The end...

I've just finished Mass Effect 3 and felt I had to share some things I noticed about myself. I know no-one cares... but it helps me

I don't think I can write several posts about Mass Effect Three without discussing the ending. Don’t worry if you haven't finished it or want to play the game in the future, I’ve made every effort to stay spoiler free.

'Everything has led to this point. Some of you may die, depending
 on how many missions we completed, but we can always reload.'

The thing about Mass Effect’s Ending that is so interesting is the debate it has caused in the gaming community. Some are disappointed, some are bemused and some are just simply irate. Me, I am confused. Not by the ending itself, but by the response to it. My job involves working with books, both fiction and non-fiction. A certain level of book knowledge is expected of me and so I read a lot. As a lover of books I find the idea of changing an ending really hard to reconcile. To me a story is sacred, the work of an author who guides their audience through the experiences of the characters. Asking that author, whether one person or a group of people, to change their story fills me with a certain amount of unease.

Familiar....

Now games are slightly different, they are interactive and so the story requires more input from the player. A game like Mass Effect requires choices to be made as well so the player has an even more important role within the story. However the way I see it, even those branching elements of the story are written by an author. Everything you do in the game is guided by them. Those choices are still just part of the experience they craft. Therefore, despite the appearance of ownership, the player is still just there to experience a story told to them.

Freddie Prinze Jnr, you've got my rear.

Looking to the other side of this argument though, I can see where some players are coming from. When you invest so much time into an epic story that spans the galaxy and are then disappointed with the ending you are going to shout about it and you are well within your rights to do that as a consumer.

However with the response to Mass Effect I can't help feeling like a line has been crossed. The difference between the statements ‘that ending was crap,’ and ‘that ending was crap and needs to be changed,’ is huge. For me I feel it is a line that I cannot personally step over, maybe it’s my association with literature and the respect I have for storytellers, but it is an author who owns a story and the audience who share it, not the other way round. I would consider it similar to asking Herman Melville to change the ending of Moby Dick. By asking for a change, you are asking the author to relinquish ownership of their story.

Small feet, small hands... big suit.

My thoughts on the ending itself, for what it is worth, was that it’s was okay. It felt reasonably epic in scope, closed some story arcs while leaving other questions unanswered and had a few elements that made little sense. It was the essence of a standard blockbuster ending and I felt fairly satisfied with it probably because I didn't expect too much. For anyone interested, my Commander Shepard was fully paragon throughout all three games, but in the end, it turns out, she was right down the middle.

* The above is not an argument for or against changing the ending but rather where I sit on the scale. I am not interested in telling people what to think but like to share my mind. Your own opinion might differ from mine, and that is great, because to be honest, I am nearly always entirely wrong.