The Mass Effect 3 ending debacle
When Mass Effect 3 launched in 2012, it was meant to be the crown jewel of a series that had broken new ground in role-playing game design. Over the course of Commander Shepard's space trilogy, BioWare had given you unprecedented control over what happened to you, your crew and the species you met along the way. Players were giddy with excitement at the prospect of seeing their ending, after investing so much of themselves into the series.
Initially it looked good. Critics seemed very impressed, noting that the whole game felt like an ending, taking you on a tour of critical locations throughout the galaxy and delivering closure around key characters and plot points. The genophage, the quarians, the Reapers - you would settle all the family's business. If anything, the game was so obsessed dealing with business from its predecessors that it didn't quite stand out as strongly on its own as either of them, but that felt like an inevitable consequence of BioWare's design. Ultimately it was probably worth it. Right?
But when gamers got to the very end of the game, the final final final showdown, and witnessed Shepard's outcome, the mood shifted. Sure, we'd got to do a bunch of narrative housekeeping along the way, but where was the huge range of outcomes that should have been possible based on the decisions we made throughout the trilogy? Where was the sense of closure? After the unbelievably epic conclusion of Mass Effect 2, where was the final boss the series deserved? And don't get us started on the plot holes. Instead, we got a couple of possible conclusions, notoriously distinguished from one another largely by a change of color scheme. Oof.
What should have been a moment of triumph quickly evolved into a PR disaster. Gamers would not let this one go - they had been led down the garden path by Mass Effect's bluster about a personalized RPG story for literally years, buying into it at every step, and now it turned out it was all hype. The thing that really frustrated people seemed to be that BioWare was so much better than this. The studio of Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and Baldur's frickin' Gate, these guys should have been able to pull this off.
In the end, BioWare agreed. While preserving the original Mass Effect 3 ending, the studio broke off from other activities and went into production on a free piece of downloadable content that installed a cinematic epilogue. The Extended Cut arrived in late June, three months after the launch of the core game, and was generally well received.
