7 ms·

Look at Bioware. If they hadn't lied about the Mass Effect 3 ending (they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 b

by onli 7y ago

Look at Bioware. If they hadn't lied about the Mass Effect 3 ending (they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons) Andromeda would still have been criticized, but it would have been criticized in a more positive atmosphere. That studio is in a downward spiral ever since. There are additional reasons than those lies, but I'm certain lying to their fans and eroding the loyalty they had (it's after all the studio that made Baldur's Gate) did not help them one bit.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
You know, just because the ending is the same regardless of your choices doesn't mean they didn't matter. No matter what we do, each of us is destined for the grave, even the universe will end one day, but our decisions still matter even though the outcome is identical. PS: I had no idea it was such a controversial statement to suggest that things matter even if the universe is ultimately doomed.
- onli 7y ago
  Nope, it's not that kind of ending. Kill all the robots or not, that's more or less it. Not that philosophical kind of game. And if you want to see it like that anyway: Yes, we die, but our actions influence the people around us. People we help might help us later etc. None of that was properly covered.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    ...and the universe will still end one day, meaning the outcome is, ultimately, identical. Why is this so difficult to understand?
    - speeder 7y ago
      You know that this is not proven right? Or rather, not even a "theory" in the physics sense, there are multiple competing hipothesis, none of them have enough evidence for us to be certain the universe will end... In some ideas the university does end, but in big crunch, or big rip, in others it just starts anew, in others humans spawn new universes, and so on...
      - adrianN 7y ago
        None of the popular options sound like your choices will matter a lot in the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        There are a lot of competing theories of how the universe will end, but pretty much all mainstream cosmology admits that it will end. Very few cosmological models say otherwise. However, even then I contend that eternity is just another kind of ending. Given an infinite time, everything that can happen will, and therefore it will also repeat. That means that every decision we make will be made again infinitely, every path followed an infinite number of times, always eventually returning back around again, and ultimately the outcome will still be the same. So you see, under cosmologies of eternity, we just exist in a stasis of infinity and our decisions will not change that. Under cosmologies where the universe ends our decisions will not change that either. Does this mean that nothing we do matters?
        hutzlibu 7y ago
        "but pretty much all mainstream cosmology admits that it will end." By using "admits" you mean they accept your point of view, even if they do not want to? Thats a bit telling about your worldview. And have you ever considered, that cosmology can only make relative observations and speculations? In other words, if our whole universe is just a small part of a bigger universe, how could we tell for sure, if all we can observe is within those borders? Also, how likely is it, that out of eternal nothing someday came a whole universe which wents back to nothing forever? Sounds more like religion than science.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        > By using "admits" ... "admits" can also be used to mean "accepts as valid"
        7y ago
    - onli 7y ago
      I was about to write an impolite response. Let's just keep it at: Your thought is not that deep that it is original or something other people do not understand. You miss the point where your Existenzangst is applicable and where it is not. Jumping on meta-levels and missing that we talk about the time period where consequences matter - like for how much fun there is when you play the game during the period our universe actually exists - is not profound. Looks like a bored effort to derail the discussion to me.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Simple question: how much did the ending actually matter to your enjoyment of the game? Would you have ignored the game and simply watched your preferred ending on youtube? Would you have told your past self not to play the game at all given how the ending actually is? These philosophical questions are not as separate from the day to day reality as you want to believe.
        onli 7y ago
        It compeletely destroyed every bit of enjoyment I took from playing and finishing the game. Yes, I would have not played the game and actually do that regularly when it comes up, to tell people to not play (and to not buy!) ME3. It was that bad.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        > It compeletely destroyed every bit of enjoyment I took from playing and finishing the game. So... you didn't enjoy anything at all up to that point? Really? Then why bother playing it at all? Why not let someone else play it and just watch your preferred ending cutscene on youtube? Is it really all just about the destination and the journey means nothing?
- gilrain 7y ago
  The outcome is not identical because our choices throughout our lives impact other people and, potentially, get passed through the generations. This is why humanity is so advanced despite not having physically evolved much. The outcome is only “identical” if you only care about yourself. Not really the same thing at all.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    The universe will end one day. The outcome will, ultimately, be identical.
    - iamtheworstdev 7y ago
      The universe's end is not my end though, so I don't see that it's relevant.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Your end will happen even sooner than that by a ridiculously large margin.... so I don't get your point?
  - ionised 7y ago
