Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy

Note: This article has vague spoilers. It’s not enough to tell you exactly what happened, but it is enough to spoil things for you. Use your head.

The fan backlash to the ending of Mass Effect 3 is unprecedented. The ending of Mass Effect 3 was the conclusion to an entire series, and it says a lot about BioWare that they could craft a universe that people care about this much. The outrage has built up to the point where important people at BioWare are promising to go back and change the game.

On one hand, I agree that the ending didn’t work at all. It was shockingly bad and left me feeling frustrated and disgusted instead of satisfied and reflective. (My expanded all-spoilers writeup is on my blog.) On the other hand, I don’t think a re-write will actually make fans happy. No matter how much we hate it, this is the story the writers decided to tell. If they change it to please us, then it’s not their story anymore, it’s ours. We can easily find ourselves in a situation where we’re playing through our own fanfiction.

If you’re looking for a good fanfiction ending then I highly recommend this one. It’s dark and desperate, but it takes your actions into account and reveals the Reapers without turning them into a joke. But if you’re looking for an official ending to Mass Effect 3, then you already have it. It even comes in three different colors.

In general, an audience is probably looking for three key things at the end of a story:

1. Affirmation – Love conquers all, hope endures, freedom is worth fighting for, the truth will set you free, justice can’t be denied, etc. You save the little kid, the evil overlord is defeated, somebody gets married, everyone celebrates the hero, cupcakes and ice cream. Ex: Frodo drops the ring into Mt. Doom and Saruon is defeated forever.
2. Explanation – All questions answered. Making sure it all makes sense also falls under this category. Ex: How did Gandalf come back from the dead? What made the Witch King undefeatable? What happens to the Three Rings if the One is destroyed?
3. Closure – How did things turn out? Did the characters have a happy ending? Ex: Sam married Rose. Frodo and Bilbo went to the Havens. Aragorn was crowned king.

Of course, there’s quite a bit of overlap here, but you get the idea. Good guys win, questions answered, and character stories are fulfilled. Lord of the Rings does all three. The books are sometimes ridiculed a bit because of their drawn-out ending, but for me it’s one of the reasons I love the series so much. The story is brought to a full and complete close and everything fits together.

Of course, you don’t have to do all three. In fact, in a gritty sci fi universe like Mass Effect, a mega-happy ending can feel forced or out of place. It’s perfectly valid to write a story where the good guys lose. (Empire Strikes Back, Se7en.) You can leave questions hanging. (What was in the unopened package in Cast Away? What was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction / Ronin?) You can drop characters without resolving their stories. (What happened to Sean Bean in Silent Hill?) But if you are going to refuse the audience all three then you had better be really, really sure of yourself. You should have some kind of point you’re trying to make. If your point is, “Life sucks, nothing makes sense, and you’ll never know what happened” then you had better brace yourself for some push-back, because people know this already. They experience it every day in real life, and they probably aren’t looking for more of the same in your entertainment product.

A “life sucks” conclusion can work, but you probably don’t need a long story to tell that tale. You can tell the story of “Life sucks, nothing makes sense, and you’ll never know what happened” in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you stretch that out over an hour and a half movie and spring that on them at the end, then you should expect some people to be angry. If you take that message and spread it out over three movies, then you’re a sadist. And if you spread that message out over three 30+ hour videogames, then you are going to end up with what we have here, which is people so frustrated and angry they will try to file an FTC complaint because they hate your art so bad.

If you are crazy enough to make a three-game series that ends on a black note with no questions (sensibly) answered and no sense of closure, then the least you can do is make sure the things you do say at the end doesn’t contradict what has come before, or introduce new plot holes in the last minutes of the game. This is what Mass Effect did, and it’s what has players so angry. Everyone dies, the bad guys turn out to be ridiculous, we don’t find out what happens next, and the things we’re shown don’t make any sense. It is the most insufferably frustrating, obtuse, and nihilistic ending I’ve ever seen.

Having said all this, I really don’t think this is an easy fix. Some people really did expect a mega-happy ending, and that’s the only thing that will satisfy them. Some people wanted closure. Some wanted tons of possible endings. Some didn’t care about the galaxy, they just wanted to retire on Rannoch with Tali. By saying they plan to change the ending, BioWare now has to decide which groups of people they’re going to make happy. (All of them? Good luck with that.)

Are they planning to sort through the rat’s nest of tangled lore they’ve cobbled together over the last five years and try to come up with coherent answers to everyone’s nagging questions? Will they resolve the personal stories of your companions? Will they resolve all of the galactic conflicts between the various races? Will they let Shepard live? Will they give players all of the above, thus ending this gritty space opera with smiles and rainbows? No matter what they do, some people are still going to be mad.

If this really was the story BioWare wanted to tell, then they should stick to their guns and keep the existing ending. If this isn’t the story they wanted, or if they didn’t really have a story planned and were just making it up as they went along, then they need to fix that problem more than they need to fix the end to Mass Effect. Next time you embark on a five-year, three-game series with tie-in comics and spinoff novels, make sure you have some kind of plan.

Shamus Young is a programmer, critic, comic, and now author. Check out his new book!