You can't really talk about video game endings without mentioning Mass Effect 3. We're not sure if it was necessarily the worst finale to a video game we've ever seen - like, it was technically done well and all - but boy howdy, was it disappointing for the end to a series and a story that players had invested more of themselves in than, like, one of those weird Sims families where they recreate themselves, their crush, and play out their weird marriage fantasies. Shut up, we've never done that. Anyway, you know that the Mass Effect 3 ending was disappointing when so many fans got ticked off by it, they hassled developers Bioware to the point that they made an entirely new ending to placate them. It's a bit of a fallacy when games suggest that you can actually have an affect on the its story - like, Grand Theft Auto is an "open world" title in environment only - but Bioware actually managed to deliver on that promise to a degree. Not only did the way you created your character have an effect on how other NPCs interacted with you, but the choices you made through the series did make a genuine change to the plot. People died, planets ended, and those things got carried over with each title, so long as you kept your save files. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96CczhHtqgY Therefore it wasn't totally beyond the pale for players to expect those decisions to be carried through to the ending of Commander Shepard's epic space-faring adventure. Or you wouldn't have thought so, but apparently Bioware did, and thus served up a totally unrewarding and disappointing ending possible. The same thing happened a few years earlier with Bethesda's Fallout 3, which also got fixed with downloadable content, but with Mass Effect - where people had been building towards the ending over three games - it was all the more egregious. Not only did Mass Effect 3's ending ignore your choices on a personal level, but also on a cosmic scale. You even make a choice immediately prior to the ending, with each of them seemingly hinting at radically different scenarios - except they're all pretty much the same, and so no matter what you did across all the games, you got the same ending. Biggest. Disappointment. Ever.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
