What I found strangest about it was that there was such a multitude of (sometimes mutually inconsistent) complaints across a number of narratological levels, but that didn't stop a lot of people insisting that their personal complaint was what most people "really" thought, and angrily declaring that anyone addressing anyone else's complaints was "missing the point".Originally Posted by motherpuncher
"Moronic cynicism is a kind of naïveté. It's naïveté turned inside-out. Naïveté wearing a sneer." -Momus
That's not really strange. I think it's a lot harder to work out why you like or dislike something than it is to work out whether you like or dislike something.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
I think Mass Effect is shit personally...
Poor linear static level design where you land on a planet, kill the mobs, fight a boss and bring someone back to the ship lol. The shooting feels shit, their original excuse was cause it's mixed in with RPG elements but they're few and far between. I found the gameplay to be really boring, just run from point a to b and stop every 30 seconds while an NPC says a load of bullshit you don't care about. I'm sick of having to stop for a dull cutscene with no animation, just two characters looking at each other and talking. Why couldn't they just have them say that shit while you're playing like what the do when you're driving to a location on GTA 4.
The story is such a cliche mess and the characters are all so poor.
Portal 2 made a sphere robot animate better than anything from Bioware.
God I hate their shit games so much, don't get why people like them.
Well, I'm not so sure people were wrong about why they disliked it. Different people had, as Jesper Juul put it, different types of investment in the game, and with a different investment came wanting something different from the ending. The problem, as Juul sees it (and I'm leaning towards agreeing) is that there was simply no way to satisfy all those different investments. People liked the games for a variety of different reasons, and expected an ending consistent with that reason. For some of us, the ending was consistent with why we liked the games, but for a lot of people, who liked the games for different reasons, it wasn't. Some people dissatisfied with the original ending liked the extended cut, while others still didn't. (And some people who liked the original ending disliked the extended cut...)
The point there is that there never was a catch-all solution, or a way to fix the ending, because what people wanted from the ending was too disparate. That, I think, is ultimately a casualty of BioWare's aiming for mass appeal and trying to be all things to all people.
"Moronic cynicism is a kind of naïveté. It's naïveté turned inside-out. Naïveté wearing a sneer." -Momus
That's cop out thinking tbh. Fundamentally the developers/writers should be way more invested in the game than any of the fan base because they're creating it. The man hours they've invested far outweighs that of even the most fanatical fan by a country mile.The problem, as Juul sees it (and I'm leaning towards agreeing) is that there was simply no way to satisfy all those different investments.
Last edited by Kadayi; 13-08-2012 at 10:33 AM.
Why yes you're right I'm deliciously evil
Tradition is the tyranny of dead men
Steam:Kadayi Origin: Kadayi GFWL: Kadayi
Probable Replicant
*blush* I'm flattered by the attention boys, but please let's not make the thread about liddle old me
Ok well I played a lot of games this year. But for things to be big disappointments I've had to have had "high hopes" for them first. So I can discount all the games I bought and played just for the heck of it (Like Spec Ops the Line or something).
Star Wars: The Old Republic
I personally found this game to be a pretty huge disappointment. Few reasons for it.
First of all the game killed itself on it's own flagship, the storyline, ironically enough. The storyline had two major flaws; it showed how much the game was rushed. The first act was pretty awesome on any class; the second act was already getting mediocre and the last act was rather poor. You could immediately tell it was rushed. The same could be said for flashpoints, quality degraded as you progressed into the game.
The second major flaw was pretty much a death sentence for being an MMO; because you were semi-forced to solo play for most of your game time. This was perhaps the biggest annoyance for me and it occurred on a daily basis that people didn't want to do "social things" because they were busy with their single player game inside this big MMO world. Ironically it's exactly how guild wars 2 is going the opposite direction in that (nearly) everything you do promotes social interaction.
Another disappointment was that the game, for trying to be a ripoff of WoW, it didn't learn from WoW's mistakes. Things like making separate PvP games for premade groups should have been on their to-do list well before the launch. Constantly going up against fully geared, voice chat communicating, pvp guilds really took the fun out of the PvP.
I could extend this but that's not what this is about
Mass Effect 3
I'm just going out and say that I enjoyed 99% of this game. I had high hopes for this game, and although the ending was pretty lame (didn't play extended and don't plan to anytime soon); IMO the rest of the game was quite enjoyable.
