I spent most of my play-thru of Mass Effect 3 convinced that the people who were complaining about the ending were insane. This game was fantastic! And it wasn’t like the previous two games hadn’t funneled me down to a flavored variations of the same basic structure.

… So, yeah. I was wrong. That ending really was just as bad as everyone was saying.

At this point, the failed ending of Mass Effect 3 is a well warmed chestnut. Because of that, in my discussion here, I’m going to try to avoid dwelling too much on specifics. But I do want to spend a little time discussing the structural flaws of the ending and what can be learned from those.

(Although I won’t be delving deeply into specifics, there are still MASSIVE SPOILERS ahead.)

NEGATING CHOICE

Most of Mass Effect 3 is an amazing conclusion to a series in which tough choices had real consequences. As Mass Effect 3 develops, those choices begin to reshape the galaxy itself. It’s incredibly powerful watching this saga draw itself towards a conclusion: Old favors are called in. Old debts are paid. Old vendettas are fulfilled. Entire races are set in motion or destroyed based on the actions you’ve taken.

Wow.

Regardless of which path you take, however, there is a pervasive theme of “bringing the galaxy together”. It is a massive, seemingly impossible task. But slowly and inexorably you manage to pull it off. (And, unlike a lot of RPGs, it never feels like a deus ex machine or shortcut or a cheat. You have to work at it and it’s believable when the pieces start coming together.)

Unfortunately, the three endings presented to you at the end of the trilogy render most (or all) of your choices irrelevant.

Most pervasively, of course, the destruction of the mass relays renders the entire theme of “bringing the galaxy together” irrelevant. But the problems pervade at every level of the game.

Did you cure the genophage or leave the krogan sterile? Doesn’t matter. Either their entire genetic code has been rewritten or they’ve been isolated on a world that the writers went out of their way to tell you can’t support them.

Did you kill the quarians? Kill the geth? Unite them in peace? Doesn’t matter. Either you killed all the geth or rewrote both species into cyborgs.

And so forth.

I talked just a couple days ago about the series’ penchant for negating tough choices, but negating these choices on this scale is practically criminal. This alone would have guaranteed fan outrage: You can’t invest players fully in making meaningful choices and then take it all away from them in the last two minutes.

THEMATIC INCOHERENCE

For most players, the ending of Mass Effect 3 negates important themes and accomplishments that were seen as integral to the story of the series.

For example, in my play-thru – between curing the genophage and forging a lasting peace between the quarians and geths – I had emphasized (a) that wiping out an entire species was wrong; (b) free will was incredibly important; and (c) organics and synthetics could work together.

Then, at the end of the game, I was given a choice between (a) wiping out the species I had just saved; (b) taking away free will from the Reapers; or (c) forcing everyone in the galaxy into becoming something they aren’t without their permission or consent. And I’m not even allowed to use my experience with the quarians and geth to argue with the smarmy, mass-murdering AI boy that there’s a non-genocidal solution to the “created vs. creator” problem.

The synthetic destruction ending just rubs your nose in it when you realize that Joker is desperately trying to save the love of his life by outrunning the energy wave… and then he fails and we watch him walk out of her corpse while the soundtrack shifts into an uplifting tune (pun intended). Holy shit, Bioware.

This failure can be a little bit harder to pin down because these thematic elements can vary radically over the course of the three games depending on the choices you made. I think there actually is a narrow range of play-thrus in which you exterminate the geth and treat EDI like a slave in which the “destroy the Reapers” ending is thematically consistent.

But most players experienced this thematic incoherence, and it severely disrupted their connection to the game.

(For a deep exploration of this thematic incoherence, check out the excellent original post in this thread.)

Worse yet, this particular thematic incoherence was achieved by forcing the players to make a choice which would be fundamentally out of character for most of them. This is a mistake a lot of games make, but it was particularly devastating in a game like Mass Effect which had spent 90+ hours avoiding the exact mistake.

