10 Perfect Video Games With One Glaring Flaw

8. Mass Effect 3 - The Cop-Out Ending

mass effect 3 ending
Bioware

Did Wrex live or die? Did you opt to help end the Genophage or suppress manufacture of the cure as penance for the Krogan race's past deeds? Does your intervention in the Geth/Quarian war lead to reconciliation between the two races or does one deserve to live over the other?

Despite Andromeda's dirtying of the series' reputation, the original Mass Effect trilogy remains a well-written space opera fraught with agonizing moral, ethical and existential dilemmas, which makes the final part of Shepard's quest to end the Reaper threat all the more demoralizing as it reaches its climax.

Having spent three games crafting your own personal narrative for Shepard with the promise that every choice would be accounted for by journey's end to form a tailored ending, it's not at all surprising that the three static, poorly-presented choices presented to Shepard at journey's end resulted in the universally derided ending that BioWare ultimately decided on.

Did the fan base expect too much or did BioWare bite off more than it could chew? Whatever the reality, Mass Effect 3's ending took into account all of the decisions players had made over hundreds of hours and fobbed them off with a generic, impersonal conclusion.

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Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.