Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut

[ríomhaire]

Bioware have announced that they will be releasing a DLC that will "through additional cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes."

http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=662095

It's free until Arpil 2014 for some strange reason, after which I guess they'll start charging for it? EA are weird.

 

[Sgt.Tibbs]

They couldn't just release it like that in the first place?

 

[Lucid]

In before it's actually a precursor to the Mass Effect MMO.

 

[Remus]

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/04/05/mass-effect-3-extended-cut/

Read the blog post.

This DLC does not change anything, it simply adds some extra cutscenes and epilogues.

The rage on the Bioware forums is delicious. LOL

 

[DEATHMASTER]

This is stupid. Free cinematics! Right, because those would be youtubed to death if they were pay only.
The artistic vision argument is even worse. They're EA ffs, like anyone will buy that.

 

[nofreeman]

i really hope they don't **** this up.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

This is stupid. Free cinematics! Right, because those would be youtubed to death if they were pay only.
The artistic vision argument is even worse. They're EA ffs, like anyone will buy that.

Bioware are the retards who made this awful shit thinking it was a great idea. Even though EA are still shit anyway.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

I thought the game was pretty good for the most part, but to just blow the ending? It feels like corporate intervention.

 

[MultiVaC]

I just finished it recently, and I think the worst part about the ending was how not only was it not affected by your choices in any meaningful way, but how it makes almost all of your choices irrelevant by destroying any possibility of them actually playing out:

Spoiler

No matter what choice you make, the mass relays are gone. Galactic civilization is no more, so everything that I was considering when I made almost every decision is gone. When I chose to cure the genophage, I worried about the consequences of enabling another krogan rebellion, but I felt like the krogans have suffered enough and I believed in the leadership of Wrex to lead them in a new direction. Well, guess what? No more mass relays, so there could have never been any new krogan rebellions anyway, and Wrex is not even their leader anymore because he's trapped on Earth forever. I was happy when I managed to create peace between the geth and the quarians, and to see them be able finally return to their home planet. It was a huge victory for the entire galaxy in the storyline, and the quarians all talked about how they could finally return home after hundreds of years. But now it turns out that they can never go home anyway, because the migrant fleet came to fight in the battle for Earth and now most of the species is stuck there also. Every big decision in the series made me think about the consequences for the galaxy, but every possible ending resulted in there essentially not being a galaxy anymore. That just sucks.

And it doesn't suck because it's bleak; no matter what happened it was going to be bleak as shit. Trillions of people dying horrible deaths, just about every single place you have ever visited in the series reduced to rubble or space debris, all the main characters could potentially die. There was no need to get rid of the mass relays for the sake of bleakness. That ghost kid thing was a deus ex machina in every sense of the term, and there was no reason for it to happen that way (and coincidentally they basically copy-pasted the ending of Deus Ex in there, which is really bizarre). It would have been so much simpler, more logical, and keeping with the game's themes and mechanics if it just ended with the scene of Shepard and Anderson on the Citadel. The Crucible kills the Reapers through whichever technobabble is appropriate (it was always going to be a MacGuffin, there's no way around that) like we meant it to, and everything else determined by your effective military strength, maybe with some permutations based on the status of main characters. High strength would result in the people of the galaxy severely battered but victorious and ready to rebuild, and maybe even able to come in and save Shepard if your strength is at its absolute maximum. Low strength would result in the Reapers beaten but your forces completely annihilated in the final battle, with Earth left as little more than smoldering ash with a small population of survivors still barely clinging to life. Moderate strength could be somewhere in between.

Sure it would have been predictable, but I think that's mostly because it makes sense and is where the series has always felt like it was leading us. Really, Mass Effect was always a little predictable and heavy-handed, but it was great at it and made an excellent and meaningful ride along the way, in my opinion. Nobody really minded that the original Star Wars trilogy ended in pretty much the most obvious way imaginable, and it would have sucked if all the sudden the Force came out of nowhere to tell Luke that the Empire was something it created to somehow protect the galaxy from chaos and he sacrifices himself to stop it and transform all life forever. For me Mass Effect's broad story arc always felt like it was about the same thing as Star Wars' was; people banding together to find some way save the galaxy from a seemingly insurmountable evil force. It seems ridiculous that Mass Effect suddenly decided that instead it wanted to be more like 2001: A Space Odyssey in the last 5 minutes.

Anyway, it doesn't sound like the DLC is going to anything to remedy what I didn't like about the ending. I don't really think it's something that can be fixed just by changing/adding to the cutscenes. Besides, even though I still love the series despite a botched ending, the damage has already been done. Most fans are going to look back on Mass Effect and think "great series, shame about the crappy ending."