Miranda took a shot to the gut, I didn't get a chance to iron things out either.. sorry duder.

mordin died in my mass effect 2 because of my own selfishness wanted to save him. so i sent him back with the doctor and the crew thinking he had down his part and deserved to go back to the ship. i thought the escort back would be light duty compared to sticking around with the collectors. but my own hubris caused his death! =(

This story is probably the most heartbreaking thing I have ever read. Why the fuck is that Kony Island video considered more important than this?

Honestly, I wish I had the willpower to live with the choices I made during my playthrough, but I got stressed out just by the thought of being responsible for the death of one of my squadmates. I guess it's time for me to start writing my erotic fanfiction epic "How Mass Effect 3 Should Have Ended: Lube Edition" and then go hang myself with a comically long piece of rope.

Also, was I the only person who found it really easy to complete the suicide mission with everyone alive? It just requires that you complete all the loyalty missions, not piss them off between the end of their loyalty mission and the start of Hoarders: People Edition episode 1 (also a potential name for a really tasteless documentary about slavery), and have the ability to identify the basic strengths and weaknesses of your squadmates.

@BenderUnit22 said:

Patrick bitching about shit again?

If you don't want the consequences of Mass Effect 2 inform what happens in Mass Effect 3, how about not importing the save file and start from scratch instead of moaning about how some miraculous way, the sequel bares some form of consistent logic to what happened in the prequel.

Quite the contrary really. Patrick is talking about how he lived with his decision and was glad he did because he feels consequence is important. Instead of bitching, he talks about how, if he wants a different outcome, he will play through the games again. This is more a meditation on BioWares design choices and character construction and how that informs and impacts choice than it is "bitching."

I had Thane, Zaeed and about half of the Normandy crew die on my first ME2 playthrough. I felt awful about it in the moment, and I still feel awful about it now. I also could've just gone back in time and just pretended like it never happened, but I decided to deal with the consequences and the guilt. 
 
When I play Mass Effect, I put myself into that universe. The outside world disappears for the hours that I play, and these digital characters almost become real friends, in a way. So the first time that I was taking a tour of the Normandy in Mass Effect 3 and I came across the memorial wall... I had a lump form in my throat, I stopped and sat there for minutes thinking, looking at the names of the crew members that my own errors had gotten killed, and despite feeling more upset than I have at a game than I ever have, it was a great moment. A moment that I'll always remember.
 
 Moments like this are the reasons I love Mass Effect so much over the course of the series it has become my favourite game series of all time, and needless to say I'm extremely excited to finish what I started in the first Mass Effect.

@BrockNRolla said:

If people just start throwing down opinion pieces and random thoughts into the the "Articles" section, this ends up like Kotaku. (A site which I have grown to abhor.) Giant Bomb should hold itself to a higher professional standard.

So is the issue that you're having with this article ("editorial feature" if you want to semantically differentiate in terms of more official journalistic parlance, although as somebody who's done some journalistic work, the definition of an article really does include editorials) that it's just being "misclassified" or that, as a site known mostly known until relatively recently for covering conventional news for its journalistic endeavors, that editorials in general don't belong front and center on the main page and/or a dedicated section of its own? Because if it's the former, then sure, some structural changes can probably be implemented to better differentiate things. But if you're arguing the latter, which the portion I isolated is leading me to believe, then I don't think you're going to see eye-to-eye with a lot of people, myself included, considering that it's been journalistic tradition to have editorial pieces mingle with regular news features. Last time I checked, outlets like the New York Times and Newsweek, have both hugely influential independently-conducted news articles as well as editorials, some of which are not dissimilar in tone and topic to what Patrick is discussing here.

