[StarSlayer]

The Reapers are literally entire civilizations packed into a space cuttlefish machine. I refuse to believe that no one in that entire Harbingeroid civilization has read the evil overlord list or heard the phrase 'make sure he's dead', especially when the survival of the entire Reaper program is on the line.

'The villains were overconfident' is one of the worst cop-outs in writing.

Yeah but 'ttuta, if it is an entire civilization think of how much of that collective must be comprised of ignorant morons.  Ship must be like a giant monument to group think.  I imagine the decision making process must proceed like You Tube comments, probably a few sensible posts drowned in a sea of 'bundle of sticks' insults by the unwashed masses.

[Dilmah G]

That is indeed new.

Good to see this is hitting them hard and that they're listening to feedback. Hope they don't **** up the recovery.

e: I'm gonna call it now, they're going to clear up some of the broad **** around the ending (show that mass relays didn't explode and wipe out all life, for instance) and maybe give some closure to characters, but not patch any of the more annoying plot holes or make your EMS really do anything.

Yeees, I'm going to take that as a confirmed for some sort of ending DLC. Was going to reply to the earlier replies to my first post but by the time I checked this thread it was on an entirely different page.

Interested to see how it pans out.

[General Battuta]

I saw an actually interesting and substantive post on BSN:

Conventional customer service thinking (at least as far as it appears in many published works, training seminars, etc.) states that for every customer who complains to your business about a problem approximately 26 customers are dissatisfied as well but remain silent. Given that we know ~57,000 BSN users have complained (as indicated by the poll - http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/), conventional customer service thinking would place the number of dissatisfied customers at approximately 1.5 million.

Whoof. Guy goes on to cite some sources and **** http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10363783

[newman]

Yeah but 'ttuta, if it is an entire civilization think of how much of that collective must be comprised of ignorant morons.  Ship must be like a giant monument to group think.  I imagine the decision making process must proceed like You Tube comments, probably a few sensible posts drowned in a sea of 'bundle of sticks' insults by the unwashed masses.

Behold, The Truth.

Available on Origin for $9.99

[LordPomposity]

Yeah but 'ttuta, if it is an entire civilization think of how much of that collective must be comprised of ignorant morons.  Ship must be like a giant monument to group think.  I imagine the decision making process must proceed like You Tube comments, probably a few sensible posts drowned in a sea of 'bundle of sticks' insults by the unwashed masses.

Behold, The Truth, Collector's Digital Deluxe Special Edition.

Available on Origin for $29.99*

*Special pre-order price. Regular price $39.99

Fixed.

[Luis Dias]

e: I'm gonna call it now, they're going to clear up some of the broad **** around the ending (show that mass relays didn't explode and wipe out all life, for instance) and maybe give some closure to characters, but not patch any of the more annoying plot holes or make your EMS really do anything.

That's not really that much Sherlokian of you. It's quite easy to see that this is the case.

EDIT:

I saw an actually interesting and substantive post on BSN:

Conventional customer service thinking (at least as far as it appears in many published works, training seminars, etc.) states that for every customer who complains to your business about a problem approximately 26 customers are dissatisfied as well but remain silent. Given that we know ~57,000 BSN users have complained (as indicated by the poll - http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/), conventional customer service thinking would place the number of dissatisfied customers at approximately 1.5 million.

Whoof. Guy goes on to cite some sources and **** http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10363783

Yeeeeaaah, well the 26 figure comes from the "90s". Well in the nineties the internet wasn't what it is now. I'm *pretty* sure that this figure is completely outdated regarding how much easier it is now to vent off your own dissatisfaction, so it's obvious that a much bigger percentage will complain. How much? I *couldn't have any frakkin idea*. But at least I don't make sh*t up.

[General Battuta]

Hahahaha holy ****, people are claiming this is a Peter Patrick Weekes post:

I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn't automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali's goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft.

And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn't need to be peer-reviewe.d

And again, it shows.

