ME3 Ending PetitionFollow

After playing in Bioware's sandbox over the course of 3 games making the choices you want to make, ultimately, ME3 only gives you up to 3 choices at the end (with slight variations depending on a choice made at the end of ME2).

The ending cinematics, for all 3 choices, are the same aside from the Spoilercolor of the beam that's sent around the galaxy and maybe 10 seconds of footage at the very end (who survived on the Normandy, and whether or not Shepard survives).

I liked the ending of ME3, as I knew my Shepard would Spoilersacrifice herself to stop the Reapers & that's pretty much what she did.

I would have liked there to be more variety in the endings, and something similar to the end of DragonAge when it tells you how the decisions you made during the game effect the immediate future of that "world", but it being ambiguous leaves room for more stories in the ME universe (ME4, ME Online?).

I find it silly that the people playing ME 1-3 who've praised Bioware for the freedom given them to make choices are mad that at the end they were given up to 3 choices they maybe didn't want to make. SpoilerYou stopped a million+ year old cycle of the elimination of all organic life in the milky way & stopping said cycle may have resulted in the deaths of lots of different people you maybe didn't want to die. Sorry?

Poldaran-

I agree with you there. But on the other thread, I mentioned that it was similar to Lost in that aspect. It ended with resolutions for all the important characters yet left a lot of details & explanations out which further fuels speculation as to what actually happened. What happens after your choice at the end of ME3 is really up to your imagination, but can be extrapolated based upon various decisions you made throughout the series and at the end.

Also, this is pretty funny:



Edited, Mar 15th 2012 5:18am by Omegavegeta

He's a contrarian, by and large. Sometimes that means that he sounds like a nice bit of sanity among a sea of crazy, and sometimes he seems like he's picking nits or being abrasive simply to stir the sh*t. Sometimes a bit of both, which I think is the case here.

Either way, the charity thing exists in a wholly separate world from complaints about the game. It's nice that they're doing some good, but it's got nothing to do with their message about ME3.

Edited, Mar 15th 2012 10:51am by Eske

Quite.

I didn't have any problem with Final Fantasy 7's ending. SpoilerWas a fantasy game and I always just figured it was the planet, which from I recall was a living organism, finally cleansed itself of its infection (Humans). Through evolution, magic, whatever that allowed more of Red's Tribe to start populating the planet since they were not destroying the planet.Another posiblity is somewhere else on that planet there was a female that he finally found, that's not impossible either?

Far as the price of Video Games go I don't remember what they were for Atari when it first came out but the average NES game was $50 when it was a new release and there wasn't too many games that dropped down to $20 within a few months of release. MY mother once told me Atari 2600 games were over $50 when they first came out but I don't know how true that is. I always seen them for under $20 as a kid but that was mid 80's when it was dieing so don't know.. II think Genesis/SNES was between $50 and $60 as well. Supposedly I always heard that it cost Nintendo $15 to make a NES cart?. You look at modern media I doubt it costs more than $3 to put a game on a DVD/cd/blu-ray case and we won't even go into digital downloads. I guess in that since they are getting more money per sale but I am sure it costs ALOT more to make a game now then it did for older systems.

I remember the Nintendo 64 when it first came out some of those 3rd party games where $80 each at first (Shadows of the Empire). I imagine alot of it was Nintendos, in my option poorly thought out decision, to use cartridge as the media instead of cd like the rest of the world was using. So really $60 for a new game isn't too bad when you look at inflation and what your getting. I remember paying $50 for NES games as a kid in the 80's and within a couple of days beating them. $50 was alot more money in the late 80's than it is now.

The average NES game could be beaten in some cases less than an hour once you got good at it. Now a days you get a good rpg/adventure game you can expect 20+ hours of game play just going straight through the game. I know a lot of people who have 200 hour save games on Elder Scroll games.

I think that the example advertised prices in that article are exceptions though. I don't remember walking into a game store and seeing many games outside the $50-$60 range back then (with most being in the $20-$40 range instead). Today, with the exception of the occasional very obviously crappy/old games, it's hard to find anything less than $40 for a console. I think they're pointing to the wrong time period too. Early 90s was when there was a re-emergence of console gaming (which had died out somewhat after the initial boom of the early 80s) and prices were still high(ish). Compare to the late 90s/early 2000s, when the availability of better programming tools and cheaper memory and media drove prices down and the typical new release was right at around $40. It's gone up significantly in the decade since then

Adjusted for inflation, I wouldn't say that games have gotten more expensive, but they certainly are not less expensive. And given that the media and programming costs have (theoretically) decreased over that period of time, they should be cheaper than they are. I suppose you could counter that the games are "better", that's also subject to opinion. Better graphics and effects, sure. Better stories? Better gameplay? That's hard to say. As some have pointed out, SC2 really didn't change much from SC1 and in some ways had a less advanced/full story and plot. So we waited 15 years for what? Same game with improved graphics and cut scenes?

Not even saying that's typical, but it's not like human story writers have improved their trade as dramatically as the tech parts have improved. There's a reason why there are some 30 year old computer games, which (once you get past the graphics) are often more engrossing than games released today. Back then, they knew that they were limited in terms of graphics and game mechanics, so they focused on the parts they could make better. Today, it seems like better graphics and more advanced interaction is how gameplay is measured, but I'm not sure that's the best way to do it.

Edited, Mar 15th 2012 4:22pm by gbaji

I'm guessing Starcraft.

Today's Nerf Now! has a take on some potential new endings for ME3.

It just seemed to me that games used to fall in price much faster after release than they do today. This is the same for both computer and console games from what I've seen. Used to be, you could wait 6 months after the initial release was done, and pick up a title for about half the price as initial release. Today, there seem to be two pricing approaches: Anything that is physical media costs about as much 6 months later, or a year later as it did on day one, with downloadable content made available for relatively cheap (which can be smaller full games or extended content for games).

I'll freely admit that I'm not nearly as avid a video game player as I used to and my perception is based almost entirely on swinging through the game sections at Best Buy or Fries and noting that "holy cow, they're still asking $45 for that game that came out 1.5 years ago?" or trying to pick up Wii or DS games as gifts for my numerous nieces and nephews and noting pretty much the same trend.

It's just strange because this effect doesn't seem to be occurring with other media, like film. I can walk through the video section of those stores and easily find films released last fall that were going for $25-$30 are now $12-$15 in most cases (or less sometimes). Anything released a year or more ago is often in the sub-$10 range. So it's not about the media, it's about the market I guess.



Just covering all the bases. It does affect the cost for systems to do development on though. Those games aren't written on optical media. They're just copied to them for shipment to end customers. I was just commenting on the total cost of development.



Yeah. Some of this I see, some of it, not so much. The music team stuff I get, but then that's part of what I was talking about with more "stuff" in a game that doesn't necessarily add to the actual gameplay at all. I'm more about the actual game, the mechanics, plot, controls, objectives, etc. While I appreciate good sound and some music, it's not the most important feature of a good game, and I think that some projects go a bit over the top with that.

Graphics and more basic sound effects and music falls into the "better tools" category. It's 100 times easier to program graphics, and edit/score music and sound than it was back then. As I'm sure you're well aware of, most games are developed using somewhat standard sets of graphics engine tools. Sure, they push the envelope a bit over time, but that's also spread out over a whole bunch of titles that use the same toolset and engine to create their graphics. The greatest amount of time isn't really spent actually programing the graphics themselves, but on the design of the things the graphics engine shows to the player in that game. And the tools they have for that today make it super ridiculously easy compared to just 10 years ago.



Yes and no. While maybe not so applicable to the mid to late 90s era that I was talking about, but game developers used to pretty exclusively work at just a handful of "big" game companies. That actually changed in the 90s as development costs came down enough that smaller outfits could design games and then market them (either through a larger company or directly). This is where companies like Blizzard and Bioware came from. Prior to that time period, it was basically Nintendo, or Sony, or Atari, or a handful of other related companies that did all the games.

What we may be seeing is these smaller studio style companies have now become bigger, with more management layers, attorneys, overhead, and whatnot, and that's having an effect on the efficiency of their own operations and the resulting costs to the consumers.



Yup. Which kinda echoes what I was just talking about. I think the guys who were the indie studios 10-15 years ago, are now the "big dogs" of today. So maybe the rule is that things don't really change that much? I guess it's also a timing thing for me. I remember the first console game bubble (and crash) in the late 70s through early 80s, but I was a kid then. And while we were all in awe at the idea of playing video games on our TVs, to be honest, most of the title were pretty darn horrible (and most of them designed mill-like by the big companies of the day). I also watched as console gaming (and computer gaming) emerged in the 90s. The massive increases in technology allowed for a rapid growth of the industries. The existing console folks latched on to that, but still weren't making much of interest. It was in the computer games that the small studio model emerged. And they were incredibly innovative and interesting. These same guys moved into the console arena and essentially forced the old school guys to innovate as well.


It just seems like today, while the production value has increased, it's rarer and rarer to see something really new and interesting come up. It's easier and cheaper to just take an existing title, write a new storyline, toss in some new characters, spruce up the graphics a bit, and sell it than it is to make something new. That's not to say there aren't some interesting titles out there, but most are still rehashes of the same basic concepts. I think the last game I saw that I thought was a really "new" idea was Portal. And it was pretty basic and simple. Didn't need super amazing music, or sound. It just needed a neat concept and to execute it well.

Playing yet another variation of the same RPG long ago bored the hell out of me. Simply changing the UI and story isn't really making a new game. I still find RTS games interesting, but honestly no one's really improved the genre since Warcraft2 came out ( they've just produced modified versions with different resources, things to build, and units to use). Maybe I'm just jaded, but I honestly think that the game industry could do better. And given that they so often *aren't* doing better, I do find the costs a bit higher than I think they should be.


It may also be that I do remember the 80s, when console game were milled out and I really do see a similar trend going on today. The graphics are better, but they're still doing the equivalent of releasing 12 versions of the same game and just changing the name, the levels, and the graphic appearance. And while I suppose the high polygon counts of today make it a bit easier to conceal that it's still just a stick figure with stuff on it compared to the old 8bit graphics, are they really doing anything different? Are game companies really that much more innovative today than the guys back then who actually marketed games by thinking "Ok. It is just another side view game, with a character that you jump or swing over obstacles like the 5 games we released last year, but this time you're playing Indiana Jones! And see, he's got kind of a hat, and a whip. If you squint really hard anyway."?


I do hope you're right and that some new blood will flow in and start producing games that actually innovate. There's presumably no end to interesting ideas that one could incorporate into a game. It just seems like not nearly as many have appeared in the last 10 years compared to the 10 years before that.

Edited, Mar 16th 2012 6:11pm by gbaji

I think they should add more wombats.



That makes any game better.

From Crunchyroll



So some free DLC that resolves the ending should be forthcoming, unless the source is full of it.

It really sucks if that's true, though, and some ******* ruined everything... Wouldn't be surprised if it was, in any event.