(A related problem in many games is that “cut-scene boss fight” where you’re suddenly forced to lose. This was something else that the Mass Effect series had avoided until Mass Effect 3 introduced Kai Leng. As with forcing an out of character choice, this abrupt deprotagonization alienates the player from their character.)

CONTINUITY ERRORS

The ending further complicates those two major problems by including an incredibly large number of gaping plot holes.

I don’t agree with those that claim that the destruction of the mass relays must inevitably signal a mass extinction event: The release of the energy in most endings is clearly shown to be non-destructive (either transforming everything or destroying only Reapers) and is quite clearly different from the uncontrolled explosion you get from plowing a meteor into a mass relay.

But, for example, how did everyone get back onto the Normandy?

Which brings us to the final structural flaw: You can get away with enigmatic endings to a 2-hour sci-fi art film, but people are going to have a lot less patience for that after 90 hours of investment. Particularly if the primary experience of the game is explicitly seeing the consequences of your actions.

BLATANT LYING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

The designers of the game promised that the ending would definitely not be “choose A, B, or C”.

The actual ending, of course, is literally someone telling you to choose A, B, or C.

Don’t lie to your customers. That never ends well.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There are a lot of ways in which the ending of Mass Effect 3 could be “fixed”. Most of them have already been bandied about.

From a structural standpoint, however, it’s interesting to note that the game would have been more successful just having a single ending with no choice at all: Shepard reaches the Citadel, activates the Crucible, and wipes out the Reapers (while either living or dying in the process).

This ending would have worked because it would have actually provided a functional tabula rasa at that point: The entirety of the game had reshaped the galaxy (in many different ways) towards the singular goal of wiping out the Reapers. Achieving that goal would provide clear satisfaction regardless of the path that had been previously charted, and the player would have been free to read the future fate of the galaxy based on their experiences up to that point.

Effectively, this lack of choice in the final two minutes of the game would actually turn the entirety of Mass Effect 3 into the ending of the game.

(If you wanted to further improve this ending, you could simply add explicit detail about the future fate of characters and civilizations based on the play-thru. If you wanted to be really awesome about it, more of your choices would have also been reflected in the final battle for Earth. But these wouldn’t be strictly necessary to improve upon the fundamentally unsound ending provided in the game as it was published.)

Of course, there are also a number of other “three choice endings” that could have been applied without implementing something structurally unsound. Maybe you force a choice between different ways of destroying the Reapers with different consequences for each (destroy all synthetic life; destroy the mass relays; destroy Earth). Maybe you give the same three basic choices (control, destroy, synthesize) but in a way which is thematically consistent with the rest of the game and built on the choices you made instead of negating them. Each of these would be a tough choice with meaningful consequences, but they would not have negated your previous choices or been thematically incoherent.

So, yeah. Lots of ways it could be fixed. But the same could be said of the Star Wars prequels.

Screw it. My game ended with a beautiful sequence in which Shepard destroys the Reapers while in no way murdering EDI and mass-murdering a race that I had just spent the last 20 hours trying to save while reconciling them with their creators.

Also, there was no Highlander 2.

I’ve been playing through the Mass Effect trilogy over the past two weeks. It is, hands down, one of the greatest video game experiences I’ve ever had. It is also, through the virtue of its immersion, one of the most intense narrative experiences I’ve ever had.

It is not, however, without flaw and today I want to talk about one of them: The negation of tough choices.

To do this, obviously, I’m going to need to discuss some spoilers. First, I’m going to do a pass on some MINOR SPOILERS for two of the loyalty quests in Mass Effect 2. Then, I’m going to talk through some MAJOR SPOILERS for the end of the game. Control your reading accordingly.

MAKING TOUGH CHOICES

Creating tough choices in a video game is hard work. First, you need to sufficiently immerse the player into the game world that they care about the outcome of the choice. Second, the choice needs to have real consequences.

