On Endings – The Enduring Legacy of Silent Hill 2 and the Missteps of Mass Effect 3

Ending a story is hard.

Consumers of any storytelling medium have a tendency to place a disproportionate amount of importance on the ending of a story. There is of course logic behind this. A story’s ending after all represents the final moments an audience has with the author’s work. And yet, you are far more likely to hear “the ending ruined it for me” than a comment about the first chapter of a book or the first ten minutes of a movie ruining the story for someone.

As stories in video games have become more complex, so have ending systems. RPGs in particular have given birth to complex ending trees. If you look up the potential ending states in any Bethesda game, you will see over a dozen ending states for quests, characters, or cities. Each ending state can have multiple endings, and the composite of all these different potential mini-endings are numerous potential “endings.” It’s a neat little bit of tricky that allow developers to advertise dozens upon dozens of endings. But open-world RPGs are not the only genre to feature unique ending mechanics.

I picked two games to discuss here: Silent Hill 2 and Mass Effect 3. Let’s start with Silent Hill 2. There will be spoilers for both games, so you have been warned. You play as James Sutherland, who has been brought to the town of Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from your dead wife Mary. James has the goal of reaching the Lakeview Hotel, where Mary and James spent a vacation together that was special to the couple. That journey represents the entire game. If you haven’t played the game, you should stop reading this and go play it as Silent Hill 2 is a masterclass in video game storytelling.

Silent Hill 2 is not the first game to utilize something like the ending system it possesses, but it remains one of the more unique implementations of it. There are six endings in the game, though three of them are only available on additional playthroughs and are less important. The three primary endings are referred to as “Leave,” “In Water,” and “Maria.” Throughout your playthrough, the game keeps track of several player actions. These include how quickly you use health items to restore stamina, how quickly you pursue story objectives versus wander throughout the game world, if you listen to certain conversations fully, and if you examine certain game objects. Not much changes in the final section of the game; the final boss does differ based on which ending you have earned, but that’s about it.

What makes the endings so fascinating is that they represent three potential contextualizations on the story you have just played. Your actions throughout the game are used to determine James’ motivation for killing Mary. In the “Leave,” ending, James is able to come to terms with killing Mary. His talk with “Mary” at the end of the game results in him forgiving himself and leaving the town. In the “In Water” ending, James has similar motivations, however is so racked with guilt over killing his wife that he commits suicide. In the “Maria” ending, James’ motivations take on a more sinister tone, and he is more unwilling to confront the fact he killed Mary. He becomes drawn to Maria, the town’s spiritual realization of a younger, healthier, and quite frankly sexier Mary.

From a top-level view, this all sounds fantastic. With its mechanics laid bare, the player can logically understand why they received the ending they did. And yet, if you play the game for the first time completely unspoiled, boy does it come a bit out of left field. Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game. The genre teaches you to conserve health items. Why would the player not examine a knife or not examine a recording of a conversation? Those are natural actions in any game featuring exploration. In some ways, it almost feels as if the video game medium failed Silent Hill 2 and not the other way around in this regard. Even in the context of playing Silent Hill 2 at the time of release, its ending mechanics are at war with the ways gamers had been conditioned to play games by its contemporaries.

That said, the endings of the game are beloved. Time has been very kind to Silent Hill 2, as it moved from a pretty well-received game with solid sales numbers to what’s considered a classic. Why is that? Why are gamers so keen on this game’s endings and its ending system that they hold Silent Hill 2 up as an example of everything right with ending design?

Let’s move on to Mass Effect 3 for a bit before we discuss that. I will admit I possess strong feelings about this game. Mass Effect 2 remains one of my favorite games of all time. Mass Effect 3 is maybe the game I have been most disappointed in ever. It represented so much squandered potential that it would take an article much larger than this one to fully convey my feelings toward it. And yet, I will come to its defense in this regard: the endings are not the problem with that game. Allow me to explain.

