TL;DR at the bottom
I'm not sure how many gamers there are on this sub, but the whole shitting on fans thing that Star Wars have been doing since the release of that god awful movie reminded me of BioWare and Mass Effect.
When Mass Effect 3 (the last entry in the trilogy) came out, the community went on fire with all sorts of criticism on the BioWare Forums and elsewhere.
The product was extremely rushed (EA gave them less than a year to develop since release of Mass Effect 2), with certain odd game design choices and a lot of technical issues and bugs (mostly fixed post-release).
But of course, what relates it to NuLucasFilm are problems with its story, the subsequent criticism from fans and how it was handled.
As the final entry in the series, Mass Effect 3's story was ridden with plot holes, character assassination, deus ex machina (with the ending being literally this), outright weird choices like relegating extremely major events in the universe's timeline to DLC side-quests and dare I say it - subversions of expectations. In some cases, the latter directly contradicted what was promised by the game developers.
In the game's lore, humans and other races built their civilisations on the ruins of an old empire that had mysteriously vanished, with all its people dead due to an unknown extinction event. This is a pretty big deal and serves as a foundation for the game's main plot and lore. Little was known about this old empire's culture, and there was no chance that anybody lived through whatever has killed them all.
So you'd think a sole surviving member of said empire being introduced in the final game would be an important plot element. Alas, it was relegated to Day 1 DLC... While this side-quest can be called subversive, I have to admit that it wasn't so in a bad way, and had a few decent plot twists that introduced a lot of (somewhat wasted) potential if explored properly.
This is to give you a taste of the missed opportunities and weird plot decisions. Now let's look at something that resembles TLJ better.
SNOKED / There was no plan!
Upon release, there was barely any explanation provided about the mysterious ancient antagonist race's origins and motives for wishing to destroy the galactic civilisation, despite heavy hinting in Mass Effect 1 & 2 and all the marketing hype. And what was explained didn't make any sense and contradicted the initial plan for the antagonists' motives, with certain foreshadowing in ME1/2 now leading to nowhere.
Interviews suggest the writers had no plan for the third installment when working on the second game.
FIRST ORDER REIGNS
Major point plot of the previous entry was a black ops human-centrist paramilitary organisation. Illegal and dangerous experiments, espionage, conspiracies to push their agenda, advanced R&D, etc. Their wealth and capabilities rivaled that of the official galactic governments, but their numbers were low.
In Mass Effect 3, they suddenly have a gigantic army and occupy whole star systems. They've got hordes of elite soldiers, high-tech weaponry and equipment, and a huge star fleet. They're so big that it felt like the player was fighting them more often than the Big Bad who had finally invaded our galaxy and turned Earth into a literal slaughterhouse.
There is no proper explanation other than "Reaper tech" (in English: "a wizard did it"). While it's hinted that their army consists of kidnapped/brainwashed randoms, nothing explains the rest of their armada.
Character Assassination
Said human-centrist group was founded and led by an enigmatic tycoon, who learned of the Big Bad earlier than anyone else in the story. He's been portraited as someone who's always been one-step ahead of the Big Bad despite the latters' overwhelming capabilities. His own morality and that of his organisation has always been in the gray area.
They used to be a "whatever it takes" kind of group willing to make sacrifices and spit on the morals as long as it helps them reach their goal - save the humanity from the imminent Big Bad invasion and make them a dominant race in the galaxy. It's not white, but it's not black either - a perfect blend of gray.
In Mass Effect 3 that all goes down the toilet - the tycoon turned out to be just the Big Bad's puppet (a carbon copy of the first game's antagonist) and the army that came out of nowhere are literally their zombies. Zombie Nazis now do Nazi things in the galaxy where they REIGN because they are Nazis and are evil.
Lame-ass Characters
Mass Effect 3 introduces some late-to-the-party nobodies that we are pushed to respect without them deserving any of it.
For example, a Gary Stu-ish steroid junkie whom we are supposed to sympathize with because he has a backstory™ presented to us exclusively by exposition, and to understand it properly we need to buy a book™ or watch a short film™ along with some other side materials™. We interact with him more often than we do with some of the already established characters that we've bonded with in previous games.
But the most notorious offender is that stupid, lame "star kid".
Throughout Mass Effect 1 & 2, our main protagonist has witnessed and experienced all sorts of losses and atrocities that war brings. Depending on their choice, the player can lose a whole bunch of greatly fleshed-out characters we all can sympathize with. Characters that the protagonist has been really close with. Characters who had tragic deaths, or sacrificed themselves.
You'd think that when shit hits the fan and our protagonist starts having PTSDs, he'd been remembering them. But no! Commander Shepard sees that random kid he witnessed get killed on Earth in his nightmares throughout the game. And these dream sequences are so clunky and feel so forced, they aren't imposing the feeling of disturbance that they were trying to go for - they're just awkward.
Then the God (deus ex machina) we meet in the ending takes form of this very star kid. Not the proganist's dead love interest, or battle buddy, or his parents, no! The God assumes the form that would cause him to feel most empathic about it, and it's that random kid the player doesn't care about, causing further disconnect between the player and his avatar. Which brings me to...
Ending
Many problems with the ME3's plot can be attributed to insane production terms imposed by the publisher (Electronic Arts), and I am sure that had they more time - we would have gotten a much better game even if they kept all the faulty plot points the same.
But the ending is clearly something that suffered from the plot's direction.