The bad news is that the former is fleetingly rare and the latter is seen as exponentially increasing development costs. (This is based on a fundamentally limited understanding of how to implement choice consequences in video games, but that’s a topic for another time.)

The good news is that these two factors easily end up feeding into each other: Making a tough choice will immerse the player into the experience, which will make them care more about the outcome of future choices, which will make those choices tougher, which will further immerse the player into the experience… and so forth.

One common mistake among game designers is to mistake calculations for choices. I’ve talked about this previously and you should also check out this episode of Extra Credits. The short version is that game players are often presented with what looks like a huge number of choices, but because those “choices” all boil down to different ways of accomplishing the same thing, the “choice” is really just a calculation of which method is the best for accomplishing a given goal.

Meaningful choices, on the other hand, often involve elements of sacrifice: You have to give up one thing you want in order to gain another.

Most games featuring “moral choices” fall into this trap: Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation has frequently made the case that many of these games only offer simplistic – and oftentimes simple-minded – choices (“go out of you way to get food for these hungry orphans or burn their orphanage down”). But the more systemic problem is that these games don’t actually offer any choice at all.

See, in most of these games there is the “good track” and there is the “bad track”. If you follow one track you get the “good guy content”; if you follow the other track you get the “bad guy content”. At best, this means that there is only one choice: Which set of content do you want to see first?

Once you’ve made that choice, every other choice in the game is reduced to mere calculation: Which choice will accumulate the most points for the track I’ve chosen?

MINOR SPOILERS

The Mass Effect games feature a similar “moral track” in the form of their Paragon vs. Renegade scale. And although there are elements of calculation still present in the system, Bioware manages to frequently sidestep the problem in three ways.

First, there are plenty of points to go around and a little dabbling on the Renegade track won’t screw up your Paragon play-thru. This means that you’re free to make a more complex pattern of choices.

Second, the definitions of Paragon and Renegade are a bit more complex than just “goody two-shoes” vs. “purest evil”. (“Paragon” means that you’ll generally be helpful, sympathetic, and play by the rulebook. “Renegade” means that you’ll generally do what you want, take shortcuts, and expect people to take care of themselves.) This means that Bioware’s writers can, for example, offer several different “flavors” of Paragon choices in response to a given situation.

Third, Bioware presents you with choices which impact more than just your moral meter.

And this last is the real key. It’s what allows Bioware to give you legitimately tough choices.

For example, during the loyalty mission for the mercenary Zaeed in Mass Effect 2 you’re confronted with a choice: You can either help Zaeed pursue his twenty-year vendetta or you can turn aside to help save a group of civilians.

It sounds really simple, but the effect in the game was positively electric: I’d been playing a character who was primarily a Paragon, so saving the civilians should’ve been a no-brainer. But loyalty in Mass Effect 2 is really important: First, you won’t have full access to the abilities of your NPC allies unless they’re loyal. Second, the game had made it really clear that you needed the loyalty of your crew if you wanted to survive the suicide mission at the end of the game. (The game had even suggested pretty heavily that there was a no-win scenario in which you might win Mass Effect 2, but end up dead and unable to import your character into Mass Effect 3. I don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but the game certainly made me believe it while I was playing it.)

In short, the game suddenly presented me with a choice which had a huge impact both mechanically on me as a player and narratively on the game world. As a result, it was a truly tough choice: Do I stick to my morals and do the right thing? Or do I let those civilians die and do what has to be done in order to ensure that my team is ready for the final mission?

I eventually chose to save the civilians. And that choice was immensely satisfying on multiple levels.

Imagine my disappointment, therefore, when Bioware negated that choice five minutes later.

See, when I got to the end of the loyalty mission, I was given a paragon conversation option that sweet-talked Zaeed into being loyal despite the fact that I had just screwed him over. In other words, I made a Paragon-aligned decision that carried with it significant consequences; but because I had made so many Paragon-aligned decisions, I was given the option to negate those consequences.