There probably aren’t many people around unfamiliar with Mass Effect 3. Bioware’s initial promise on the first Mass Effect was a trilogy of game featuring a vast array of choices that would impact not only the individual games, but the story of the entire trilogy. So when the final minutes of Mass Effect 3 ensued, and suddenly a glowing space entity presented Shepard with the decision to destroy all synthetic life, control the Reapers, or to merge all life into some form of synthetic/organic hybrid, it’s natural to think a lot of people lost their minds. Instead of particular choices impacting the ending, the game presents the player with an aggregate scoring mechanic of all decisions known as “Estimated Military Strength,” or EMS for short. Each decision point in the trilogy resulted in a positive or negative impact on Shepard’s EMS. The EMS score determines what endings the player has access to. In order to get access to one particular ending, the player needs to play the game’s multiplayer mode. There were not enough points in the game to otherwise reach a score high enough to access it.

Here’s the interesting thing: the ending systems of Silent Hill 2 and Mass Effect 3 really aren’t that far apart. The only mechanical difference is Silent Hill 2 calculates an ending and hands you it, while Mass Effect 3 calculates endings available to the player and lets you choose one. One could reach the conclusion that the issue was allowing the player a choice, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Would simply being presented with one of Mass Effect 3’s endings have made the endings work? Not really.

The issue is Mass Effect 3 told a flawed story from the moment the game started. Shepard’s goal in Mass Effect 3 is to build the Crucible. What is the reason for this? Nobody knows, but for some reason the Protheans thought it was a good idea. But you never really learn anything about them (unless you bought the Javik DLC, but let’s leave that atrocity aside for the moment). So while Earth is being glassed, Shepard runs off to complete an entire game full of side quests and story missions mostly about other things. Never before has a video game presented a sense of urgency so early, and then at no point stressed it as important. The Reapers may be the great galactic menace, but prepare to spend half the game fighting a terrorist group and their anime cyber ninja. And all of this leads to three endings stressing themes that are largely off message with what’s going on.

Mass Effect 3’s endings were not failures because of the mechanics they used, but because of their content and the story that led to them. It felt like a narrative departure from what the games had presented to that point. The three (later retconned to four) endings lack any insightful commentary on prior events. The control ending feels like the option meant for a Renegade playthrough, as at no point does it seem like a good idea in that universe to grant any singular person or group that level of power. So if the Paragon playthrough’s endings are seen as Destroy or Synthesis, the Destroy ending flies in the face of all of Shepard’s efforts find peaceful co-existence with the Geth. But does that mean my Shepard wants to play God with and rewrite the DNA of every life in the galaxy? I can actually better understand the point of view of people who enjoy the game’s story more than people who say just the endings are the issue.

At the end of the day, does Mass Effect 3’s ending mechanics really work much differently than other Bioware, Bethesda, or Witcher games? There are slight variations in ending count and where decisions are presented that determine the ending, but that’s about it. Mass Effect 3 was simply lazy, bad storytelling that resulted in a set of endings that reflected that.

The “Choose an Ending” solution to branching endings has perhaps gotten a bad reputation. Much like certain narrative devices such as mind control and amnesia/memory loss, we have an initial negative reaction as these devices are so often poorly utilized. It does not mean they can’t be used effectively though. The recent Jessica Jones Netflix series uses mind control brilliantly to examine themes of consent. The Bourne Trilogy and Memento are all fantastic movies. Danganronpa 1 and 2 both use memory loss to tell interesting stories.

I remain concerned that gamers have become so wrapped up in the mechanics of endings that authors may seek to modify their stories as a result. In the case of presenting the player with a final choice that determines whether you receive one of several endings, there is nothing inherently wrong with this mechanic. After all, if you present one, two, or even several decisions earlier in the game that determine your ending, it’s inherently the same mechanic. You just decide on your ending earlier. If there is no particular merit or theme being explored through multiple endings, what is the purpose of them? Are we trying to reduce video game storytelling to having all the merit of choose your own adventure books out of a misguided need to ask for authors to surrender more narrative control to the player? There is some value in this for certain games, but It would be in error to pursue particular mechanics as the universal solution to how to end a video game.

First of all, bravo. Great post, I love it.