Both of those outlets, granted, keep their editorials in separate areas, but they're still easily accessible no matter where you go in a matter such that you can readily access them while reading conventional news pieces. I still bring them up because your wording makes it sound like you have a deeper issue than that, though, taking issue with the fact that this editorial by Patrick is even on here in a non-blogging capacity in the first place. You can have "higher professional standards," as you wrote, while including opinion pieces as long as they're formatted and presented in an ethical matter, which as far as I'm concerned, Patrick has done; he might not have a dedicated editorial section to stick this one in, but that's not his fault and he otherwise hasn't made this piece look as though it was "actual news" or something. After all, there are always two sides to journalism: the fact/data gathering and the actual dissemination/analysis of that information. Biased, editorialized discussions like this one are necessary in journalistic endeavors so people can process information and also have enough tools to come to their own conclusions. If people don't talk about the news or something related to it, like Patrick has in talking about his time with Mass Effect 2 impacting his Mass Effect 3 experience, then readers are that much less equipped to deal with the information that's handed to them.

If you want a more serious example, a big reason why SOPA became such a big deal was that editorial writers, not just bloggers, looked into the actual legal writing behind that bill, interpreted it in more easily understandable terms that the public could understand, and then conveyed legitimate opinions as to why it was so bad. Every reader knew going into those editorials that they were opinion pieces and weren't led to believe for a second that they were supposed to be reading a regular news feature, but those pieces were still powerful precisely because they conveyed somebody's opinion an issue in the news that somebody could look up and verify in the regular news section and set the stage for how people examined and debated it. Those writers made a major stink about SOPA and, by extension, so did the public who read those editorials and other reaction pieces. If those editorials had been relegated to a section completely isolated from the "actual news" like a blog, which is bound to get less reading traffic in most instances on news sites, the matter would have probably stayed obscure and been something that only tech industry people cared about despite the widespread implications of the bill itself.

If I'm completely wrong in interpreting what you wrote, then I sincerely apologize, but there is a long, long history for having these sorts of pieces take the spotlight in journalistic outlets and I suspect that's why I and the other commenters are calling foul on what you and other users with similar-sounding comments since that seems to be what those remarks are addressed towards. If anything, we need more opinion pieces like Patrick's so readers can be provoked into really contemplating the implications of various game industry trends, but that's not the topic of this discussion. As far as I'm concerned, this article and any other editorials Patrick writes has their place on this site in a capacity beyond a conventional blog post.

@The_Laughing_Man said:

This might be why people got so mad with ME3. In the end nothing they did in the other games seemed to matter in the end. Letting Miranda die in your game? No effect on the end of ME3.

If that's what people were expecting, then they were kidding themselves.

That DEGREE of impact is so ludicrous that there could've ended up being 1000 possible endings. How is that reasonable? And at what point does it stop? What if you DIDN'T push that dude out the window? What if you DIDN'T get Garrus' loyalty? What if you DIDN'T tell Conrad Verner to stop being a retard?

If you were to say that an actual significant choice like saving/destroying the collector ship should've mattered more? Sure. I'd stand by that. But stuff like Miranda or whoever not appearing in ME3 because they died seems impactful enough.

Without anybody dying my first playthrough (except for Kelly Chambers and Dr. Chakwas) it was a rather poor suicide mission that seriously dampened my experience with Mass Effect 2. Everyone survives who matters...so all I did was fight a giant Terminator baby. Big whoop.

I actually envy those who have had emotional moments in the Mass Effect franchise. It would be a lot more interesting that way, anyways.

I lost Thane and Legion , both the ones I didn't want to lose in my play-through =/ I am still sad about that.

Hmm... i don't actually remember if i lost anyone during the ending of ME2... i think i remember replaying it, but I am not sure if that was because i have 2 play through (Par/Ren) or if I lost people the first time and played it again so that they lived... In any case, I don't play on playing ME3 any time soon (waiting for all the story dlc to come out before i decide if i want the game or not, and to see how much the actual cost will be), so i guess it doesn't matter.

The entire topic feels like a spoiler. God dammit, now I gotta stop coming to giantbomb.com until I finish the game because Patrick can't keep it in his pants?

All that grieving over that walking mannequin Miranda and not a hint of guilt about losing Tali? What is wrong with you, Klepek?

The big shocker is losing Tali. There is a very pivotal choice that directly effects Tali. I can't imagine the game without her.

