Bioware and the ending to Mass Effect 3
I don’t have time for computer games these days, but it’s been interesting to watch the blowback to the ending to Mass Effect 3.
There’s an important rule to fiction that all writers, in whatever media format, must remember. You can have any kind of ending to your story that you want. You can have a happy ending, a sad ending, a bittersweet ending, or some mixture of the three.
But under no circumstances can your ending leave the reader feeling cheated. Furthermore, an ending must be an ending, and it must not betray the story that preceded it.
Now, there are people who argue that such endings are unrealistic, and that fiction must be as realistic and gritty as possible. But that’s nonsense. Fiction, by definition, is unrealistic. Storytelling is like stage magic – it’s an illusion, a trick, but like stage magic, the audience wants to be fooled.
To continue the metaphor, having a “realistic” ending that cheats the audience is a bit like a stage magician performing the “sawing a woman in half” illusion – only that he actually does saw in her half. And as the audience stares at him in shock and dismay, the magician informs them that in real life, women who are actually sawed in half die of shock and/or blood loss, and furthermore, if they are not intelligent enough to appreciate the ending, they are welcome to go eat pork rinds and watch “Jersey Shore” while drinking Miller Lite.
I’m sure you can think of a few books or movies like that – stories where the writer killed off the entire cast or wrecked the setting out of spite, or betrayed the story to make a heavy-handed political point with the ending. There was a remarkably lame sitcom from the 90s called DINOSAURS, which ended with the cast freezing to death to Teach A Valuable Lesson about environmentalism. Another good example is M. Night Shymalan’s film THE VILLAGE, where all the mystery and horror of the story only turns out to be a humbug. Or THE SOPRANOS series, in which case the ending simply didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Writers: don’t do this. Remember that a fool doesn’t learn from his own mistakes, but it’s an absolute idiot who fails to learn from the mistakes of others.
-JM
I have not played a Mass Effect game since the first back in ’07 or ’08, nor was I aware of the controversy. Wow, two years in a row for Bioware, that’s not a good sign…there is a saying that goes “the bigger they are the harder they fall”, it seems Bioware has not been living up to the huge expectations they set for themselves; and this is nothing compared to last year’s major fan blow back over Dragon Age 2, that actually ended with Bioware recrafting the DLCs, delaying any expansions, and going back to the drawing board for DA3 (which will now be somewhere inbetween DA1 and DA2, on the mechanical side of things anyway).
As for a story’s ending, I could not agree more! Whenever you take the time to read a book/play a game/watch a film, after all that goes into it (your time, effort, emotions, etc), only to be robbed at the very end, that is something like a story telling sin! I hate that when it happens, but in my case it does not happen so often, which I’m thankful for! Though it’s not always so black and white, sometimes it depends on you and how you see things, like Lost for example, alot of people hated the ending, I loved it, I thought it not only moving, but the right ending fore the series. Other people had concentrated so much on the mysteries of the island that the missed the spiritual nature of the show, that was what Lost was really about, the mysteries of the island were more or less McGuffins. However, sometimes it’s not about you at all, it actually is the writer. Case in point, the latest Martin fantasy book, alot of people were turned off by it, one need only look at customer reviews to see this, but considering the series was only ever meant to be a trilogy, means Martin has been winging it for along time, so what do people expect? And considering Martin’s love of killing off people, having things end in failure after failure (not to mention the crap sack world it take place in) does anyone really think the ending of the series will be anything other than a cheat?
What books/movies/games, etc would you pick as the worst offenders? I could probably come up with a few myself, but I’d like to hear what you have to say.
I think Bioware’s gotten bitten by the “realistic ending” bug. The bad guy in Dragon Age Origins was the Blight and the dread archdemon – worthy foes for an epic. The enemy in Dragon Age 2? Social injustice – much harder to hang on a story on that.
“What books/movies/games, etc would you pick as the worst offenders?”
Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER comes to mind. The first 6.5 books were good. The last half of the final book sort of went off the rails, badly.
“The bad guy in Dragon Age Origins was the Blight and the dread archdemon – worthy foes for an epic. The enemy in Dragon Age 2? Social injustice – much harder to hang on a story on that.”
Totally! Look, I loved DA2, but it did seem to lack the epic feel of the first game, and I think it boiled down to two reasons, the one you stated above (lack of an epic villian/no ‘save the world’ plot), and the fact that the whole game pretty much took place in just one city…compare that to the first game, which had you all over an entire country!
I wonder how DA3 will be in those regards? Bioware has said it will be about a war between the templars and the mages…sounds like the second game…let’s just hope it has a more epic feel to it this time around!
FWIW I’m going templars all the way! 😀
I have heard of King’s Dark Tower books, but I generally stayed away from them because they were, well, Stephen King books, heh. His books are either horror stories, or really bad horror stories. Were they fantasy books? Dark fantasy?
The Dark Tower books were dark fantasy, but they’re a little hard to define.
King’s books are either hit or miss – Duma Key was excellent, and I’ve heard good things about 11/22/63.
I just checked out what all the fuss was about regarding the ending to ME3…well I can see why so many were turned off by it. What on earth was Bioware thinking! They didn’t even give their fans one good ending, all three were crap! It also kills the whole point of the series, which was that your choices reall mattered, because in the end they don’t.
While I only played the first game in the series, the ending they gave for it makes me feel ok that I did not play the sequels. As for “realism”, that is not what was in play here I think, more like a kind of nihilism, or at least a very deep seated pessimism, none of which make for very good ending.
“As for “realism”, that is not what was in play here I think, more like a kind of nihilism, or at least a very deep seated pessimism, none of which make for very good ending.”
Yes. I think they slipped into the particular school of hard science fiction that argues “the evolution of man is a meaningless speck against the indifferent vastness of the universe”, which does not for a cheerful story make, which is why hard science fiction never does all that well.