![]() ‘Peace is a lie! The universe has to be bent to your will!’ ![]() Surely it wasn’t all this ham-fistedly ‘resolved’? A literal deus ex machina, popping up in a floaty ghost suit to rub your face in the rote emotional manipulation arbitrary massacre of a nameless child and grant you a wish? And there’s no way that the writers of a game that has always been about navigating tricky political and social relationships would ultimately just putter out on a declaration that different races can never truly get along unless they are forced to by having one of three gruesome war crimes inflicted upon them? So rather than wallow in impotent bewilderment (who am I kidding: maybe I was just looking for a more convenient way to do it), I ventured online to try and make some sense of it. What I had witnessed seemed so clumsy and so offensive that I was too stunned even to be angry. Colin Moriarty (not surprisingly) particularly embarrassed himself.įor my part, although it will sound overly melodramatic to say, after the shock of the ugly, artless message at the heart of Mass Effect 3’s ending, the part of my nerd heart that used to brim with love for the franchise was left exposed, raw. ![]() There were games publications that wound themselves into apoplectic knots trying to justify their unceasing praise of the game in the face of the wider audience’s scorn, columnists chastised fans as ‘entitled whiners’, bleating on about games as ‘Art’ (as if that immediately shut down all critical debate), and flamed with rage whenever anyone mentioned the curiously near-universal failure of any major publication to address the narrative’s end at all, let alone in any substantive manner. There were weird complaints to the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising there were disgusting, inexcusable threats from a very small faction of lunatics calling themselves fans. Suffice it to say that there were petitions, there were pleas, there were cupcakes. For anyone who followed the story it is old news for anyone not familiar, my summary will no doubt sound (and certainly is) too clouded with bias. The details of the audience backlash to this conclusion need not be revisited in too much detail here. That was until the real spectacle arose days later when people played the game, and reached its inglorious end. …Because that’s something to do, I guess.Īnd although I probably did roll my eyes a little at this glut of media saturation, my enthusiasm and love for the franchise was too great, so I gobbled up every morsel gladly, only adding to the din by rambling away to friends and co-workers about this, the great new frontier for interactive speculative fiction… Copies of the game were even being shot into space. ![]() Preview features were slathered across every gaming publication cinematic trailers screened with great fanfare alongside the Walking Dead premiere the official Mass Effect Twitter feed was busy encouraging fans to sign a petition designed to pester the UK government into release information about extraterrestrial life. After what felt like an eternal wait (that in reality was a rushed production schedule at publisher EA’s instruction) the game had been released to its eager fans amidst a flurry of hyperactive advertising. Two years ago it was almost all I thought about. It’s been a long time since I stirred myself to think about Mass Effect 3. IMAGE: The New Shepard-Catalyst, Mass Effect 3 (Bioware)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |