Mass Effect 3 ending an oversight?

So if you haven't heard G4 released a video featuring Lance Henriksen, the voice of Admiral Hackett in which he says the folks at BioWare told him the ending was "an oversight" and "they did a whole series of things...to live up to the quality they've been doing."

Here is the link:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/58573/lance-henriksen-talks-about-the-new-mass-effect-3-ending/


So how in the world did they have an oversight? This is looking more and more like EA was pressuring them to release an unfinished project.

I think they may have lied to him to be honest. Lance doesn't look like a guy who plays games and while he might know the ME story, maybe even a little of the lore, he clearly doesn't know the problem with the ending.

Because he says "When they loose boom over its done." So he thinks that the ending of the game, or the new work he has to do for the ending of the game is revolving around, a "game over" experience. So since he thinks he's doing this to expand on a "game over" event then yeah I would definitely call it an oversight.

This does put a tentative bit of hope out there because Bioware is describing their current ending as a "game over" ending, or at least, that's what this implies to me which means that they MIGHT be actually making an alternate ending that wouldn't be considered "game over"

Or they just lied to poor Lance and made him look like an idiot (which he most likely isn't) infront of half the gaming world.

I gather it varies quite a bit how much of the story they explain to a voice actor, but given some of the speeches Hackett gives in ME 3, he must have had some general sense of the narrative.

It's interesting that he says that BioWare described the existing ending as an "oversight", but it's much more interesting that he says the oversight was the lack of a good ending when the player loses. That really does suggest that BioWare is retconning the existing ending into a losing ending, and is providing a new ending in which the player wins. If true, that's very good news.

while the above post is optimistic, I didn't know whether this was purely poor articulation on Lance's part, or if it was perhaps info confirming the bratalyst's manipulation.

I like to think of the interview as Admiral Hackett confirming that the Marauder Shields ending is the TRUE ending so Bioware is developing content to reflect that.

Thus, the player has to "lose the game" to gain closure.

They lied to him. Had nothing to do with the player "Losing". Hell i had so many War Assets it was sick, all at 100%, i had been a paragon for all 3 games, and had made all the right choices in all 3 games. My ending made me sick, and i felt numb, like my dog just got run over by a car or something. So that wasn't it. I love Lance Henriksen though, guys a total badass in a lot of great movies, and does great voice work for games, and anime.

an 'oversight' ......its like if you made a house with no windows or doors....yes it looks nice and we appriciate the time taken to build it...but its f**king useless and im not buying it and no i dont need you to write a note to explain why....i want a f**king house with doors and windows. the full finished product please or dont even bother and find a new line of work.....

If anything I think it's telling of what we're getting in the end, at least from Hackett. Some sort of funeral scene or reaction to Shepard's death. Which makes sense. I'm sure Mr. Henriksen is just reacting to the lines he's been given, and if he's talking about a player's character dying, I'm sure this is his only impression.

Yeah i agree, although that in itself isn't a bad thing providing they can actually make Shepards death mean something this time.

That would be nice,with the current endings there is no possibility of truly losing the war,Reapers triumphing and continuing with their cycle,that kind of ending should be in the game.Or that you can join them or anything like that.The only way they can retcon current endings in a satisfactory manner is by making them indoctrination,but then again Bioware said they will not change the endings,which may or may not be another lie.Like I said in one of my posts,if I was Bioware I would claim that I wont change the endings,and then I would change them in order to create a positive shock in the gaming community,and salvage some reputation in the process.But we wont know for sure until the DLC is released.I dont expect anything from the DLC,I will simply install it and see what it brings,then make conclusions.

"an oversight" They had months to make things right after they delayed the release date from DEC 31, 2011 to MARCH of 2012 for a good reason to make every thing perfect, insented it led all of us here to HTL. (Just saying)

The oversight was a lack of scrutiny. When you have a team of writers who are forced to sit on the sidelines while two guys write the ending themselves and don't allow any input from the team, there's bound to be some issues. I'd like to think that Hudson and Walters simply didn't think things through, that they became so obsessed with their "2001" ending that they were blinded to its problems. They're not blind anymore but unfortunately they're still wearing blinkers.

In terms of what actors are told, they generally just go in and say their lines. Does anyone think that Martin Sheen plays Mass Effect? No. It's a job.The actors are given a background to the story and details on their characters but they aren't invested in the way the player is. So being told that the ending was an oversight really only means that they get to record more lines and collect another paycheck though I assume they were contracted for DLC anyway.

He's a voice actor, and i doubt he plays the ME games, but he should know a lot about his character at least. I think then even he would wonder what the hell happened to Hackett.
He seems to talk about the fact that its a game over experience, because it kind of is, all it lacks is the big "CRITICAL MISSION FAILURE". Not sure if he knows the whole story, but since the player pretty much always gets killed. I would count the ending as a big loss though. Despite all the pr stuff, i can see nothing positive out of the endings as a whole.
An oversight? Perhaps, but as Breefolk said, he like, everyone else, is probably under contract so that "If you ever say anything bad about this game, i will sue you! Then i will sue your children! and when they cry i will laugh at their misfortune!"

He's right about the abruptness though, 100's of hours boil down to a crappy choice and a 2-3 minute cut scene in which nothing that makes sense happens. I expected ten minutes at least, not counting an epilogue.

I remind everyone these are the people who killed Kal'Reegar.... and supposedly didn't bother to tell Adam Baldwin he wasn't needed anymore (I regret I don't have the link to the BSN thread from which this anecdote is taken).

No point over analysing this at the moment. Lance is only saying what he is allowed to say, that's if he has been following the situation at all.

I hope to god the Extended Cut isn't of the same quality as the rest of the game... if the fetch quests, limited dialogue choices, contrived scenes, plot armored characters and cutscenes that swap weapons (among many other issues) are anything to go by..

Honestly, it's hard to know what kind of interest various voice actors have in games they work on but at the end of the day, they're never going to bad mouth the people paying their wages and I think it's fair to say a lot of them probably don't have any direct experience with the finished product and so are only aware of problems in the vaguest of ways.

I know Jennifer Hale hadn't even played ME1 until sometime after the release of ME2 and I don't think she played for more than an hour...

Even if it was just Mac and Casey on the ending, it's just hard for me to see the creative process that led to the whole disastrous ending. We don't need to rehash the numerous objective technical failings but it's just hard to see how someone could think that it was a good idea. I know that it's easy for people to focus on an idea and become incapable of looking at it rationally but I just find it difficult to really see how such an abstract ending could stem logically from the trilogy... perhaps Casey Hudson just lost it.

If this is really true, then it just further justifies my decision to play as Bro-shep