I know how you feel Patrick, i really liked Tali but I wanted to keep legion alive which i did which then of course pissed Tali off and she was killed in my final mission, now all i can do in Mass Effect 3 is look at her name on the Normandy Memorial wall.

I lost a few characters in my play through of ME 2, but when I CHEATED and looked up a guide, I felt like I was cheated by the game afterward, and that the vagueries of who was the BEST at what also didn't help... Yet in ME3, I let spoilers spoilers go without a re-load.

Not a single person died on my main playthrough. Nobody dies on my watch :|

That being said, I really didn't like the structure of Mass Effect 2. The marketing/premise is to build up your entire team so that they can survive the suicide mission and go into the next game but storyline wise, the Collectors virtually disappeared from my game for a good 14 hours while I was off doing errands and making everyone loyal. Kind of weird to have the game tell me "we must stop them right now!" only for them to basically vanish for a dozen hours

Weird to make a story out of this, but I agree with Patrick. Having everyone survive the end of Mass Effect 2 was a huge letdown. Jack wasn't even loyal to me, for half the game all she told me was to fuck off and leave her alone, so I was expecting her to betray me or refuse to obey orders and cause someone to die or... something ! Anything.

@BrockNRolla said:

@iAmJohn said:

@BrockNRolla said:

@thebigJ_A said:

@BrockNRolla said:

@rudyarr said:

@Clonedzero said:

this is not your damn blog patrick wtf

don't be a douchebag. Don't read it then

I kept waiting to read some type of "News." Instead, it was just a blog post, which, correct me if I'm wrong, are a thing you can do on this site. Sorry to say, but this doesn't constitute an article Patrick. It's cool to write something up like this, but calling it an "article" is deceptive.

ar·ti·cle

(ärt-kl)n.1. An individual thing or element of a class; a particular object or item: an article of clothing; articles of food.

2. A particular section or item of a series in a written document, as in a contract, constitution, or treaty.

3.A nonfictional literary composition that forms an independent part of a publication, as of a newspaper or magazine.

Know what words mean before accusing people of dishonesty.

How did I know someone would pull out a dictionary and pretend like that was important?

If you click on the "News" tab of the website, you get all the "Articles." If you look on this first page, everything that pops up will be an announcement, recent event, or interview. While there are 3,966 results on the site, and I don't want to check through all of them, the first 10 pages of article listings have nothing remotely comparing to what this "article" contained. Ergo, it is deceptive to call a random musing an "Article" given the history of this site.

Well if you knew anything about the "history" of the site or, frankly, any of the Whiskey Media sites, you'd know that they don't differentiate between news, editorials and previews. So no, it's not deceptive, and even if it was, what does it fucking matter? So editorial essays don't have a place here?

I think Editorial Essays are part of any healthy site's typical churn. I'm not saying there isn't a place for the content.

But, in the last week+ we've seen a relatively small amount of news or interviews. I'm not sure why given that GDC took place last week and that seems like a treasure trove for content. It certainly was on other sites. So, seeing that Patrick is spending his time on something like this is dissapointing. I think Patrick is a good writer and does good reporting. I want to see those skills put to use to create quality content. If he wants to write up something about his ME2 experiences leading to ME3, that's great, but that seems like something he should be doing on his own time for fun. Hence, a blog post. This isn't up to snuff for Patrick or the site.

You see, this is the issue I keep coming back to: Arguing that this should be a blog post. It's something I find especially insulting as a writer because it's attitudes like this that stop people from writing interesting, personal pieces like this. What does it really matter whether Patrick attaches this to his blog or as an editorial? Either way, it's interesting content for the website related to a game that people are talking about in various contents so there's no reason not to promote it from that stance alone. I don't really want to get into the issue of this supplanting other news reporting (though seriously, name five important big gaming news items from the past week that weren't covered on this site; please keep it to shit that actually matters, so no game or release date announcements or things like that), but frankly, so what? Articles like this are, more often than not, far more insightful and interesting than anything that's going to be in a news post. There's a reason why AV Club constantly promotes their For Your Considerations as some of the top items.

With all that said, you're not going to get any complaint from me that last week was kind of bullshit.

