Now We Can See How Mass Effect 3 Really Ends
In case you've been living in a hole and didn't know this was coming, BioWare released today in North America the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut, a free DLC package that expands on the ending that had fanboys everywhere filling message boards and social media with angry tirades. The DLC will feature new cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes to expand upon the ending, hopefully giving fans the closure they so desperately crave.
"With the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut we are delivering what so many fans have asked for - more answers, more clarity, and a more definitive resolution to their Mass Effect 3 experience," said Casey Hudson, Executive Producer of the Mass Effect series. "The team is excited for players to experience this final statement on the conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy."
Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut is available now in North America on Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network as well as Origin for PC. It will hit the European PlayStation Network on July 4.
Personally, I was a little disappointed in the ME3 ending because it was so brief, but it's been so long now that I'm kind of over it. I suppose I'll still download the Extended Cut just out of morbid curiosity... But since you're instructed to load your last autosave point in the game before the final mission on Earth, I'm not really psyched to actually play the ending again. I just kind of wanted to watch the additional epilogue cinemas! (But then I'm lazy like that.) I certainly don't want to have to get my Galactic Readiness back up to 100% from wherever the heck it's fallen to since I finished the game months ago!
Did you download it? Did it fix your issues with the ending? Or make them worse?
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 26 June 2012
· Comments (11)
Other stuff like this: bioware, dlc, extended cut, mass effect 3, playstation network, xbox live
It doesn't fix the endings that's for sure. But it does make them borderline acceptable. That's about it.
Wait, your Readiness drops over time if you're not playing it constantly? What if you're like me and don't give a damn about the multiplayer?
I actually was in the same boat as you. As much as I love the Mass Effect series and consider them my favorite games, it was too soon for me to feel like I was ready to play through the last four hours of the game. But I did it, dutifully, and I have to say that I was pretty impressed.
I was among the (now seemingly minority) of people whom were kind of appalled at the gaming community for the original backlash over the Mass Effect 3 ending. To expect Bioware to kowtow to our righteous anger over their product and actually change the ending seemed a little farfetched to me. But the more I thought about it, the more I did kind of come to agree that I had invested hours and even real emotion into tough-yet-kid badass Celia Shepard and the lack of an epilogue for those characters was really shocking. Truthfully, there are Mortal Kombat 2 epilogues that reveal more than Mass Effect 3 did.
I do now feel like my personal Mass Effect trilogy narrative has been fleshed out further with the edition of the Extended Cut DLC. Sure, I would have liked it to have gone even further and told me what would end up happening to those characters a year down the line, but honestly, where does that end? I'd like to know what happens to Tali in five years, and then what about Steve Cortez in another three and Kaidan in another ten and so on and so forth. But I think that's the great thing about a series that has been as successful as Mass Effect has been is that maybe Bioware doesn't feel as much pressure to address those questions because there is always time for them to be touched upon in the future, in further looks into that universe.
Finished it and it turns out that you still can't polish shit into anything else. Because the little after bit with the breathing in the rubble is still there and still not explained.
*head-desk*
It's as if they tried to miss the point entirely...
People were not asking for 'more answers' so that they had to spell out what the endings meant as if the audience were children. They were asking for the choices that they made throughout the games to MEAN SOMETHING in the conclusion.
All this does is say to the audience "You were too stupid to understand our great idea. Oh, and if you wanted to make sure that the Geth died out or the Krogan couldn't reproduce, screw you and your choices."
Despite what game producers may think, their audience are capable of thinking and handling ambiguous endings. Anyone who's watched and enjoyed the director's cut of Blade Runner can agree with that.
They didn't listen. They chose the laziest options possible in order to 'fix' this.
Shin, yeah. You have to play multiplayer in order to get your galactic readiness up. And when playing the game, I actually got it up to 100% across the board for when I went into the endgame. (Since it's co-op, multiplayer wasn't that horrible. I almost kind of enjoyed it.)
But I checked and it's down to 50%. And since I want the ending that I originally got (just fleshed out, hopefully), I feel like I need to boost that back up again. And I don't have time for that right now. So part of me feels like being lazy and just watching the ending on YouTube!
Oh, wait, I just remembered that the whole reason I wrote that long post was to get to this point somehow: I left my multiplayer percentage at 50% and still got the same ending.
You can check the War Assets computer, I think it's called, in the Normandy, and it will tell you what your chances look like. If you've completed mot of the side quests, then it should be fully green and you should be good to go. I'm all jacked up on cold medicine and I totally digressed earlier.
It's tragic really as they used to be my favourite game maker, till they started producing poor quality games. I'm fickle like that. I just hope Bethesda manages to keep up the quality (and I'm really dreading the possible bad results of the Elder Scrolls MMO), t'otherwise I'm going to have to take up tabletop gaming at this rate.
I appreciated the new 4th option: Extinction.
no, seriously, I really did. that dark twist, where Shepard basically tells the piece of shit deus ex machina Star Child that your choices all suck? best ending in the game. I appreciate a dark twist like that, tragic endings are few and far between and I really liked it.
the rest? absolute garbage.
I played it last night and while it has been a while since I played the game, I found myself very satisfied with the extra scenes that were added. It felt more complete. They got to keep their endings but they really should have given us this extra stuff from the beginning. The only thing I didn't like were the hand drawn montages at the end. They looked rushed and cheap.
I should have realized after Swtor tanked that ME3 was doomed. Just like when square soft became squeenix.. just went down the tubes...