I have to agree on how the Silent Hill 2 ending vexes new players. I thought the ending I got was crap and tossed the game to the nearest lake (exaggerating). ME3's endings were all disappointing but I don't think they ruined the game, but they more or less gave a coherent closure to the story and I think that having Shepard choose what to do at that point is the ultimate decision you make as Shepard. Throughout 3 games I made decision after decision, it should be me who decides how all of this ends not some tally system or ending-tree mechanic. That's what I liked about the ending mechanic however lame the endings actually were. Plus ME is an RPG if I have been coherently playing as an absolute paragon it is completely out of character if I choose to destroy all synths or synthesize. ME allowed the player to play their character to the last bit. Unlike SH2 were you are there just to uncover the story and depending on how good or bad you are as a player you get a ceratin ending.

I just went through all three Mass Effect's again recently since I bought some DLC that I didn't get in the prior playthroughs, and while I wasn't one to hate on the end of three like many others were, I did initially find it disappointing (although I also liked it to a degree as well, just in the way it made me feel aside from disappointment). When I got to the end of three this time, it didn't really bother me. I mean, I don't really know what was retconned. From what I remember, it was something that was mentioned in Arrival about the mass relays and how they can or can't be being destroyed or something. That aside, my main issue was that it ended the same for everyone basically, but this time, it didn't bother me because I noticed and considered the fact that everything that needed to be tied up between what was going on in the galaxy was already done, and I got the satisfaction out of that, which was the point for me. I've done all endings before (and beat the game twice prior), but this time chose the synthesis ending since it brings everyone together as one, even the Reapers, and doesn't kill any of the races. I enjoyed it, and I have little issue with how it ends now. Silent Hill 2... All I can say is that, that game is okay; I was hoping it'd be longer.

Was it ever widely held that the problem with ME3 was that they showed you all the choices at the end and let you pick one? That's how every Mass Effect game ended. You might be on to something with your fear of authors shoving choices into players' hands: that seems like exactly what led to ME3's endings. It's like they tried to come up a new choice just like any of the countless others players made throughout the series instead of trying to tie together the consequences of even the events that weren't decided by the player. They had so little to do with the rest of the series that any of them could have been the ending of ME1.

As someone who loved Mass Effect 3 and was satisfied by the original endings, I get the disappointment but absolutely do not agree with it.

The choice at the end has such vast ramifications. You're in the unique situation to have spoken with Sovereign, spoken with Virgil, gathered people from all over the galaxy from many different races. You've seen the beginning, middle, and now the end of the war. Shepard is the only individual alive that can really understand what all this means, and the ending hours of a hopeless war lead you to the mindset that everything has already drastically changed. After the final run in front of Harbinger, it gave my wounded Shepard a sense of finality. After 100 hours in the series, I felt prepared to make a decision. And it was now or never.

So you can follow the original plan of defeating the Reapers, use their power, or try something new. I spent a good 15 minutes thinking about my choice based on all of Shepard's experiences. I came to the conclusion that destroying all synthetics wasn't the right option. Controlling them was too much responsibility. Through my interactions with such varied races, synthetics, and my prior conversations, I decided that synthesis may in fact be the next step in evolution. And if they want to synthesize, it would mean they don't want to kill everything. This will move everything forward. If they're lying about synthesis, they're probably lying about the other two options and will kill everything anyway. So let's take that next step.

With that being said, my renegade Shepard gave no fucks and was gonna carry out the mission. Ruthless as it is, the destroy ending was the only option for her. Whatever it takes. So let's examine this comment of yours: "What makes the endings so fascinating is that they represent three potential contextualizations on the story you have just played. Your actions throughout the game are used to determine James’ motivation for killing Mary." In Mass Effect, the ending made me reflect on everything I had done, and my good and bad playthroughs differed so much that the final choice made me reexamine my motivations for the past 100 hours. From my point of view, the finale does a great job of making you look at the past and reminisce about your journey. But what about the future?

What I loved about the endings, as mentioned earlier, is that they absolutely change everything about the universe. I remember reading that the endings are "too similar," differentiated by the color of a beam. But the true ending isn't the moment that it happens, it's what happens after. That's where the differentiation is, that's where you get to contemplate the consequences of all of your actions, and it was a brilliant way to end the series. Not so much that you and your crew defeated the enemy, but that you've truly made a difference in the fate of the galaxy. In a series that put so much emphasis on how you choose to play it, I couldn't ask for anything better.

