With Mass Effect 3 I feel that the customers who bought the game deserve satisfaction. What BioWare does next could very well determine the future of the company. The logical course of action would be to provide alternate endings and make all future DLC's of the game free. But given BioWare's reluctance to listen to its customers and it desire to greedily sap every dollar it can from their games with the sales of DLC's that should of been in the games at launch, I feel that is it very unlikely that BioWare will heed this as a lesson and a wake-up call. Dissatisfied customers don't come back and if BioWare doesn't begin to listen to its customer base, then BioWare may very soon become a starving artist.
In the majority of this article you are trying to defend the game as a piece of art and protray the makers of Mass Effect 3 as victims valontly protecting their product from being destroyed by an unruly torch-bearing crowd of evil customers that are demanding changes to their video game. At the same time you vainly try to tie this logic to the fact that the game is indeed a product. Since art is open to interpretaion; almost anything can be art. For example an automobile or a finely cooked meal. But if I buy any of these products and it winds up that they are defective, inferior or not the same products that were advertised, I have the right to demand satisfaction from the party who sold them to me. Besides the ending of Mass Effect 3, which I will not get into detail, since most people reading are fully aware of the complaints, other key problems, to name a few, are: 1) Player Choice Is Completely Discarded 2) Key Philosophical Themes Are Discarded 3) Lore Errors, Plot Holes 4) A series of forced choices justified by tautological platitudes. 5) Brevity 6) Bugs
Art is a reflection of society and art is dynamic. However once you sell your art you become a business person and your art becomes a product which is bought by customers. EA and Bioware are selling a product to make money (hence the DLC's) Therefore, as consumers of a product, we do indeed have rights if the product we bought is poorly made. The arrogance of your statement and its total dismisal of the complaints of the disastified customers who shelled out money for this game is overwhelming. Unfortunately it is just a reflection of gaming sites which are more interested in the developers and publishers of games than the customers who actually buy and play them. You really sum it up in this statement "Some people have argued that in Mass Effect 3, BioWare has delivered something different from what it promised. This is irrelevant." I would also like to point out the inaccuracy of this statement. "While this petition only represents the feelings and voices of a very small subset of the gaming community" Mass Effect 3 Metacritic PC User Score 3.6 out of 10 Metacritic PlayStation 3 User Score 3.7 out of 10 Metacritic Xbox 360 User Score 4.9 out of 10 (I would not call this a "very small subset of the gaming community". Is it also a "small subset of the gaming community" which disagreed with GameSpot about Dragon Age 2?) Dragon Age 2 Metacritic PC User Score 4.2 out of 10 Metacritic PlayStation 3 User Score 3.9 out of 10 Metacritic Xbox 360 User Score 4.3 out of 10
1) Don't buy any BioWare game until you've played the demo first. 2) Rely on player reviews, not game critic reviews. Since, for the most part, the game critics have been bought off by EA and BioWare. 3) If you don't like a BioWare game go to the BioWare forum and tell them: (Why you don't like the game. And that this was the last time you will ever rob me out of my hard earned money.) 4) Money talks and if BioWare lose us as customers; it is money they will never get from us again 5) BioWare is relying on it's game titles and its Company's history and reputation. Unfortunately BioWare's reputation is now history and their games titles have become the selling points-not the games themselves. Creativity has taken a back seat to corporate greed and BioWare games now have about as much substance as jello in a microwave.
The dumbification of rpgs has become the norm for most developers. The fundamental reason for this is that creating a video game is an extraordinarily expensive business venture and developers feel that they can make more money by expanding the potential market appeal of their titles. Therefore we have a proliferation of "rpgs" that wouldn't even strain the brain of a 5 year old. But as seen by the debacle of DA 2 there is a backlash by the hard core fan bases of these games, who in actuality are the ones who buy these games. DA 2 started strong from the gates in sales in the first months but ultimately fell flat on its face in comparison to DAO's sales. EA Games Label President Frank Gibeau recently said this to Eurogamer about DA 2, “But to be honest, we lost some fans as well. They were not pleased with some of the innovations and things we’d done. We understand that and we’re listening.” Hopefully Bethesda's Skyrim will be the game that reminds the developers that there is a difference between making games for current fans and making games for potential fans. The difference is current fans are the ones buying the games year after year.
Caffeine__Fiend's comments