Watch mass effect 3 endings update#

everybody was fried, everybody was completely destroyed, morale was incredibly low,” ME3 cinematic designer Zachariah Scott tells People Make Games. “I remember us being pretty okay, but within two years once we got into Dragon Age: Inquisition. Changing the ending was bad enough on a base level, but it led to horrible working conditions for its developers, which would then have a knockdown effect as much of the team moved on to Dragon Age Inquisition. While you can always make the argument that Mass Effect 3’s ending was thematically fitting, that’s not what the real issue is here - a developer was forced to alter its original vision because of the anger of fans. Mass Effect 3’s ending was infamous for making dozens of player choices suddenly not matter, but ultimately that was the thematic point BioWare was trying to make. According to a documentary from People Make Games, these threats came even as developers were forced to crunch to add the new ending and DLC. The controversy on the ending blew up to such an extreme degree that BioWare developers started receiving online harassment and threats, something that’s sadly all too common these days. Mass Effect 3 wasn’t the first game that disappointed fans with its narrative choices, but it was the first time we’d ever seen a developer completely correct course after a game had already launched.

Looking at it years later, the Mass Effect 3 ending backlash was a turning point in fan ownership and entitlement.

Watch mass effect 3 endings update#

The end result was BioWare and EA bending over backward to update the ending with DLC, but the event caused irreparable damage to both BioWare’s reputation and the franchise. But the strengths of the game were completely overshadowed by the extremely negative reaction fans had to its ending. Mass Effecthad quickly become the biggest hit BioWare had ever made, and expectations were high for the third chapter. In 2012, there were few gaming events bigger than the release of Mass Effect 3, the end to a trilogy that would come to define the way video games approached player choice and consequence.