dmann05

It's really annoying reading things like this from you Patrick:

"Some of them, Shepard dies, some of them, Shepard lives, but as far as I can tell, none of the endings I saw, and none of the endings I've read about, involve you saving the day in every capacity."

In none of the endings does Shepard survive. Not one. This is not an issue as I expected Shepard to sacrifice herself for the galaxy to have a chance to survive. But I will get to that. In every ending but two (there are six total) every mass relay in the galaxy is destroyed, which has been shown (in these games, not the books, not from a forum thread, in the actual games themselves) to wipe out every life in the solar system the relay explodes in, meaning not only did Shepard (and Bioware) cut off interstellar travel but he in fact wiped out billions of lives when the relays exploded. He killed more humans and aliens than the Reapers would have, and more quickly and effectively too! The reason Shepard is grounded at the start of Mass Effect 3, is that he destroyed a mass relay in Batarian space without giving people the chance to evacuate. He was unable to warn anyone and hundreds of thousands of Batarians were killed. This takes place in the Arrival DLC for ME2.

So Shepard is provided with 3 choices at the end of the game. Choices that are totally arbitrary and have nothing to do with the rest of the games you played over the past 150 hours, nothing to do with the choices MY Shepard would have made if given the chance. The ending of ME3 is insulting, not because its a "sad" ending or because we didn't get to rescue the princess in the end like you seem to imply here, its because its filled with gaping plot holes and contrivances that almost deflate everything that was great about the entire game as well as the previous two games.

I am tired of reading articles (like this one) where the writer mischaracterizes the reasons people dislike the final 15 minutes of this otherwise excellent game. You picked the most childish reason you could imagine for people to feel let down, instead of better ones: It's poorly written and full of holes and in the end you are less heroic than the Reapers in your collateral damage. In the best possible endings, some important friends and allies are casually discarded without any thought and that's unacceptable. You spend the whole game recruiting this massive force and you see almost none of them in the final battle, they make no contribution to your effort and are apparently killed by the millions by either the Reapers or by Shepard herself.

There are plenty of reasons the ending sucks, stop picking the bad ones to make gamers sound entitled. We're not entitled to the ending we want or a happy ending, we're entitled to an ending that is as good as the other endings already included with the game (the Krogan Genophage and the Geth/Quarian conflict) both of which were handled with emotion and weight and felt like they belonged after being setup and paid off across three incredible games. But then the Reaper storyline is concluded with a set of scenes that feel slapped together and hastily thought through. It's garbage and its a good sign that Dragon Age 2 was not an anomaly from Bioware/EA.

Valve's point about DLC is perfectly valid and made even clearer when you try to download the DLC for Crysis 2. Where is it? You can't buy it from mycrysis.com or even find a link to buy it from there. You can't buy it on Origin and you couldn't find it in the EA download store before Origin launched. When it came out there was literally ZERO information about where to actually purchase the map packs for Crysis 2. The DLC is apparently exclusive to Gamespy, which I found out later after I gave up trying and stopped playing the game entirely. Gamespy. What year is it?

I bought every piece of DLC for my Steam copy of Mass Effect 2, and I bought it directly from Bioware but even that process was a pain in the ass. Same goes for the DLC for Dragon Age. The process is too fucking cumbersome. Compare that to buying addons and extras on PSN or XBL...there is no comparison. Valve wants to make it as easy as those services because those are fairly analogous and EA doesn't seem to have a problem with MS and Sony imposing the same restrictions.