10 Brilliant Video Games With TERRIBLE Endings
2. Mass Effect 3
You ALL knew that this one was coming, don't act like you didn't.
The ending of Mass Effect 3 is so infamous that fans threw a hissy fit strong enough to actually make Bioware change it to please people. Whether sating the cries of angry fanboys was a good or bad thing in the long run is up to you to decide, but it speaks to how bad this ending was that it didn't really happen until this game hit the shelves.
And it WAS bad, despite my snark. It's basically what happened in Deus Ex, but somehow worse, since at least Human Revolution was the first game so it was starting things rather than ending them. This is the big finale of the series, the final battle with the eldritch reapers. This was the death of Commander Shepard and the destruction of the reapers. And it all boiled down to "do you want this ending, this ending, or this ending?"
Rather than achieving an ending based solely on the player's decisions (your decisions just decide how well the battle up until then actually goes for you, not the ending itself), Mass Effect 3 boiled down the fate of the universe to a multiple choice question. Which yes the rest of the game did, but this part made it more stark and apparent than ever before.