Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Mar 2012 23:54 UTC
As I made very clear in my thorough review of Mass Effect 2, I'm a huge BioWare fan. This relationship got very, very cloudy when BioWare released Dragon Age II, a rush job with no story and atrocious gameplay. Mass Effect 3 looked like redemption - until I hit the terrible, terrible ending. The criticism of the ending has been so immense and consistent, BioWare is contemplating changing it. Of course, this story is riddled with spoilers, so be warned.
Thread beginning with comment 511517
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Why should every story have a happy ending? That's the one thing that irks me the most about most hollywood movies.
Plus ME3 isn't actually a sad ending, you do prevent the annihilation of every civilization in the galaxy, don't you? There's even one possible ending where shepard somehow doesn't die (although what actually happens is kind of confusing, but all of the endings have that particular issue)
Edited 2012-03-22 09:43 UTC
RE[3]: My take on Bioware
by Thom_Holwerda on Thu 22nd Mar 2012 10:00
in reply to "RE[2]: My take on Bioware"
Member since:2005-06-29
Plus ME3 isn't actually a sad ending, you do prevent the annihilation of every civilization in the galaxy, don't you? There's even one possible ending where shepard somehow doesn't die (although what actually happens is kind of confusing, but all of the endings have that particular issue)
That's one of the major plotholes: no matter the ending, everybody dies. Why? The mass relays are destroyed. The galactic fleet you assembled are now all stuck in earth's orbit! They will never reach home using the conventional FTL drive cores (way too slow), so they will surely end up killing each other in and around the Sol system.
Member since:2009-07-18
Sure an unhappy ending is fine, but make it a choice just like in the second game. If you want to go badass, you can. If you want to go pope-style, you can. In the 3rd game however, it's the same ending no matter what you do. That was one of the things I liked most about ME2. Your decisions mattered and you could work towards the ending you wanted.
Mind you, that doesn't imply that the pure paragon path is the road to a happy victory. It would be nice to see some renegade options leading toward success while paragon would be too weak and ineffective in the same situations (and vice versa).
There are plenty of good ideas with interesting plotlines but I think Bioware had to make it to the deadline and rushed the ending through giving a less than satisfactory result. It certainly ruined the replay value for me, knowing that no matter what quests you did, how much effort you put into it and what decisions you take, everyone dies the same way anyway.
Edit. Woops, replied to the parent post instead, sorry 
Edited 2012-03-22 13:20 UTC
RE[3]: My take on Bioware
by cyrilleberger on Fri 23rd Mar 2012 11:20
in reply to "RE[2]: My take on Bioware"
Member since:2006-02-01
Sure an unhappy ending is fine
I bet most people are just upset of not seeing Shepard and Liara surrounded by lot of little blue children
but make it a choice just like in the second game. If you want to go badass, you can. If you want to go pope-style, you can. In the 3rd game however, it's the same ending no matter what you do.
The same ? Really ? Tell that to the Geth, since they either die or survive. You have basically three choices: kill the synthetics, control them or merge the synthetics with the organics. How exactly is that the same choice ? And how exactly isn't it more choices than ME2 ? Where you only had two choices: destroy or not destroy the base.
And all of those three endings have different variations depending on your actions in ME3, depending on how much time you invest in the game (like ME2, I guess, where your crew would only survive if you do all the side quests).
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2005-08-18
Why can't serious stories have happy endings?