If you'd asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I'd break them down as:
Galactic Alliances
Friends
Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay -- a deliberate "nothing happens here" area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the "nothing happens here"-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me -- every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn't have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here's the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here's the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be -- something that I've been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson's goodbye.

For me, Anderson's goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just... You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he's not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it.

And then, just to be a dick... what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked "Destroy the Reapers". When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you'd show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory
b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.
c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren't in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don't know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it'd be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to "which color is stuff glowing?" Or maybe they ARE in, but they're too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that's... yeah.

Okay, that's a lot to have written for something that's gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn't tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn't have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don't even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes -- all three of them.

[Luis Dias]

Wait what? Weekes? That can't be right. That's a massive leak!

That cannot possibly be a public letter. That's impossible...

Sauce?? I only find it in pastebin.com

[General Battuta]

From a reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/r6su6/to_mass_effect_3_players_from_dr_ray_muzyka/

Apparently he posts on Penny Arcade sometimes and then deletes his posts a little later, in which case we might've ****ed him by spreading this all over.

That's golden cover for fabrication though. I don't know if it could be real...seems to match his style, though, and I've got at least one person corroborating it...

[Luis Dias]

It's a massive catch Battuta. Thing is, even if it's fabricated, it's soooooooo believable that I'm just going to blindfully assume that's exactly what happened. It fits perfectly.

EDIT: However, the cutscenes are indeed different regarding the score you have. Not much, but his description isn't much different from what I saw on youtube.

[General Battuta]

I don't want to get him fired

But it's probably too late. Genie's out - the reddit thread/pastebin was patient 0 anyway, I'd just be one vector.

[General Battuta]

Patrick Weekes says he didn't write it so probably fake, or he's covering himself

[Herra Tohtori]

This atmosphere of disinformation and deception makes for a better story than Mass Effect ever, with bad ending or good.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

WHO WILL YOU BELIEVE

[newman]

Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he's not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it.

Um.. yea. "Unemotional, intellectual ending"? I think not. If anything it was too emotional, trying to cover up that it's not intellectual at all. It's all simplified organics vs. synthetics rehashed bs we've seen.. everywhere before, cut together in a giant mess that doesn't make sense, with a bunch of emotional smokescreens to try and cover it up. I hope this post was fake..

[General Battuta]

I think it's unemotional and intellectual in that it's about Big Ideas (even if they don't make sense) rather than the specific characters or species we've come to care about.

[newman]

I think it's unemotional and intellectual in that it's about Big Ideas (even if they don't make sense) rather than the specific characters or species we've come to care about.

Well, yea, but if it doesn't make any sense, there's nothing much intellectual about it. I'd accept "failed attempt at intellectual, with a failed attempt to cover it up with a failed attempt at emotional" though

[Ransom]

Possible-Weekes' point was the ending's writer was preoccupied with high-level concepts at the expense of emotional resolution. Nitpicking word choice isn't productive.

[newman]

I just don't like what's considered intellectual these days.

[The E]

Nitpicking word choice isn't productive.

[newman]

I guess you and I have different definitions of "nitpicking", as whether or not anything in ME can be defined as intellectual isn't entirely irrelevant for the topic at hand. Giving the franchise waaay too much credit is one of the recurring problems I see with people, ME devs and certain journalists included. It's not an artistic masterpiece like a Shakespeare play or a Rembrandt painting, and it's not intellectual, nor is it supposed to be. It's not Asimov, it's not 2001.
It's when you forget what you're making and try to get all deep and "intellectual" on the wrong basis is when you get a mess like ME3's final 10 minutes. So no, it's not nitpicking. It's the perception that space opera pulp can be called "intellectual" that's part of the problem these days.

If they'd accepted the franchise for what it is, they'd have followed up the "high level" choices with closure on the universe and characters they made us care about (and did a great job with it, no question), spiced with some actual variety derived from your choices. Instead we get a pretty simple, rehashed organics vs. synthetics thing we saw a million times before, add a cycle of extintion as a twist, and call the lack of closure on any of the characters or smaller concepts "intellectual". No, it's not nitpicking at all in my book. But I feel I've made my point clear by now, so I'm done here.