@BrockNRolla said:

If it said "Blog Post," I probably wouldn't have started in the first place.

And that is why it is on the front page. These guys who built a site around their personalities have an avenue to present their viewpoints and are using it. Funny how that works.

Destructoid did things like this all the time. Since 08

@Pepsiman

There is absolutely nothing wrong with editorial content. I do believe though this is misclassified.

There are two distinctions I might draw. One is the first you brought up, that editorials are typically separated from news content. You're write that there isn't an "editorial" section, but there is a blog post section, which I think this more appropriately fit under. That's a matter of opinion though, so I can understand the different points of view though.

The second though is that calling this an "editorial" in terms of the content we see in the New York Times and Newsweek I think seems somewhat generous. In the SOPA debate, which I heavily enjoyed and engaged with, editorials weren't musings about people's experience with a game, they were about informing the public with a given slant. They were key to helping people understand how the law worked and how it would effect people on the ground. But this article fails to "inform" me of anything other than how Patrick felt while playing a game. That doesn't sound like journalism to me. It's not even an opinion piece. If this had been an article about how he felt about the game and how that related to the public outcry related to the game's conclusion, I could totally get behind it.

Anyone could have written this. There isn't any journalistic skill applied here, and that's the disparity that bothers me.

Alex posts a straightforward news article while Patrick posts a blog.

@SaucyGit said:

Listen to yourselves.

Everyone survived ME2 for me. I wish I'd lost Jack.

@Shaanyboi:

Well, maybe it didn't help that Bioware stated that Mass Effect 3 will have "almost infinite endings"

However, thanks to the embarassing internet croud I am now afraid to say that I didn't like the ME3 ending because I don't want anything to do with all the whiners out there.

I didn't like the ending. It is not the end of my (real) world. The end.

@SatiricalScience: and patrick is the "news guy" lol

One less.

I lost Miranda in Mass Effect 3. It made me super sad. I started ME3 using a Renegade save of ME2, in which I romanced Jack. But in my first ME2 playthrough, I romanced Miranda, as she was my favorite crew character. My Shepard in ME3 had no feelings for Miranda, but as a player I was attached to her and it sucked to see her die. But it's great that the Mass Effect games can make you feel this way. Too bad they botched the ending so very badly.

Sounds like white people problems.

@iAmJohn:

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how this is interesting or shows me anything about Patrick. It is just his experience playing through a game. That's a matter of opinion though, so I won't argue about it.

I don't expect Giant Bomb to post every last news story. That's what I go to Destructoid for. What I do expect though are indepth, thoughtful posts when they do put content up. Any user on this site could have written this article. Do I feel like I know Patrick better now since I know that he felt bad about Miranda dying? I certainly don't. I'm simply looking for higher quality articles. If Patrick wants to do this stuff, that's cool, and if people want to engage with it, that's cool too, but feed me something substantial before offering me an after-dinner mint. That's where I'm coming from.

I disagree, the game is meant to be played how you want it to, after all it's an RPG. Bioware takes it one step further by let you, the player, craft his own story within the story they crafted. so if you don't like your outcome you can easily go back and make some changes to get the story you wanted to see, if you wanted everyone to live than that's fine. Just look at MGS4's ending, everyone lived through that, even snake which was BS. you don't get to craft that story and I felt it was only fitting that snake pull the trigger to end his own suffering, they dragged it on and built it up and let everyone down when they saw he just couldn't pull the trigger. the same goes for ME3's ending, you get to craft your ending so if your not happy with it, than its your own fault and if your not happy with any of the endings that doesn't make them bad, you just didn't like them.

Methinks some people here are unfamiliar with the concept of the op-ed and its role in the traditional structure of the news.

@Sooty said:

That image really makes it hit home how much better the squad mate selection is in 2.

Thats what happens when you're Cerebus funded.

While I don't care for the first half of the article where it tries to replicate the emotion instated over an entire playthrough of a game in a few meager paragraphs (stick to your day job, Patrick), the second half for which is the article's meat has a big element of games in question:

Consequences.

