GhostofAnakin

One other thing that personally bothered me about the endings is there was no real "winning" option. If I sacrifice Shepard, it should be because I, the player, chose that option as it best fit my character. Or at the very least, because I failed to do certain things throughout the game (chose the wrong allies, didn't get enough war assets, etc.). I might be alone in this, I don't know. But I think games should have at least one ending where the player actually can "win" the game and see the reward of winning. What was my reward? My crew inexplicably landing in Jurassic Park despite the fact that a couple of the ones who exit the Normandy were RIGHT BESIDE ME WHEN HARBINGER KNOCKED US OUT!? Not to mention no epilogue about what happens to the various races and planets I apparently just saved/doomed? Ironically, ME1 ended on the most positive, and likely best, note of the series. If anything, they got the endings mixed up. The Shepard laying near death (or dead) in a pile of rubble should have ended ME1, so that at the beginning of ME2 Cerberus can bring him back to life, and then ME3 ends with the heroic emergencence of Shepard after defeating the big bad guy.

Hmh, I'd say NWN2 and KotOR 2 has worse. At least for me they were. For the life of me, I can't remember how NWN2 ends. But with MotB, at least it wasn't the "end" of that storyline, per se. Similarly, KOTOR2 certainly left things hanging, but it always seemed like it was setting up KOTOR3. The fact KOTOR3 never came (or morphed into TOR MMO) was another issue. I think what makes ME3's ending so bad, and why it's worse than the two you mentioned, is because ME3 was supposed to be the absolute final game in this trilogy. It was THE end of the line, and was supposed to answer every linger question from the previous two games. Unlike the other games, ME3 wasn't just a bad ending to a GAME, but it was a bad ending to an entire SERIES. The reaction might not be as bad if there was a ME4 that BioWare said would be the conclusion. But ME3 is that game, and that, I believe, is where the backlash stems from.

Has there been a video game ending that has caused this much anger within the fanbase of the game in question before? I'm honestly curious, because I can't recall this much bitterness toward a game's ending as ME3 is getting. The closest recent comparison would be (ironically enough) BioWare's other recent title, Dragon Age 2. I followed the Dragon Age 2 fiasco, and while there certainly were a lot who disliked the direction the game went, I don't think the numbers of haters rivaled the sheer number for ME3's ending.

If you think about it, BioWare did a better job way back in KOTOR with regards to making an ending that depended on how you choose to play throughout the game than they did all these years later with ME3. One ending has Jedi saving the day, the other has Sith ruling the galaxy, both depending on your actions. Say what you will about the actual quality of the writing to get to that point, but the basic premise, at least, ended up giving you closure for your character. ME3, the endings did no such thing. If this is a PR stunt gone wrong, then they better hurry up and fix it. If not, then they really need to fire whoever came up with the ending, and fire anyone who gave the green light to the writer of the ending.

So I finally finished my first play through last night, and .... yeah. I see now what all the uproar about the ending is about. What makes it worse is the fact BioWare made statements months before release about closure and how there would be no unanswered questions, and they come up with an ending that doesn't provide closure and a million questions. Not to mention the fact your choices throughout the series had zero impact on the endings, or even on which endings were available to you. The thing that boggles my mind the most is, when a game/story is left on a vague note, it's usually so the story can be continued at a later date. But with what happened, it's almost impossible (without a lot of retconning) for any continuation of the story since Horrible way to end a series.

Finished that quest (as well as the Dragonborn one) today. I'm pretty much just finishing off the various Xbox360 achievements now. The Brotherhood questline is pretty much the only "story" quests that I need to do. I can't complain too much, considering the amount of time I spent playing. I still wasn't a fan of the actual story/writing, but I've accepted that these types of games are going to be more about the world exploration and combat, than about the actual characters and story.

Well that's dumb. I can't continue the main quest until I finish another quest, because Ulfric won't talk to me. He just keeps saying that I should be off with his general at some ruins, and won't let me discuss anything with him.

I've barely scratched the surface of all the dungeons available to be explored. The only ones I've been in are the ones associated with any quests I've been given.

Still chugging along through Skyrim. Decided to finally try and go through the entire "main" story quest, instead of getting sidetracked with the sidequests. I'm not sure I'll be done in time before Mass Effect 3's release on Tuesday.

If it's like TOR (ie. pay each month, PC-only), then I won't touch it. And to be honest, the only thing I like about these games is the single player experience. If the core of the game becomes about shooting things, then I'll stick with Modern Warfare for my multiplayer shooter kick. If there are going to be more Mass Effect games (and based on their sales, there will be), I'd just prefer them to stick to single player games. If they want to add a multiplayer component to it like ME3, so be it. But the core of the experience needs to remain single player for me to be interested.

I'd recommend picking it up, as long as you're not a DSI & II hardcore fan who will hate anything that's not a clone of those two games.

I've kind of lost track of which quests are associated with the main quest though. I've got over a dozen sitting active in my journal, and their brief descriptions don't immediately tell me which ones are the main quest.