MORE MINOR SPOILERS

This problem actually crops up frequently during Mass Effect 2: You make a tough choice, but making the tough choice rewards you in a way which directly allows you to negate the consequences of the tough choice.

Another notable example of this can be seen in Tali’s loyalty mission. At the end of that mission, you’ve gained possession of evidence that’s needed to exonerate Tali. But, for various reasons, Tali doesn’t want you to use it. So you’re faced with a tough choice: Do you honor your friend’s request to suppress the evidence and watch her get emotionally devastated when she’s exiled from her home? Or do you betray your friend in order to protect her?

That is an inherently fascinating choice. (Particularly because, at this point, I’ve spent about 70 hours in Tali’s virtual company and I really, genuinely care about her as a character.) I eventually chose to honor Tali’s request and suppress the evidence.

But, yet again, I found the consequences of this choice negated: Using a paragon-conversation option, I was able to still talk the judges into finding Tali not guilty despite the lack of exonerating evidence.

What’s interesting about this example, however, is that there’s another level on which this was still a tough choice: See, the nature of the evidence would also potentially have a profound effect on the politics of Tali’s people. If they have the evidence, they’ll likely go one way. If they don’t have the evidence, things will probably go the other. And there is no right answer: It’s a question of your values, your opinions, and your hopes.

If we can ignore for a moment the fact that half of the tough choice ended up being negated, we can take a moment to appreciate how beautiful this choice really is: Either choice would be an interesting one. But by adding a second, independent layer of consequences, the writers of the game exponentially complicated the choice and made it virtually impossible for anyone to divine a truly “right” answer to the conundrum.

MAJOR SPOILERS

My intention here should not be misinterpreted: I critique the points where Mass Effect 2 comes up short only because it so often gets it right, and in the process provides a structural road map for how other games can do better.

And the pay-off for a game that is filled with meaningful choices – which convinces you through sheer weight of evidence that your choices do matter and that they will have an effect – can be truly immense.

By the end of Mass Effect 2, the games had taught me three things:

1. The decisions I make can result in the death of major characters.
2. That wrong decisions could create a no-win scenario in which the game could not be completed.
3. The fate of the galaxy was on the line. (And that really did matter.)

So when I got to a point during the final mission where I was forced to make a personnel decision about which of my teammates was going to have to go on a solo operation, I was absolutely convinced that I was being asked to choose which of my teammates was going to die. But I was also absolutely convinced that if I didn’t pick the best person for the job, then the entire mission might fail.

And the game didn’t pull any punches. It said, “Choose anybody you want.” And it would have been easy to pick one of the characters I hadn’t formed a strong, emotional bond with to play the martyr. But I knew who was most qualified: It was Tali. Tali who had gone on virtually every mission with me in the first game. Tali who had been a shining beacon of joy when she finally joined the crew. Tali who had helped to alleviate the immense sense of alienation and loss that I’d been experiencing for most of the game.

I couldn’t kill Tali. I moved the cursor off her name. Went scrolling for somebody I could bear to lose. But… I couldn’t afford not to send Tali. I needed the people with the best skills in the right place at the right time. So the cursor worked its way back up to Tali.

That’s when I realized there were literally tears streaming down the sides of my face.

…

So. Yeah. The Mass Effect trilogy. You should play it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The most impressive thing about that specific moment, in retrospect, is that I really don’t expect most players of the game to experience it: It depended heavily on my personal experience with Mass Effect (in which my favorite moments were “adventuring with Liara and Tali”), compounded with a reaction to the narrative of Mass Effect 2 which may be largely idiosyncratic, and then culminating in a decision that seemed to target Tali specifically (although that may not actually be true).

By contrast, the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII – another powerful, emotional moment for me as a gamer – is a moment that’s literally shared by every single person who ever played Final Fantasy VII.

But I do think that specifically because of the rich panoply of tough choices in the Mass Effect games, most people playing the games will have a comparable moment of emotional resonance. And the relative uniqueness of those moments will only serve to enhance them.