    Not really. Humanity will one day no longer exist and it will be as if we never existed at all. The universe is that massive and indifferent to our existence, and it too will come to an end.
    - jackhack 7y ago
      I'm going to use this excuse next time I miss a sprint goal. "Gentlemen, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture..."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 7y ago
  The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings. Stepping up 6 meta levels and asking "Yeah, but what's life all really about anyhow?" is, you know, fine and all, but also in way, profoundly missing the point. We want to talk about Mass Effect right now, not fundamental existential ennui. Personally... I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. etc. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game. (Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!)
  - onli 7y ago
    It is definitely possible to make choices matter. Imagine that in the final mission, if you helped the Krogans before at one point during an alien attack there will be a Krogan Squad crushing through a wall and helping you out (that's taken from an interview with a Bioware employee who described what went wrong and how the ending should've worked). Stuff like that is possible, even if branching storylines are hard to do (cut content for many players and all that, I'm aware). The Fallout games - with the exceptions of Fallout 3 - show how it is indeed possible to at the end of the game show the impact of your actions on characters and civilization. BG2 did as well! And ME1 and ME2 during and at the end and even ME3 somewhat during the game showed consequences of prior actions - just at the end of a trilogy focusing on choice not at all. Stupid mistake and definitely avoidable. I'm convinced Bioware sealed their fate with that (making mediocre games after did not help them though).
    - jerf 7y ago
michaelt 7y ago
(it's after all the studio that made Baldur's Gate) Games studios have always struck me as a sort of Ship of Theseus - if the ownership, the product quality, the game engines and assets, and 99% of the employees have changed but the logo remains the same - does being loyal to the logo make sense?
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Well, presumably the branding entity still owns the IP and trade secrets like the source code so even if an entirely different team comes on, they can still reuse that.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    I'm not in the game industry at all, but, do you or anyone know how this goes? What goes into a game design? How much more detail and story and worldbuilding is there behind the scenes? I mean if it's anything like software development, the answer will for the most part be "well there's actually nothing here". A lot of sequels feel bolted on in that regard, where they just took elements from the original game, world and story and build on top of that.
- Kihashi 7y ago
  Unless the changeover happens all at once, there'd still be some cultural and knowledge transfer. It may not be the same company, but I don't think it's an entirely different company.
eswat 7y ago
BioWare is a good case study since a few articles and books have been written about their history (one of the co-founders also has a few videos on YouTube about how they managed the business). If you read enough of of them you can see BioWare has had three phases in their life: 1. Shattered Steel to Mass Effect 2, where they were largely independent and taking on feast-or-famine work (more of the former given the quality of their work at the time) 2. Mass Effect 3 to The Old Republic, which ringed-in the EA era and cracks in the quality of their work start to show. The end of this era is also when the co-founders and some key contributors to their past games left. 3. Dragon Age 3 to Anthem, which ringed-in stronger ties with EA—specifically having to work with Frostbite—and where we see that a lot of the problems we saw in the last era were probably chronic rather than acute. Lots of key contributor churn.
WorldMaker 7y ago
> they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons At the end of the day your decisions still matter to you. The debate around the ME3 ending has left me with a lot more respect for the ME3 ending over time than after I played through it the first time. Which of those 3 buttons a player chose often says so much about their combined playthrough of all three games. Linearly in terms of that playthrough so many gamers felt they only had "one choice" at the end, and that is an amazing psychological trick because the statistics BioWare revealed show that among players that did complete the final choice it was an almost even split (and a surprising number of players took the interesting fourth choice of just quitting there and not making a choice). I think the ME3 ending even before the Extended Cut (and more importantly the final Citadel "cleanup" DLC) was better than a lot of gamers gave it credit for, but the problem with it was that it was a very hard situation to see the forest from your particular gameplay tree. (Now, Anthem from a story perspective I have a lot less respect for. It's a weird KOTOR B-Plot [almost entirely recycled] with the Star Wars filed off.)
jamesgeck0 7y ago
> they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons Your decisions do technically affect the ending, but it's subtle and not very satisfying. The outcome of every major decision in the trilogy is assigned a numeric value and added to a "war assets" sum as you progress through the game. Different decisions result in slightly different amounts of war assets, and actions in the third game were heavily weighted over previous games. The size of that number changes each ending very slightly. https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3/End_Game_Chart_-_With_Spoilers https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3/End_Game_Chart_-_Wit...
- xsmasher 7y ago
  I think that falls under "if the player didn't see it, it didn't happen."
m-p-3 7y ago
And Anthem is on the same tangent. The Internet never forgets, or it takes a damn long time before it does.