Video games often have trouble dealing out consequences. For one, they provide save files and save states. For two, the consequences are often black or white: does this person live, or do the die? For three, too often than not, of those binary decisions one is the correct one.

You obviously want someone to live, because that's the best case scenario for your play experience. It has little to do with story, and has everything to do with min-max. In L.A. Noire, sure there are alternative choices to be made when questioning, but the game flat out tells you, that was wrong.

When games define one ending or one consequence as the best, at that point it throws the whole notion of choice out right then and there. There could be some interesting dialogue or ramifications of these consequences, but instead the game gives you a percentage and calls it a day. Sorry, now you're missing content. Regardless of whether the playthough might have been more interesting, the game purposely devotes itself to telling you that it was not.

That's kind of the problem with Patrick's rationale. He is really forcing himself to appreciate something that is very much telling him played poorly. It's hard for game makers to gel the story and game to the point where they are a cohesive piece, and instead of chastising you for your decisions, rewarding you with an experience rather than limiting your numbers. There's no balance to it.

Some would argue to remove the state where everyone lives to make it so that someone has to die, so the player has to experience it, to make that the right choice, but this would just remove the finality of someone's death. Knowing that they can live is what makes the death so troubling. The way to go about it is to counterbalance the negatives with something when they occur.

In Mass Effect 3, you should have been able to take every party member you saved in ME2 with you in your missions. Regardless of the time and effort it would have taken Bioware to do this, this is the only real proper way to introduce the benefit of that victory. If you were unable to save a party member, one of the new characters from ME3 or one of the returning characters from ME1 would take his or her place. In this event, the player is not less a party member and still has interesting characters to work with but still has that loss on their character and playthrough.

The Balance of Consequences.

Due to the nature of game development, and just the notion that an experience like the Mass Effect Trilogy spanned 5-plus years, it is unlikely we will have a chance to experience a true balance of consequences in the near future. It's a shame that Patrick's article just glazes over this notion, and is really more of a subtle response to people bitching at the finality of the ending of ME3 not being what they want, which I believe entirely misses the point.

Good read. I was always firmly in the camp of "live with your choices" when it came to Mass Effect.

I think I lost Kelly. Thats what she gets for not feeding my fish?

@BrockNRolla: Again, it all comes back to things like AV Club's For Your Consideration or even how they handle the articles on Screened where they do this kind of thing a lot more. Regardless of the quality of this particular article, I think its myopic to say that only news articles are "substantial" things while articles like this aren't. To the contrary, considering most video game news boils down to "GAME COMPANY ANNOUNCES GAME Y, SAYS IT'LL BE BEST GAME EVER" or "THIS EA EXECUTIVE SURE SAID SOMETHING STUPID ON TWITTER, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC," I'd much rather read something that attempts to critically analyze games and how they affect us outside of the typical standard review or a blog post where some amateur writer uses 5,000 words to basically say "This game is good." Something that makes me try to think about a game, franchise, company or what have you in a different way is far more substantial and "higher quality" than any news reporting as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, I thought this was going to be about that Miranda from the FGC or whatever.

You guys think about the separation of news, editorial, opinions, etc. way more than I do.

you know what, a BIG part of me wishes i played through the games like this, but i just wanted to see everyone in the final game, so i played through again making sure everyone survived, i knew from the off i would do that, its fine, but seeing how the game is playing out so far, i am feeling it wouldve benefited my fiction losing a character or 2 in the last game, having people pop up all over the place is a little jarring, and would have felt much more natural with a character or 2 missing. personally i think setting up ME2 the way they did hurt the series overall, a few more natural forced loses might have given the final game more weight in the grand scheme, although i did grow to like pretty much every party member in the entire series, so im kind of glad their all showing their faces again...

except for Kaiden, he sucked anyways, i was thinking about him earlier and it kind of blows my tiny mind that he can still be a thing in ME3, to be honest i can see me playing the whole thing again with natural progression, but im not even sure if i could do that knowing the mechanics of the games now,

I was the same way with my Mass Effect playthrough the first time. I resigned myself to live with any mistakes I made, and I was glad I did in the long run. I lost people I had grown to care about at the end of ME2, and I was okay with that. Unfortunately I lost my saves for both Mass Effect 1 and 2, and had to re-do them in order to get ready for 3, and I wasn't able to replicate the same mistakes I made my first time through, so I went into Mass Effect 3 with everyone surviving, and I can't help but wonder how different my game would have been had my original saves still been around.