I agree that the choices you made throughout the game had hardly any effect on the ending, and that was a major flaw in their story writing; although at the same time I was surprised how much uproar this made. I felt like the majority of the people were just shouting, because others were shouting and you would get told off if you didn't join or said you didn't mind as much.
Special notion goes to the Multiplayer, which I enjoyed for quite a while with some friends. A lot probably find it repetitive and stale; but I have to say I quite enjoyed playing it for 1-2 months.
Max Payne 3
I haven't played this yet, but I had some high hopes for this. If this doesn't have the Noir feeling that Max Payne 1 (and in lesser form MP2) had; it's already a disappointment before I start.
Max Payne has always been praised for it's bullet time. But in my opinion what made Max Payne one of my all time favorite games is the depressing atmosphere; the awesome voice and the film noir feeling that this game had almost perfected. The stripbook addition to this just added a layer on top to finish it all off.
Diablo 3
Maybe my biggest disappointment of the year. I knew beforehand that Hack and Slash games like this have this point where they become too boring for me due to their repetitiveness. I had hoped that much like Diablo 2 the solid gameplay and hunger for good loot would extend it's duration far enough for me to be satisfied. But I was largely disappointed in the end.
I think the Auction House hurt the game so much that it lost most of it's glamor. It shouldn't have been in, and this is simply a clear indicator of how greed on the developer/publisher side can ruin a game.
Other than those, the upcoming things I have high hopes for are:
Guild Wars 2; Which for me still seems solid so far; with just one major worry. And that is that I run out of things to do. I enjoyed Guild Wars 1 for quite a while though, even though that at first seemed to suffer from similar "lack of endgame options", which turned out to be false.
Battlefield 3 DLCs; This game is still going strong as one of my best purchases of the last few years. I have never been able to find myself in people's opinions that the game ruined itself by trying to be a CoD ripoff.
Torchlight 2: I didn't really like the first, because I just don't enjoy action hack and slash games that are single player. So I have some more hopes for a multiplayer sequel. I'm somewhat hoping this will be what D3 was not; although I don't actually have very high hopes, and maybe that's for the better as then the game can't be a huge disappointment either :P
I don't really think this is the problem. I think that they just chose a non-maximal ending. That is, they could have made an ending that satisfied everyone who was satisfied with the initial ending, and satisfied a few more people. The sudden appearance of Casper doesn't add anything meaningful, he's just there. You can see this from the way that people who don't mind the ending just say they don't mind it. It doesn't bother them, but they don't ever claim it's worthwhile.
I think it's a lot harder to make people genuinely irritated with an ending than you're implying, anyway. Sure, there are lots of games where it ends and people say "meh, not very good". For instance, I thought for a moment that the game was going to end with Anderson and Shepard dying and not seeing what actually happened to the Reapers. That, I would argue, wouldn't have been a very good ending, but I wouldn't have got too angry about it, and it would have had a certain artful elegance.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
Has to be Diablo 3 for me too, so far. The game in a vacuum is fun enough, the skill system is interesting, some of the locations are gorgeous and I really didn't mind the cheesy story. Unfortunately, the singular focus on loot grinding in combination with the fact that the AH was the most easy way to acquire said loot killed any long term enjoyment to be had from it.
What I found particularly weird about the ending to ME3 was why. Why do it? Why do we even need some sudden new justification of the Reapers' motives? We've already got one perfectly good justification already, we don't need another one. It's not a series that needed some sudden "oh maybe the Reapers aren't so bad after all" twist in the last 10 minutes.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
Because the Bioware writers come up with a twist then work backwards.
Thank you, I hope to temper my disappointment with apathy.
mickygor, Battlefield 3
Otmer, League of Legends EUW
Bastiat, Planetside 2, Miller NC
Shit is in the eye of the beholder.
Can I say Just Cause 2, even though it came out in 2010 and I only started playing it last month?
I was really disappointed by it because there was so much potential there, and they didn't do anything with it. Not only could they have leveraged the power of a modern PC to simulate actual traffic instead of just constantly spawning and despawning vehicles in a 50m radius around the player, but the destruction of military property could have created a great sense of progression that they seem to have abandoned right after pre-production. There's no such thing as disrupted communications after blowing up a radio mast, the army is on your ass as quick as ever. There are no lights going out when you shoot up a generator. There are no citizens revolting after you destroy a propaganda trailer. It's pointless.