Silent Hill 2 was cool, as well.

So says Warren. *spinning drop kick*

@ntm:The most important narrative issue the updated endings addressed was that in the ME fiction, destroying the Mass Relay would have wiped out most if not all life in the galaxy housing it. Here's a pretty good article on the changes. If you look back on initial reactions to the game, you'll see a lot of people screaming about how basically everyone's dead no matter what you choose. That was the bit you mentioned about the Arrival DLC, that showed the effects of destroying a Mass Relay.

Other than that, the updated endings are such a weird thing to me. I get why someone might find them a little more satisfying from a presentation perspective, but they don't really change the narrative. It was such a weird situation from start to finish.

@mavs: While it wasn't the most common complaint about the endings, there were certainly a fair share of fans saying they didn't want the series to end with a choice at the end or a "pick an ending" situation. However, it is certainly a complaint that has become more prevalent in recent times, which is where I think gamers have gone off-track from the issues they really want addressed. Mass Effect 2's lead writer has gone on record about what the original endings were intended to be. He's also said he doesn't think reaction to it would have been that different.

I think what Bioware found from trying to solve the business problem Mass Effect tried to tackle, i.e. dozens of choices impacting a story and compounding into an ending, is there is limited narrative value to this. There has to be a purpose to the multiple endings beyond novelty. Beyond the issues with production costs on branching content, reality will never meet player expectation of being able almost write the story for themselves at the end. Like you said, I think they tried to force a certain ending count and a complex algorithm that would impact the ending, and not only missed the mark in how they did both, but also hurt their own narrative in the process.

@csl316: Thanks for the reply! I actually get people who like Mass Effect 3's plot and endings actually a lot more than I get the view of specifically disliking the endings. And by the way, despite all my complaints, I think the Geth-Quarian conflict portion of the narrative and the conflict on Tuchanka were two of the best sections in the series. While I certainly enjoy engaging in my fair share of "what color lights do you want" jokes, that aspect of the endings is a presentation issue. Perhaps whether you are satisfied with those choices lies with how you played the game. Paragon Shepards really only had two in-character choices, and the Synthesis ending is even then a bit of a leap in terms of what action she'd take. So a lot of players felt cornered into choosing the Destroy ending, but didn't necessarily agree with it. My Shepard successfully managed to broker peace between the Geth and Quarians, so suddenly asking her to commit genocide toward the Geth was abhorrent.

That's the one aspect of the endings where I might say "okay, that was the problem with the game's narrative." But the late introduction of the Crucible into the narrative minus needed context (some of it because they moved Javik's content to DLC, the grossest example of removing vital game content as selling it separately I can ever recall) and the fact a third of the game or more involves Cerberus for no really good reason were much bigger issues to me.

But yes, the device of offering different contextualizations on the journey wasn't my issue.

Awesome post! You also touched on Mass Effect 2 being one of your favourite all time games - I think that game's structure (and how it ties into the ending) is the major reason for it.

In ME2 the stakes are set early and you know exactly what you're in for - you need to pull together a team of badasses and go on a suicide mission to save the galaxy. The entire game is built around this concept of forming your team. With this setup, ME2 deftly sidesteps the notion of "bad pacing" we often level at open-world RPGs. The character-specific loyalty quests don't feel like optional asides that take us away from the world-ending threat. In fact, they feel necessary because they hammer home the importance of trust and loyalty among the disparate members of the crew, and the need to come together to accomplish something greater.

The final mission feels incredibly personal as a result of all this. All the interpersonal beefs (beeves?) between characters are set aside in this massive multi-part finale, and it just works. We even forgive ME2 for the crappy human-reaper hybrid boss thing because the characters were so memorable, the stories so well told, and the pacing so damn tight. In the grand scheme of things ME2 is a very small game. Sure it spans solar systems and alien worlds. But really it is the story of taking down a single ship, and putting together the only crew in the galaxy that can do it. And it's fucking RAD.

