Why it's time to say goodbye to Mass Effect and Bioware.

The waiting time is over and now we have the EC, the reactions have been varied but can, broadly speaking, be put into 3 categories: I loved it, I hated it and I don't care.

As a note I'm a sub group of "I don't care" where it was okish as a DLC but honestly not good enough.

So yeah, for me Mass Effect is over, sure some issues were solved, some issues were created and others ignored completely but now I just don't care. What was one of the best game series I've played to date has been moved alongside the likes of Modern warfare. A game where the story was okish but not anything worth getting fussed about in the end.

With the DLC solving issues such as the relay destruction, the crewmembers getting back onto the Normandy and joker running away explained fully and other issues such as (the major theme mutilation still happening) a lot of people have coined the phrase “Better than we had feared, worse than we hoped” and it’s right to certain extent.
The fears being something that somehow made it even worse, that actually added more plot holes and issues, one that showed the contempt they seemed to embody towards their fans and followers. Well luckily for us, it didn’t turn out that badly, it did actually deal with some of the issues (Well not so much the joker one, or the fleets running away they just allayed them onto other people) and had epilogue slides that did at least offer some form of closure on the characters.

However it didn’t really go as far as it should, it didn’t grab the chance that was offered to fix almost completely the relationship between fan and dev. I mean the response could never really be fixed without an apology and not even then really but the endings? Completely and utterly in their power so yes, there was a very much a missed opportunity here to repair the relationship.

Yes, it should have been a full rewrite, as has been said clarification and explanation wasn’t really enough to fully deal with the issues, and it wasn’t. It didn’t change the fact that it misrepresented the themes of the game, that his own logic was wrong and downright arrogant, that he himself created machines which haven’t rebelled against him. It didn’t really change the worst issues.

It also won’t change how I will remember it, ME3 and by extension a lot of me2 will be forever tainted by this, ME3 itself will always be looked upon with critical eyes and I’ll always see the autodialogue, the lack of choice, the pointless EMS mechanic and how nearly every LI outside of The original crew got shafted just a little bit.
I can’t look at the story of me3 now and see the awesome parts, I can’t see them because they are two few and far between around all the missed chances. Around everything that could have been.

Finally I’d be lying if it wasn’t because of how Bioware reacted that I was tired of Shepard, after 3 months of effort we got the bare minimum that the game deserved, it really did. It got the very least that was needed to please a portion of us all. I’d be lying if how they acted and responded didn’t make me hate the company as a whole and wonder if even if the EC was good should I be happy or not because at the end of the day with how they acted, how can we trust them again. How can we trust them to take the right amount of time with their work if they already did this to their flagship IP?

So yeah, for reasons of how they reacted, what we got in relation for what was asked and what was deserved and how they broke my trust with this. I’m saying goodbye to them; I wish them the best of luck because traveling down this they are probably going to need it.