by onli 7y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

You know, just because the ending is the same regardless of your choices doesn't mean they didn't matter. No matter what we do, each of us is destined for the grave, even the universe will end one day, but our decisions still matter even though the outcome is identical. PS: I had no idea it was such a controversial statement to suggest that things matter even if the universe is ultimately doomed.

onli 7y ago
Nope, it's not that kind of ending. Kill all the robots or not, that's more or less it. Not that philosophical kind of game. And if you want to see it like that anyway: Yes, we die, but our actions influence the people around us. People we help might help us later etc. None of that was properly covered.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  ...and the universe will still end one day, meaning the outcome is, ultimately, identical. Why is this so difficult to understand?
  - speeder 7y ago
    You know that this is not proven right? Or rather, not even a "theory" in the physics sense, there are multiple competing hipothesis, none of them have enough evidence for us to be certain the universe will end... In some ideas the university does end, but in big crunch, or big rip, in others it just starts anew, in others humans spawn new universes, and so on...
    - adrianN 7y ago
      None of the popular options sound like your choices will matter a lot in the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      There are a lot of competing theories of how the universe will end, but pretty much all mainstream cosmology admits that it will end. Very few cosmological models say otherwise. However, even then I contend that eternity is just another kind of ending. Given an infinite time, everything that can happen will, and therefore it will also repeat. That means that every decision we make will be made again infinitely, every path followed an infinite number of times, always eventually returning back around again, and ultimately the outcome will still be the same. So you see, under cosmologies of eternity, we just exist in a stasis of infinity and our decisions will not change that. Under cosmologies where the universe ends our decisions will not change that either. Does this mean that nothing we do matters?
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        "but pretty much all mainstream cosmology admits that it will end." By using "admits" you mean they accept your point of view, even if they do not want to? Thats a bit telling about your worldview. And have you ever considered, that cosmology can only make relative observations and speculations? In other words, if our whole universe is just a small part of a bigger universe, how could we tell for sure, if all we can observe is within those borders? Also, how likely is it, that out of eternal nothing someday came a whole universe which wents back to nothing forever? Sounds more like religion than science.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        > By using "admits" ... "admits" can also be used to mean "accepts as valid"
        7y ago
  - onli 7y ago
    I was about to write an impolite response. Let's just keep it at: Your thought is not that deep that it is original or something other people do not understand. You miss the point where your Existenzangst is applicable and where it is not. Jumping on meta-levels and missing that we talk about the time period where consequences matter - like for how much fun there is when you play the game during the period our universe actually exists - is not profound. Looks like a bored effort to derail the discussion to me.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Simple question: how much did the ending actually matter to your enjoyment of the game? Would you have ignored the game and simply watched your preferred ending on youtube? Would you have told your past self not to play the game at all given how the ending actually is? These philosophical questions are not as separate from the day to day reality as you want to believe.
      - onli 7y ago
        It compeletely destroyed every bit of enjoyment I took from playing and finishing the game. Yes, I would have not played the game and actually do that regularly when it comes up, to tell people to not play (and to not buy!) ME3. It was that bad.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        > It compeletely destroyed every bit of enjoyment I took from playing and finishing the game. So... you didn't enjoy anything at all up to that point? Really? Then why bother playing it at all? Why not let someone else play it and just watch your preferred ending cutscene on youtube? Is it really all just about the destination and the journey means nothing?
gilrain 7y ago
The outcome is not identical because our choices throughout our lives impact other people and, potentially, get passed through the generations. This is why humanity is so advanced despite not having physically evolved much. The outcome is only “identical” if you only care about yourself. Not really the same thing at all.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  The universe will end one day. The outcome will, ultimately, be identical.
  - iamtheworstdev 7y ago
    The universe's end is not my end though, so I don't see that it's relevant.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Your end will happen even sooner than that by a ridiculously large margin.... so I don't get your point?
- ionised 7y ago
  Not really. Humanity will one day no longer exist and it will be as if we never existed at all. The universe is that massive and indifferent to our existence, and it too will come to an end.
  - jackhack 7y ago
    I'm going to use this excuse next time I miss a sprint goal. "Gentlemen, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture..."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jerf 7y ago
The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings. Stepping up 6 meta levels and asking "Yeah, but what's life all really about anyhow?" is, you know, fine and all, but also in way, profoundly missing the point. We want to talk about Mass Effect right now, not fundamental existential ennui. Personally... I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. etc. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game. (Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!)
- onli 7y ago
  It is definitely possible to make choices matter. Imagine that in the final mission, if you helped the Krogans before at one point during an alien attack there will be a Krogan Squad crushing through a wall and helping you out (that's taken from an interview with a Bioware employee who described what went wrong and how the ending should've worked). Stuff like that is possible, even if branching storylines are hard to do (cut content for many players and all that, I'm aware). The Fallout games - with the exceptions of Fallout 3 - show how it is indeed possible to at the end of the game show the impact of your actions on characters and civilization. BG2 did as well! And ME1 and ME2 during and at the end and even ME3 somewhat during the game showed consequences of prior actions - just at the end of a trilogy focusing on choice not at all. Stupid mistake and definitely avoidable. I'm convinced Bioware sealed their fate with that (making mediocre games after did not help them though).
  - jerf 7y ago

