What else could it be? After hundreds of hours of gameplay, thousands of carefully considered decisions, limitless fractal possibilities that would scare Ashton Kutcher's butterfly effect right off, this is what it all comes down to. An entire galaxy of possibilities, of friends, enemies and billions of lives at risk. You're a grown adult, capable of dealing with these high stress, intense situations. Don't panic, you can do this. You're Commander Shepard, a man who regularly achieves the impossible. Now... Would you like the red, green, or blue happily ever after? What? That's it? All that, the build up, the years in the making, and this was the best ending you could reasonably create? Fine, the internet has harped on about the ending more than enough, but it's still pointless, vacuous and completely unreasonable. The most stinging betrayal is not the poor quality of the ending. It was BioWare's artistic vision as a company, and the way they wanted to end one of their flagship series. The betrayal is that they expected us to be as gamers to be happy with that ending; not to mention the fact that Casey Hudson was quoted as saying Mass Effect 3 would have "wildly different conclusions based on the player's actions in the first two chapters". He went on to specifically say we wouldn't get A, B, C endings, and yet that is exactly what we received. It is inconceivable that a man with Hudson's ability, experience and talent would have planned this ending years in advanced. The leading theory is that the "real ending" was designed to be released as additional DLC and was only partially completed at the time of Mass Effect 3's release. The furore around the ending meant that the original plan had to be scrapped and BioWare had to quickly pull together the Extended Cut, supposedly. Now that Casey Hudson has left BioWare we can only wait and see how homogenised and corporately dessicated the recently announced Mass Effect 4 becomes and how much of it your $60 actually buys before you have to shell out at least an extra $20 to get the real ending. EA strikes again in their machiavellian attempt to own all the money on Earth. There we have it. The ten biggest betrayals those wonderful people at BioWare and the slightly less wonderful but still decent humans (probably) people at EA have committed upon us through the Mass Effect series. How were our choices? Any especially awful ones we missed? Disagree or have a defence to present for BioWare/EA's actions? Let us know in the comments section!
