SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

[trinityvixen]

This is a five-point defense of the players who disliked the ending of Mass Effect 3, so naturally there are A TON OF SPOILERS should you choose to read it. At the risk of becoming, as I worried with my roommate last night, the backlash against the backlash, I still find these arguments lacking. There is exactly one point they raise on which I agreed, but that was a logical error so out of line with the events of the ending that, like or dislike, stands out like a colossal WTF?

I hereby resolve to stop protesting against the backlash. Haters gonna hate, I believe, is the thing the kids say. And who knows? If I play through a second time with Renegade Shepard and like the ending less, I might be among them. Bloody unlikely, but we'll see.

What I'm most contemplating now, though, is a re-play through the whole series, stopping along the way to pick up a couple of the DLC adventures from the first two games that I never played. (Yes, you read that right: there was something branded Mass Effect, a video game no less, that I have not played!) I'm still mightily opposed on grounds of fuck EA and their enforced new-game buying tactics, DLC shouldn't be used as a bribe to get people to pay for your game or prevented from having if you don't, etc., etc. But my high and mighty standards stand weak before my love of these games. I don't expect my willpower to last.

In other video gaming news, has anybody out there played Heavy Rain and can anyone explain to me why the game wouldn't be, like, immediately solved by the protagonist just going to the fucking police in the first place!?!? Even with abusive asshole cop in charge of the investigation! It would be better! moonlightalice and wellgull are watching me go through the story--which I bumped down to easy difficulty because the game play is that much not fun--and we're all in fits about how stupid absolutely everything the hero does is. Every five seconds, I'm hissing Call the poliiiiicccccceeeeeeeee.

Comments

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Ethan is just supposed to be completely dysfunctional after the accident. This is not a good reason, but it's why. There's also some later stuff.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

But he's not the only one! Absolutely everyone behaves bizarrely. The FBI guy who won't corral the abusive cop. The woman who helps Ethan out despite mounting evidence (and Ethan's own confession) that this guy might be a goddamned killer. The psychiatrist! Who has reasonable suspicion and possible evidence that his patient has committed a crime who refuses to tell the police out of doctor-patient privilege THAT DOES NOT EXIST IF HE THINKS HIS PATIENT IS A CRIMINAL.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Oh, he's in no way the only one. He's just the most egregious. Heavy Rain's biggest problem is that it's very obviously a game that was written with particular endings in mind, and everything else was written backwards from it.

This isn't a bad way to write, but it lends itself to the lazy writer approach where stuff just is because they need it to be that way to accommodate the ending.

I like the game a lot despite it's problems because I like the atmosphere of the game A LOT (and Jayden's glasses).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm getting something of the same sense you mentioned, mostly because I know that there's no way to write and then animate the number of different endings that this game would otherwise possibly generate if you didn't have it narrowed down to specific endings. This is the problem with choose your own adventure narratives outside of books. A book can be read pretty quickly, and it doesn't take but a few more moments to write two endings to every decision. In contrast, creating a game out of that is not only expensive and arduous, it would be incredibly frustrating to players. You'd have to create some kind of saving tree whereby you can save at each critical juncture point before going on.

But options made in the beginning of the game would still have to have less effect on the narrative than the later parts or people would get incredibly frustrated by being thwarted later for something they messed up in the beginning (point of fact, that was the complaint with some text adventure, wasn't it?). There's no really great way to do choose your own adventure in video gaming yet, not while it takes as long as it does to make these games.