Then there are the little details that just a bit of post-release support can fix in a moment. Why no speedometer, why no altimeter? Why aren't the vehicle and weapon stats displayed in numbers instead of meaningless, partially-filled bars? Why no grapple upgrades, parachute upgrades? Why can't you grab an object instead of giving it one pull? Why can't you push a boat into the water? Why?
I'm just highlighting that saying 'no one will ever run under a four minute mile' is bullshit thinking. It's the talk of quitters and a poor excuse.
An argument would require one side to have a decent position. I haven't yet read one article or post anywhere that's proffered up a convincing defense of the ending that's anything other than a twist on 'Well I liked it' and been able to really address any of the endings flaws. Same with Prometheus.Also, can we not have yet another ME3 Ending argument?
Last edited by Kadayi; 13-08-2012 at 02:35 PM.
Why yes you're right I'm deliciously evil
Tradition is the tyranny of dead men
Steam:Kadayi Origin: Kadayi GFWL: Kadayi
Probable Replicant
*blush* I'm flattered by the attention boys, but please let's not make the thread about liddle old me
I guess they felt the end of a massive trilogy needed a single answer to life, the universe, and everything. Shame that answer was a crowbarred in pseudo-philosophy deus ex machina at it's most primitive level. I do wonder what the reaction would be if there was no great revelation though, would people be happy with the standard man vs destructive alien race premise? I mean, I always thought the overall story wasn't particularly important in the Mass Effect games, and the core appeal was more about kickin' it around the universe with a bunch of badass misfits, Outlaw Star/Firefly/Cowboy Bebop/KotoR style.
I feel the same as Kadayi does about ME3 to some extent - it wasn't the game I found disappointing, it was Bioware's reaction ("ITS FINE, SHUT UP" rather than "yeah, we screwed up, its not our original vision and we changed the storyline from what we planned in ME2") and the press ("LOL BEST GAME EVAR, HATERS GON HATE STFU" rather than "they have a very valid point, the ending makes no sense").
Hell, I stopped reading Penny Arcade due to their defense of Bioware. When two of the (IMO) cleverest people on the internet and highly respected gamers turn their back on what is the biggest traversity of writing and common sense in the history of mankind, then I no longer believe in the world. My view of the media in general has also been jaded since then.
I'm fine with the opinion that the whole game is not bad - in fact, ME3 is a masterpiece. The MP is good fun (better than others with its depth) and areas like Tuchanka and the Citadel really hammer home how good it is. Then you have areas that flash past (Earth, Thessia, Pavonis, Sur'kesh) that were good but could of been better. But the ending? What a fucking mess. The extended cut makes a small attempt to fix it, but the massive fuck you that is the god child and the illusive man's bullshit? No.
I would of been happy if it cut to credits as the crucible fired while Anderson and Shepard were sitting there looking out over the battle. If the Geth and Edi had lived, and there wasn't any stupid shit like Joker pulled. That there was an epilog showing the impact of your choices (which would of been piss easy for bioware to make "the geth lived" or "the geth died in vain" or something)would people be happy with the standard man vs destructive alien race premise?
Ug, I shouldn't of said all that. I've ranted enough. Let me just say that the ME3 ending disappointed me and broke me in more ways than one. I don't think I'll get as sucked into games again for a while.
Last edited by Hirmetrium; 13-08-2012 at 01:40 PM.
It annoyed me that the epilogue didn't even mention EDI and the Geth getting fried along with the Reapers. I would have though Joker would have been a little miffed.
...not that I picked that ending myself. I just watched the other 2 (3-ish) on YouTube after.
By the way, sorry that I'm happy to keep talking about ME3. I only completed it two weeks ago.
Yeah, I really think they just thought they had to do something "smart", whereas in fact nothing really special was needed. That seems to be a bit of a problem with a lot of stories these days, this requirement to have a sudden smart twist. It just really sticks out with Mass Effect because the rest of the series was played pretty straight, so the last 10 minutes feels really inappropriate after 80 hours to suddenly do a massive switch. And one also gets the feeling that this ending wasn't the plan at all in ME1 and ME2 and not the plan for much of the writing of ME3, so it feels really really out of place.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
The <insert game here> rage.
Seriously - don't you have anything better to do in your free time? Like... playing games?
Posting Permissions