@iAmJohn:

I don't get any kind of "critical analysis" from this article. I get literally what you said, a "standard review or a blog post" that "basically says 'This game is good.'" That's where you and I differ on the issue I think.

This is pretty much how I went with Heavy Rain, especially because Heavy Rain actually does allow so much deviation and choice that I felt that my original playthrough with all of my original choices is my playthrough.

ME2 never really gave me enough choice (speaking for the story and the consequences anywhoo) to feel guilty in going back through another playthrough, plus I really loved the idea of roleplaying multiple Shepards. I never used strategy guides or anything of the sort either (in my original playthrough, Miranda died for me as well. Because I sided with Jack during their argument and lost Miranda's loyalty).

Also I never liked Miranda all that much... I preferred Jacob frankly, though after ME3, Kaiden is now my favourite ''beginning bland human'' character. Guy got turned into a pretty cool fella in ME3. He exhibited a lot more personality, plus there's a lot of great conversations to be had with him, including one where the writers somewhat-subtly admit that a lot of people found Kaiden annoying.

You people who whine about the idea of a post like this are dickish asshole idiots.

This article has made me want to play ME2 again, that was a great game. But i still have no desire to play ME3.

@Abyssfull said:

This is pretty much how I went with Heavy Rain, especially because Heavy Rain actually does allow so much deviation and choice that I felt that my original playthrough with all of my original choices is my playthrough.

ME2 never really gave me enough choice (speaking for the story and the consequences anywhoo) to feel guilty in going back through another playthrough, plus I really loved the idea of roleplaying multiple Shepards. I never used strategy guides or anything of the sort either (in my original playthrough, Miranda died for me as well. Because I sided with Jack during their argument and lost Miranda's loyalty).

Also I never liked Miranda all that much... I preferred Jacob frankly, though after ME3, Kaiden is now my favourite ''beginning bland human'' character. Guy got turned into a pretty cool fella in ME3. He exhibited a lot more personality, plus there's a lot of great conversations to be had with him, including one where the writers somewhat-subtly admit that a lot of people found Kaiden annoying.

I was going to bring up Heavy Rain as well. I played through that game in one sitting, no idea of what was going to happen or what the choices I made would cause to happen and it was great. Like David Cage himself said, it's really a game that you can only play through once to get the most out of it. I've tried to play it since but my original choices and play through will always be "the one."

She will probably be there in ME3 if you do a non-import new game. I got through the first short bit with both male & female version of Shepard on a new non-imported game picking the many casualties for the origin on both, unless you're not counting Cerebus people on the memorial wall, there's only 3 squad members on the wall being dead with that choice & two are from ME1, the one from ME2 on that memorial wall is one of the smaller role squad members who has an even more minor role in ME3 of just being a bunch of conversations. Haven't gotten to Miranda with either of those two versions of Shepard but guessing that Miranda is there. Shame they didn't just put in a minor loss option on the origin about the suicide mission where you lost a couple but it's completely random on who it is each time you pick that.

@patrickklepek: People have trouble expressing what they feel and often get lost in the semantics. When an argument boils out, they defend their statements even though that isn't truly what they meant.

It's fine and you should do more stuff like it. I think the thing to take away from this is that people probably just don't appreciate the flowery way you recounted the final moments of your experience in ME2 in order to illustrate the impact of consequence. To be fair, it's not so great.

You probably could have omitted it or dramatically shortened it to a few lines and gotten to the major point of your article much sooner, and no one would complain because it's actually a good discussion topic.

One advice, Patrick.

Don't play any Fire Emblem game. That kind of behavior would destroy your progression because you wouldn't have enough units at the end of the game.