Apparently, Mac Walters and Casey Hudson - the two lead writers - did not use any input from the rest of the team when writing the ending. It is exclusively their contraption, which screams megalomaniac, egoistic desire to "leave a mark", much like our Manbaby, Rian Johnson.
As a result, the last 20 minutes of Mass Effect 3 just make no sense whatsoever.
First, our protagonist is hit with a Death Ray that makes NPCs combust upon contact. He wakes up and sees the Big Bad Leader just leave instead of guarding the MacGaffin that threatened the Big Bad's very existence just a few minutes ago, allowing Commander Shepard to carry on and reach the MacGuffin. Said Big Bad Leader knows our protagonist personally, and regards him as the pinnacle of human race. A priority target, and a major threat for his plans that has been a pain in the ass for far too long.
The party members that were with you in that very moment are just gone, despawned. But they magically end up on your ship that was busy fighting the enemy on Earth's orbit according to the epilogue sequence!
The protagonist makes it into the Evil Lair and pops into a friendly character that simply could not be there. After a final verbal confrontation with an evil character that popped out of nowhere as well (bad level design doesn't mix well with badly written plot), the protagonist is ascended to heaven the second floor of the room, greeted by the aforementioned God and presented with the choice of endings A, B, C, despite Casey Hudson literally, word to word promising that there wouldn't be a simple "A, B, C choice for the ending" before the game came out.
These choices are sketchy based on what we know about the game's lore at this point, but the protag doesn't raise an eyebrow and just goes along with it.
Regardless of the choice, the Big Bad is stopped and all the "space gateways" are destroyed. Said destruction was shown to lead to an annihilation of the system a "gateway" was in, again, according to the previously established lore.
Oh, and your ship and crew are marooned on some uncharted world. In other words, everybody dies a lame death. The galaxy you were working hard to save lies in ruins regardless of your effort or choices. LOL
Fan Denial. "It can't be that bad!"
Most of Mass Effect 3 and especially its ending were so bizzare and anti-climatic, that the fan community had naturally tried to find a reason to like the plot. This is how the so called "Indoctrination Theory" was born. Hours of YouTube videos and dozens of megabytes of text were written to explain the plot holes and the ending and make them sound smarter than they were.
Basically, the protagonist had himself become the Big Bad's puppet over the course of three games, and what we see in the ME3 ending are hallucinations. And the game has veeeery subtle hints that this is happening.
While admitting it was an interesting theory (How dumb of them not to say something like YOUR SNOKE THEORY SUCKS), BioWare had debunked the theory and stated that it wasn't what was intended. What you see is what you actually get.
Muh ArTiStIc InTeGrItY. BioWare's reaction to fan backlash. <--- WE ARE AT THIS POINT
The fans have started to shit on the ending, and the game's plot in general. BioWare's reaction was initially silence, but then the PR nightmare has started to spill and they were forced to say something. I'll list some of the thesis used by BioWare writers, developers and Community Managers (as well as game journo shills), not the exact words, but the essense:
(Upon a request to re-write the ending) "This is our artistic vision. While we're sorry to hear you didn't like our game, we value our artistic integrity".
"You just didn't like the fact there wasn't a final boss fight!"
"The game subverts game cliches. The ending is thought-provoking and will be talked about for years to come!"
"You're mad that your theories weren't true"
"Professional critics loved it, just look at this IGN article!"
"You are all just a vocal minority"
"Stop acting entitled!"
Does it all sound familiar?..
Damage Control
Now, I have to give them credit - when the snowball of criticism turnedlarge enough that you couldn't dismiss it anymore, BioWare had apologized to fans and entered full damage control!
Although they refused to change the ending, they have released a free expansion that solves certain problems with the last 20 minutes of the game (but introduces some new ones), fleshes out the A/B/C choices some more, gives more context to the Big Bad origins and introduces a new ending D that allows you to refuse the initial three solutions and die fighting (one way to trigger it is to shoot the "star kid", like how many YouTubers liked to do in their pre-expansion analysis videos. Can't shoot the aRt!!).
With this expansion and new DLC that added more story to the main conflict of the games retroactively, ME3 had become... passable. But alas, this wasn't enough for the franchise to survive.
BioWare have written themselves into a dead end - ME3 plot prevents any sequels from happening unless they decide on a canon ending, something that they repeatedly refused to do on a principle. "So be it", as the God said in the new ending D. Mass Effect is dead and Andromeda was the final nail in the coffin.
Conclusion
While this isn't a 100% same situation as with TLJ, I feel like they are very similar and ME3 serves as a precedent of what happens when you pull this kind of thing.
BioWare had chosen their "artistic integrity", and a select individuals within the higher management of the company had decided their ego is worth more than the franchise's health.
The result is obvious, just ask yourself these questions:
- Where is Mass Effect?
- Where is BioWare?
I fear that the same fate awaits Star Wars, and no damage control will help. Just look at the EPIX view count on YouTube! And considering the probability of Disney using bots to inflate the numbers, and the fact that part of these views are by the same people re-watching, actual numbers are even lower.
Nobody gives a damn about EPIX just as nobody gave a damn about Mass Effect: Andromeda. When TLJ made me stop caring about Star Wars, Mass Effect was my immediate thought.
TL;DR: BioWare wrote a script so shitty that it rendered a major industry-defining franchise impotent, blamed and dismissed the fans, then were consequently crushed by the free market despite apologizing and attempting to "fuck, go back" while saving face. lol
Submitted May 28, 2019 at 04:43PM by Hellrot69 http://bit.ly/2QtBOWv
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