Warning: The following post makes references to the nature of Mass Effect 3's endings, but does not go into any specifics. The comments on the other hand are basically free reign for spoilers.

So the blogs have been posted, many discussions have been had, and while a few people out there are still expressing their opinions for the first time, the dust is now mostly settled on the issue of the Mass Effect 3 ending. I don’t think I need to bother going into why many people don’t like the ending, it’s something that’s been done to death and the reasons for the backlash seem pretty universal; it’s a deus ex machina, it lacks closure, it doesn’t reflect our choices throughout the games, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s not consistent with what Mass Effect is. At this point I think what’s more interesting than reflecting on the ending, is reflecting on the fan reaction itself.

The Good Reactions

Perhaps the most surprising thing for me has not been that Mass Effect 3 had such a poor ending, but that many of the fan reactions have been very reasonable and expressed in a civil tone. The voice of the Bioware fanbase in recent times had been a cacophonous and unpleasant one, expressing over-reactionary statements about Bioware being some sort of corrupted evil corporation, attacking writer Jennifer Hepler in ridiculous ways, deciding before release and with very little evidence that Mass Effect 3 was a bad game, criticising Bioware simply for including homosexual love interests, and strongly criticising Bioware/EA for their use of day one DLC, with often minimal knowledge as to the arguments for day one DLC or of how development cycles work. The temptation was to say that the Bioware fanbase was a very dislikeable one, but I was never entirely convinced this was the situation. It’s likely that among us there were just a fair number of people more loud and unreasonable than the rest, as there often are in many groups.

Now don't get me wrong, when it came to the Mass Effect 3 ending I saw way too many people who over-reacted, thought Bioware had done something legitimately wrong by making them a game they didn't like, failed to acknowledge that Bioware had done any good, or believed that their opinion on the Mass Effect 3 ending entitled them to free content. Despite this, after all the baseless pissing and moaning that had come forth from the Bioware fan hivemind before, I was pleasantly surprised to see calm and intellectual breakdowns of the ending, people campaigning by donating money to Child’s Play, people sending cupcakes to Bioware, and the like. Even the “Retake Mass Effect 3” petition, while rather unfortunately named, was doing nothing more than respectfully asking for Bioware’s consideration of the kind of changes they wanted, and stated that “It is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit”.

This showed that gamers disagreeing with creative works didn’t have to result in a torrent of vitriolic and over-reactionary complaints, the best of the Bioware fans managed to take something bad and make something good out of it. In fact I'm saddened to see that many on the outside of this situation got the wrong end of the stick, assuming that from the petition and the way Bioware fans have acted in the past, that everyone expressing major grievances about the ending was being unfair and unreasonably demanding, when that was not the case.

Forum Flooding

Unfortunately, even among the more reasonable of us I don’t think our actions were necessarily as smart or beneficial to us as they could have been. Firstly, a lot of the blogs and forum posts out there criticising the ending, seemed to be written soon after or almost immediately after people had played the ending. I do think there’s something to be said for getting down those ideas in text fresh off the brain, but I think on the whole Mass Effect 3’s ending is one you really need time to process, otherwise you risk making quick knee-jerky reactions which you may later disagree with. Posting so quickly on the issue, a lot of people also didn’t have the time to read the common statements about the game which had already been brought up multiple times, leading to a whole lot of forum posts which were very similar.

Another major problem was that many video game sites had forums which became over-run with an enormous quantity of new threads on the issue, as opposed to posts being concentrated in a smaller number of established threads. Everyone had their own thoughts on the topic, everyone felt passionately about it, and everyone wanted to be heard. This ended up making it so that if you wanted to go somewhere to talk about video games, it was repeatedly and strongly slammed in your face that people didn’t like the Mass Effect 3 ending. On one gaming forum I frequent, it became almost impossible for weeks to use the general discussion boards for anything more than discussing the Mass Effect 3 ending.

What’s more, because the discussion was scattered, people would end up going into new threads to make points that had been many times over in old threads, bumping them and increasing their post count. Here on Giant Bomb the moderation team eventually made the decision to start locking down new threads being created on the ending of the game, which I know wasn’t a popular decision with some, but I believe it was the right one considering the situation.

What We May Be Overlooking

Lastly, from what I've seen, even a lot of the more reasonable among us came to focus too much on the endings as part of the whole picture. Now believe me, I don’t like that ending either and I totally sympathise with a lot of the complaints made about the game, but the ratio of ending talk to talk about the rest of the game still seemed at least a little off. We ended up criticising Bioware for the bad, but never quite praising them enough for the good. Even the more rational of us, me included, have come to take Mass Effect a little bit for granted. When asked most people seem to tell you that yeah, despite the problems with the ending, Mass Effect 3 was overall a good game, but I still think we can benefit from stopping and really examining what Mass Effect 3 is doing right that no other game is doing.

Having such a rich and well-designed universe with such engaging characters is worthy of some great commendation, but Mass Effect goes way beyond even that. The fact it gives you genuinely difficult political and social decisions, that everyone’s game can include a different cast of characters, that everyone’s games can have huge differences in the canon, and that your choices carry between the whole trilogy, these are mind-blowing things when you stop and think about them, but we’ve come to accept them as “just part of Mass Effect” to a greater extent than we should, and are noticing a little too much of the negative in relation to the positive. I think we should all remember one very important thing; that the reason the ending matters to us as much as it does in the first place, is because Bioware have been able to create a series which was so easy to become deeply invested in.

Duder, It's Over

What’s done is done though, and like I say, I'm of the opinion that a lot of people have handled this thing intelligently, I only hope that in the future we can see less of the kinds of people who over-react, whine, and demand lots of free stuff every time a multi-million pound games developer doesn’t do the exact thing that they want them to do. Going ahead I think we have a lot to look forward to and even if they can’t fix everything, I’m extremely excited to see what the epilogue DLC has in store for us. Thank you for reading.

-Gamer_152