I'm starting to get to that point where I'm losing steam playing this game. I still have so much left to do, but the various quests are so ... disconnected to the main story that I got into at the beginning that it's getting to feel like I'm just playing a bunch of independent short games within the Skyrim world, rather than playing the story that began the game with. To be fair to Skyrim, this tends to be how I feel about most sandbox games after a while.

What about the asking advice of the steward? That's still an "open" option in my quest journal, but when I talk to him there is no dialogue option about the quest. Is that broken, or does that change after the blood trail thing?

I talked to the embalming lady. I'm pretty sure I followed the trail of blood, but still nothing ever triggered for me or gave me an option to activate something.

I can honestly say I've run into more technical issues with Skryim than I had with FO:NV. I think the difference is, for whatever reason, Bethesda doesn't seem to get called on their technical issues. Maybe Obsidian needs to spend more money "encouraging" these review sites to look at the overall product instead of focusing on one or two glithces along the way.

My miscellaneous quests seem to be bugging out. I've completed two or three of them that still show up. In one situation, I'd JUST finished getting my reward from the guy who gave me the quest and received the "complete" notification on the screen, then checked my journal and saw it was an active quest. Also, one sidequest (or maybe it's a main quest) seems broken. I'm supposed to investigate some murder in Windhelm, but the two things I'm tasked with doing now to advance the quest (examine murder scene and ask steward for advice) don't work. If I talk to the steward, there's no actual dialogue option to ask for advice, despite the fact he's got a friggin' quest icon right above his head. And at the murder scene, there's a quest icon directly over a burial stone, but there's no option to interact with it.

Iona bugs the hell out of me. Worst companion I have. I did the cheap thing and re-loaded a previous save because she ended up dying on me because she keeps insisting on running right at enemies when I'm trying to shoot them with arrows/magical attacks. She's like an untrained dog. Even if I'm sneaking, as soon as her line of sight brings her into view of an enemy, she charges at them before I know what's happening. The story telling is still rather mediocre. But it's an addicting game just due to the things you stumble across going through the various dungeons and caves.

Strangely enough, it's been the opposite with me. Lydia at least used bows once in a while, so she didn't get in the way of my shot when I'm attacking from a distance. Iona (my current tag along pack mule) constantly runs charging at groups of enemies and I end up hitting her more often than not with my shots, and she has this weird fetish for standing on a trap, getting burned to a crisp, but not wanting to ... you know ... move away from the trap. The one thing I'll agree about Lydia is she did tend to just inexplicably stop dead in her tracks and I'd have to wait for her to catch up after I'd realized she was no longer following me.

The companion AI is horrible. If left to their own devices, they either run right at enemies and get in the way of me shooting them with arrows (they literally have an uncanny ability to even move to continually block me, even if I change positions to get a clear shot), or get stuck on the landscape and I have to wait minutes for them to find a "path" to me.

The thieves guild questline didn't bother me as much as it apparently bothered others. There was a lot of railroading going on that was a bit irritating, but I guess I'm just used to that from these types of games.

The women in Skyrim are cheap and easy. As soon as I bought the Amulet of Mara, most women were throwing themselves at me wanting to get married. Even my housecarls, who are supposed to be my bodyguard types, have an option for me to marry them without even getting to know them.

That's disappointing if it doesn't get fixed. It's actually a pretty good quest that is semi-ruined by insufferable slowdowns during travel through the ruins and combat.

I don't know whether anyone else is experiencing it, but I'm getting massive slowdowns in certain areas on the 360 version. One huge example is during the thieves guild quest, when you go into the Falmer ruins after the dude who I won't spoil. I don't know if it's because you're given two companions to bring along with you, instead of the usual one, but certain areas simply slow down to a crawl (and in some cases, it's like the screen freezes for a second or two). Very annoying.

In terms of design to give the player as many options as possible, I believe that there should be a balance between that and not going too far where the world starts to change to fit your character or play style. For example, if it's a game where you're a hired mercenary, it should be designed so that you can choose to play it as a stealth guy who goes in and assassinates a target quietly, a run-and-gun guy who busts in through the front door shooting, or a diplomat who instead of killing the target, convinces him to work with the organization who hired you. However, the world shouldn't change so that all three options are equally as easy, or the rewards are equal. For instance, perhaps the "ideal" option is the stealth approach; it's the one that just fits the game world best, due to various factors like what your employer wants, what kind of backlash this assignment would have on the game as a whole, how the allies of the target will react, etc.. That will lead to the highest pay from your employer, because they wanted it done clean and without much press. If you choose one of the other options, either you get less pay, or there are other consequences for not eliminating the target as instructed. It fits with one of my dislikes of stealth games that punish you if you so much as trigger a single alarm. I've always been a fan of, while triggering the alarm is a bad thing, it shouldn't automatically mean re-start the level. Instead, it just means you've got a tougher mission ahead of you since now they're alerted to your presence, or now you've got to talk your way out of it, or something. That way you can play the game any way you want, but at the same time the game world doesn't necessarily change to accomodate those choices. It just makes it tougher for you if you decide to go against the "optimal" choice.