@ibarguengoytia: Thanks!

It actually irks me to see Silent Hill 2 fans kind of cushion new players of the game about the ending system. There are super interesting aspects about the ending system and what it says both about the narrative and about the video game medium that should be experienced raw. Like you mentioned, it does risk making you want to throw your controller through the TV, especially because you're unlikely to get the game's "good ending" the first time through.

Maybe that's just a leftover bit of defensiveness about the game since it wasn't as popular or highly regarded when it first came out, and fans have since worked to build up the rep of the game. It's such a hard game to contextualize by modern standards. It's a relatively short game: 8-10 hours in length tops. It's meant to be played through multiple times. If it came out today and wasn't a $20-$30 downloadable game, people would probably complain about its value proposition. And while the ending system is innovative, fascinating, and adds to the narrative when a player understands its inner workings, it is also the singular perfect argument against the rallying cries of "endings presented to the players rather than chosen are inherently better."

The reason I like Witcher 3 so much is because the ending is defined by the choices you take earlier in the game. Conversation choices, actions you take in the game, how you choose to resolve things, all come together and defines what ending you get. I prefer when games do this because it makes me feel like my decisions matter. I know that it's all scripted and nothing is truly random, truly unique. I know the ending I get in most of my RPG's are the ones a lot of other people will get. It's an illusion ultimately, but depending how it's done is the difference between having a satisfying ending or a disappointing one.

So I will say this is a great article you've written here. You've nailed why I dislike the Mass Effect 3 endings so much, albeit with much less strong language.

The biggest issue with RPG's and decisions in them are that, ultimately you are playing a game that was written and directed by these people. They are guiding the story in a direction that you can very seldom change entirely. Some decisions you make are huge with rippling consequences, and with Mass Effect 3 in particular you can see the result in some of these. But again, ultimately, you are playing a story that allows some freedom but not true freedom, and will ultimately see the ultimate ending of the ultimate game. I have no idea why I'm saying ultimately so much.

The biggest failures in this regard are people like Bioware who seem to give you a hefty amount of control and say in the game, then all of the sudden pull it back and say, welp, we've gotta end this game somehow! Say what you will about the narrative decisions that they made with the ending, having all of the control stricken from your hands is pretty intense.

@fram: Thanks!

That is a pretty spot on summary of why Mass Effect 2 is so damn good. It had an understanding about itself and a restraint of not trying to do more than it could or needed to that allowed them to just make a quality game. Sure, there are different endings and a choice at the end, but instead of applying their efforts into drastically different endings or end paths, instead they made Suicide Mission the culmination of all your hard work and choices throughout the game. And the choices you make in mission are extensions of the gameplay. Even though giant Reaper baby is terrible, it still might be my favorite final level in a video game. And stuff like that is where I think video game developers are seeing more successful applications of choice than trying to nail these ambitious ending systems.

It's kind of the same reason Until Dawn is such a good and satisfying game despite not really having drastically different endings.

@n7: Thanks!

I thought Witcher 3 was smarter than the previous games in the way it got a little less ambitious with what it did with its ending, while still preserving some of the world state aspects. The only thing I thought they mishandled IMO was the total failure ending felt a little forced so they had a third ending, and the conditions feel a little cheap. But compared to the Witcher 2's sixteen endings, but really they're like four, and they're all kind of just okay it was a lot more satisfying a conclusion. I would have brought up The Witcher 3, but it's too recent so I didn't want to spoil it for anyone.

Your point about yanking control away from the player is interesting to me, because the idea of how and when players are given control in the narrative and the effects their decisions and actions have on it have so many creative, innovative, and cool applications that it's frustrating to see so much attention paid to how it impacts the ending of a game. Even the idea of a game ripping control away from the player for narrative reasons has some pretty awesome uses. It does feel like game makers are starting to get better about this even if sometimes I think players are a little too focussed on ending applications. Bioware's an interesting case. They've only really done one game since Mass Effect 3 that I've played. I can't speak to Old Republic. Dragon Age did a lot of cool stuff with small affects on the narrative. We'll see what they do with ME: A.