The ending of Mass Effect 3 is so bad as to not only ruin the game, but the entire series. It kills any replay value the game might have had, because there’s no point in replaying to …that. Gamers have protested. They have donated, so far, $70,000 human dollars to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity to show their outrage. Now, the mainstream media is picking up there is trouble in the forest. The Atlantic has the story.
If an engineer did what the writer of that ending did, hundreds of people would be dead. If a doctor did what the writer did, he’d lose his license and be staring down a lawsuit from his jail cell.
Procedures exist to prevent professional misconduct on this scale. That makes the failure on display here all the more remarkable. Marc Walters, the writer of that ending (and, so I’m told, the way cool invincible cyberninja that fans also love), has probably cost BioWare over one-hundred million dollars in sales. That’s impressive.
The ending didn’t make much sense to me. In fact, I felt like more alcohol would assist me in understanding it. So, to save organics from the hands of super advanced synthetics or AIs we have to brutally destroy entire species with a race of ultra-sophisticated synthetic-organic hybrids? Okay, perhaps “destroy” is a bad word; more like, gooify you and collect you as a museum exhibit of what once was. So, instead of being destroyed in the usual “the machines have revolted” sense, we will be brutally harvested by super advanced machines. Yeah…. that is a great….uh…. solution? Chaos is not necessarily a bad thing; it is found in nature. This was hard to stomach.