’t matter.

Who is too lazy to develop choices within the overall framework of his plot?

Who is too selfish to bother acknowledging that other people might have different points of view?

Who legitimately thinks people don’t interact with their media, and that it’s good to leave them confused?

The best endings are ones that make you question what the writer was thinking and why they believed it would be good.

Who the hell taught this man to write or even analyze writing?  You should NEVER question what a writer was thinking at the end of a story.  NEVER.  It should never cross your MIND to wonder what the writer was thinking.  Your goal as an entertainer should be to leave your audience basking in the afterglow, so to speak.

When you finish something, be it a movie, a book or  a FUCKING VIDEO GAME, your goal should be one where the reader/watcher/player wants to hit rewind and relive the whole damned adventure ALL OVER AGAIN.  The best way to do that is to make a product YOU love and keep wanting to revisit.  Clearly this asshat never thought of that.

Fucking idiot.

The greatest movies and books leave people with that exact same feeling.

Uh, no.  We’ll take Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for an example. Never once have I questioned, nor had anyone I talked to questioned, what Tolkien was thinking at the ends of those stories.  NEVER ONCE.  We were all too busy going back to the beginning to reread the epic adventures of Bilbo, Frodo and company.  And the movies didn’t change that.  I’ve seen the trilogy almost as often as I’ve read the damned books.  I’ve analyzed Tolkien’s worldbuilding, his characterization, even his dialogue.  Never once did I wonder what he was thinking when I got to the end.  Because he did his damned job and the ending grew organically out of the flesh of the story.  

The Red/Blue/Green bullshit at the end of Mass Effect grew organically out of Walters’ ass, maybe, but not out of the narrative of the three games.

Worst writer in gaming. Hands down.

See, like I can understand what he was trying to say. But that sort of thing only has merit if the ending has some kind of meaning to it. When you end a story and it doesn’t end how you think it would, you yes should be still basking in that afterglow but also thinking about what the story taught you. Because if it didn’t end the way YOU thought it would, clearly the writer thought something DIFFERENT and schooled you, had something to show you that you didn’t know you wanted.

But Mass Effect 3’s ending didn’t teach us anything. It gave us a fake choice, a contrived sacrifice. Which is almost meaningless because for a heroic sacrifice to mean something, the hero actually has to not be told they must do it, they have to choose it on their own and have the option to lose courage and back out and risk their friends. It is not being given a choice of 1 of 3 deaths. That is just Sad, not heroic or tragic. That is ‘we are adding themes of death, which tug at every living human being’s feelings of mortality and sadness when a sympathetic character they have guided the whole way dies.’

That is not sincere, real tragedy, that is 'we are forcing you to kill off your character and pressing your bio buttons to think it’s meaningful, hope you don’t notice how contrived this is, bye.’

The 3 different endings of ME3 did not teach us shit. When we sat back, as this clown said, to think about what the writer could be thinking, we all thought the same obvious thing.

That endings are expensive and it’s much cheaper to just make one ending and advertise it as three.

Is that what he wanted us to think about, I wonder? Not that the author chose a meaningful lesson to show us that we didn’t know we had to learn, but that the studio was cheap bastards who didn’t want to actually pay for the experience they advertised? Because they thought audiences were so stupid they’d be DUMBFOUNDED by the goodness of ME3 and forget to do the thing they’ve done to EVERY BIOWARE GAME that has come out since BALDER’S GATE?

(via suddenlycomics)