Mass Effect 3, BioWare, and the New Age of Entitlement

As part of their “Stories of 2012” articles on the big controversies and events of 2012 in gaming, EDGE has written a piece on Mass Effect 3’s ending fiasco and all the baggage that came with it.

Here’s a snip:

So, what was actually wrong the ending to Mass Effect 3? As a final act, it was flawed in two distinct ways. Firstly, it was bad in the conventional way that endings are often bad: it was abrupt, plot-holed, and dramatically unsatisfying. The kind of badness you might expect from a suddenly cancelled TV show that had a season’s worth of plot arcs to tidy up and 42 minutes of screen time with which to do it. Secondly, Mass Effect 3’²s ending was bad in a way unique to the series: it didn’t offer players a sense of meaningful choice, or the feeling decisions made over three game’s worth of galactic adventuring had actually mattered, in direct contradiction to what Hudson and other members of the team had promised. If BioWare had avoided one of these issues, they probably could have gotten away with the other. They didn’t of course, and inside the slow-cooker forum threads bubbling with resentment, the Retake Mass Effect campaign took shape.

Technically, Retake Mass Effect was just of many grassroots responses, but it was by far the most successful, encouraging fans to donate to Penny Arcade’s charity Child’s Play in the name of having Mass Effect’s ending revised. Over $80,000 worth of charitable donation is one of the best to things to have come out of the whole debacle, but using sick children at best as a publicity tool and at worst as emotional blackmail was exactly the kind of loss of perspective that saw EA voted the worst company in America in Consumerist’s annual poll, ahead of the banks and mortgage lenders the legacy of whose recklessness can still be felt today. Penny Arcade itself seemed uncomfortable, and publicly distanced Child’s Play from the campaign.

On April 5th, roughly one month after the release of the game, BioWare made an unprecedented announcement. They would be digitally releasing a free update to Mass Effect 3’²s ending, offering (additional cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes,) to (add further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3.) The playerbase, it seemed, had won.