I’m sort of reminded how many people felt after Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker and what many fans considered a butchered ending there. It’s hard to remember an instance of this exact situation playing out since then. Mass Effect 3 was indeed improved by criticism in the end, though the path to get there was uncomfortable, to say the least. But criticism can be reasonable and justified and games can be improved because of it. So yes, I think it was a good thing that pushback drove BioWare to create that. We still don’t know, really, (other than Liara showing up in the new Mass Effect coming), but Citadel helped with that, and contained some of the best character moments in the series.
BioWare confirmed that was never their intent, but it just felt like such an abrupt ending, like your entire crew just died, even if they didn’t, because you never saw them again or learned what happened to them. No, I wasn’t the camp that BioWare needed 50 different endings for every permutation of choices players made across 200 hours of three games, but the simplistic choice seemed overly reductive, which is why I wanted to believe in the more elaborate Indoctrination Theory, that this “bad ending” was really just a trick by the Reapers to indoctrinate Shepard, and the only correct answer was to destroy them.
I simply don’t think the original endings worked at all. And fundamentally, the endings of the game never actually changed. Citadel was just a missing moment that should have been there in the first place. And in Mass Effect’s case, it wasn’t even a ret-con. But I’ve seen so many games succeed because they absorb feedback and work with fans to tell their stories. For many critics, this was the “death of art” where complaining could yield to story changes.
The game was made better with the altered ending and the Citadel DLC, and represents a collaborative process that is a lot more common in gaming nowadays. I also think the ending is talked up too much over the rest of Mass Effect 3, which was an incredible game before that point. The protests were really obnoxious and occasionally unhinged, and no one at BioWare deserved the abuse they got for the ending. Looking back on it now, it was murky territory. That would be the now famous Citadel DLC, which takes place before the final mission and is more or less just a giant party where you get to talk extensively with almost every character in the series, getting some sense of closure with beloved members of your crew before you head into the breach, with special attention given to love interests.Ĭovering this controversy was one of the first “major” stories I got any attention for, given that I was siding with the idea that yes, the ending should be changed and improved, over most of the press which was calling gamers “entitled’ for wanting a different ending. First, they updated the game to flesh out the ending a bit more with extended cutscenes and a few other tweaks. Eventually, BioWare tried to appease fans.
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