Alright, I LOVE the Mass Effect series. I even preordered the N7 Collector’s (no pun intended) Edition of the game despite the fact that I could’ve gotten the regular edition imported for less than half the price.
I looked forward to Mass Effect 3 like a little kid does to Christmas and hot damn was I excited to finally finish my version of Shepard’s story that I had started two years earlier. And then I played the game and after a few hours, stopped playing…
It was a combination of three things:
- I didn’t know if it really was worth saving the galaxy. After all, when Shepard helped defeat the Reaper Sovereign in the first game he returned in Mass Effect 2 to find that the whole event was covered up as a terrorist attack by the Geth, and in Mass Effect 3 Shepard finds himself court-martialed and left ship-less despite the fact that he led a suicide mission to destroy the Collectors. Was it really worth saving the lives of those who would never acknowledge Shepard’s actions? I figured that it was a question that would never provide me with a satisfactory answer and that it doesn’t matter what became of my story so long as I would save help save billions of innocent lives.
- I thought I couldn’t get the best ending without playing multiplayer. I guess I read too much into what people were saying about how the “Galactic Readiness” level was what determined the final outcome of the story. I had replayed Mass Effect 2’s final mission in order to save everyone in the crew, and also replayed the entirety of the original game just to save Wrex: the “best” ending was what satisfied me the most. NB. I wasn’t one of the people who complained about the endings themselves. I figured that BioWare made the game the way they saw fit, and that it was them who put in all that time, money, and effort to crafting such a beautiful series – NOT the pricks who felt that they were “owed” something by BioWare. Seriously, if you didn’t like the endings then that is fair enough, but don’t go demanding the developer make changes just to appease your mismanaged expectations. Making a series where decisions from earlier games are brought into current ones is a difficult task in and of itself, and players would be kidding themselves if they thought that every single permutation of every save file would have its own specialised ending. We just don’t have the technology to pull of something like that, and I think players should’ve known better. Either way, it was just a game after all right? Hmm, that kind of contradicts my previous dot point, doesn’t it?
- BioWare gave in. This broke my heart. I got over my indecision to save the world, and I had learned that I could maximise my readiness by complete side-missions, but reading Dr. Muzyka’s defeated blog post was the last straw. It put me off of Mass Effect 3 and made me lose faith in BioWare. I dismissed the “entitled” players that complained about the endings, but I hated the fact that they had won. They got what they wanted, and brought an established studio like BioWare to its knees. In September, Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuck left BioWare, the company they had founded together in 1995.
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So why am I playing Mass Effect 3 now, almost 10 months later? A) Because I want to be able to listen to the Giant Bombcast without having the game’s story spoiled, B) I’ve heard that the From Ashes and Levathian DLC add a lot of worthwhile content, and C) I REALLY love Mass Effect.
Mass Effect 3 deserves another chance, and I will make sure to play through the game to completion (without the Extended Cut endings), and enjoy myself while doing it. I’ve heard a lot about the two DLC packs, and will include them in my playthrough (though From Ashes was already included as part of the Collector’s Edition).
I will post updates here as I continue through the game so be sure to check back from time to time. You may even find some of it on Doublejump so keep an eye out on there too. Anyway, it’s late and tomorrow’s going to be an eventful day (I’m going to see my girlfriend yay!) so good night, and happy new year if I don’t post before then. 🙂
This post was originally published on Tumblr.
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