SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

[trinityvixen]

This is a five-point defense of the players who disliked the ending of Mass Effect 3, so naturally there are A TON OF SPOILERS should you choose to read it. At the risk of becoming, as I worried with my roommate last night, the backlash against the backlash, I still find these arguments lacking. There is exactly one point they raise on which I

Comments

[trinityvixen]

I'm getting something of the same sense you mentioned, mostly because I know that there's no way to write and then animate the number of different endings that this game would otherwise possibly generate if you didn't have it narrowed down to specific endings. This is the problem with choose your own adventure narratives outside of books. A book can be read pretty quickly, and it doesn't take but a few more moments to write two endings to every decision. In contrast, creating a game out of that is not only expensive and arduous, it would be incredibly frustrating to players. You'd have to create some kind of saving tree whereby you can save at each critical juncture point before going on.

But options made in the beginning of the game would still have to have less effect on the narrative than the later parts or people would get incredibly frustrated by being thwarted later for something they messed up in the beginning (point of fact, that was the complaint with some text adventure, wasn't it?). There's no really great way to do choose your own adventure in video gaming yet, not while it takes as long as it does to make these games.