michaelt 7y ago

(it's after all the studio that made Baldur's Gate) Games studios have always struck me as a sort of Ship of Theseus - if the ownership, the product quality, the game engines and assets, and 99% of the employees have changed but the logo remains the same - does being loyal to the logo make sense?

vinceguidry 7y ago
Well, presumably the branding entity still owns the IP and trade secrets like the source code so even if an entirely different team comes on, they can still reuse that.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I'm not in the game industry at all, but, do you or anyone know how this goes? What goes into a game design? How much more detail and story and worldbuilding is there behind the scenes? I mean if it's anything like software development, the answer will for the most part be "well there's actually nothing here". A lot of sequels feel bolted on in that regard, where they just took elements from the original game, world and story and build on top of that.
Kihashi 7y ago
Unless the changeover happens all at once, there'd still be some cultural and knowledge transfer. It may not be the same company, but I don't think it's an entirely different company.

eswat 7y ago

BioWare is a good case study since a few articles and books have been written about their history (one of the co-founders also has a few videos on YouTube about how they managed the business). If you read enough of of them you can see BioWare has had three phases in their life: 1. Shattered Steel to Mass Effect 2, where they were largely independent and taking on feast-or-famine work (more of the former given the quality of their work at the time) 2. Mass Effect 3 to The Old Republic, which ringed-in the EA era and cracks in the quality of their work start to show. The end of this era is also when the co-founders and some key contributors to their past games left. 3. Dragon Age 3 to Anthem, which ringed-in stronger ties with EA—specifically having to work with Frostbite—and where we see that a lot of the problems we saw in the last era were probably chronic rather than acute. Lots of key contributor churn.

WorldMaker 7y ago

> they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons At the end of the day your decisions still matter to you. The debate around the ME3 ending has left me with a lot more respect for the ME3 ending over time than after I played through it the first time. Which of those 3 buttons a player chose often says so much about their combined playthrough of all three games. Linearly in terms of that playthrough so many gamers felt they only had "one choice" at the end, and that is an amazing psychological trick because the statistics BioWare revealed show that among players that did complete the final choice it was an almost even split (and a surprising number of players took the interesting fourth choice of just quitting there and not making a choice). I think the ME3 ending even before the Extended Cut (and more importantly the final Citadel "cleanup" DLC) was better than a lot of gamers gave it credit for, but the problem with it was that it was a very hard situation to see the forest from your particular gameplay tree. (Now, Anthem from a story perspective I have a lot less respect for. It's a weird KOTOR B-Plot [almost entirely recycled] with the Star Wars filed off.)

jamesgeck0 7y ago

> they promised your decisions matter; but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttons Your decisions do technically affect the ending, but it's subtle and not very satisfying. The outcome of every major decision in the trilogy is assigned a numeric value and added to a "war assets" sum as you progress through the game. Different decisions result in slightly different amounts of war assets, and actions in the third game were heavily weighted over previous games. The size of that number changes each ending very slightly. https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3/End_Game_Chart_-_With_Spoilers https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3/End_Game_Chart_-_Wit...

xsmasher 7y ago
I think that falls under "if the player didn't see it, it didn't happen."

m-p-3 7y ago

And Anthem is on the same tangent. The Internet never forgets, or it takes a damn long time before it does.