Warning – complete and utter spoiling of Mass Effect 3 and a few other sci-fi stories will occur in this post.

I am one of the thousands of players who were left shell-shocked by the ending of Mass Effect 3. If there was any developer whom I expected to not ruin a series which is the flagship of the Space Opera genre in our popular culture, it was Bioware. Up to the very end, they had every opportunity to end it well, they did not write themselves into a three-toed, smoke-monster corner like so many writers before them. And yet they failed worse than Ronald D. Moore, worse than the Wachowski brothers, and worse than Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

What is the Mass Effect trilogy?

As a narrative, Mass Effect is a quintessential space opera. As a video game, Mass Effect may appear to be a third-person shooter or a watered-down RPG. But that’s really not what the game’s core appeal is. There are far better shooters and far better RPGs. The selling point of most Bioware games, and Mass Effect in particular is their particular brand of interactive fiction. Shepard is not a generic action hero. Shepard is really not any one thing at all. Your Shepard may be a Kirk. Mine may be a Picard. Someone else’s Shepard may be a Riddick, or a Mad Max, or something completely different. This ability to role-play and make the game “yours” is par for the course in Western games, but what makes Mass Effect special is that you don’t have to do it in your head. You form your Shepard through playing your Shepard, and she will turn out to be a fully voice acted, compelling character with a consistent personality. Your choices will affect the world around you and that resulting world will in turn shape your Shepard.

The most compelling evidence against Mass Effect being a shooter instead of a Hero Simulator is the end of Mass Effect 2. Killing the end boss does not mean you’ve won. If your choices prior to this point have resulted in your crew perishing, you leap off the exploding Collector base towards the Normandy… and plummet to your death because there’s no one left to catch you.

This is why Bioware promised us multiple endings that reflect our choices. They did not deliver.

We don’t scream for space ice cream

There’s an obnoxious trend among the gaming press to misrepresent what disappointed fans are asking for. I found it really odd that Penny Arcade posted the above comic two days after Jerry wrote the following:

There’s a countercharge now, in response to anger about the endings, that describes Bioware’s output as sacrosanct in some way – beyond criticism. This is fundamentally batshit, or as noted “speculative fiction” author Harlan Ellison might say,bugfuck. I’m fine with the ending, which to my mind started as soon as I ran the executable – the whole game is denouement – but I revolt against the idea of Authorial Divinity almost at the molecular level. I bet Ken Levine would take a redo on Bioshock, for example. To hear them tell it, there is plenty about Deus Ex: Human Revolution the developer would change.

So the game is not beyond criticism, but our criticism happens to be idiotic?

We do not want a happy ending. WE DO NOT WANT A HAPPY ENDING.

We want an ending that doesn’t completely destroy the preceding 100 hours of gameplay. Jerry says “the whole game is denouement”, and thereby completely seems to miss the purpose of denouement. Which seems odd for someone who makes their living by writing. But the clue to why he considers the wrapping up of plot points during the rising action to be sufficient is in this:

They’re very much endings of the Hard Sci-Fi school: work predicated to a certain extent on Interesting Answers but far, far more of a piece with Interesting Questions. The Interesting Question posed here is: what next? We know this is the question, because regardless of any particulars, the very structure of Galactic society is destroyed every time. And the alliance you’ve jammed together with gum, glue, and tape is now sitting in the equivalent of a ten by ten room, all of them armed to the teeth. We know that something survives, and lives well – “the Shepard” has passed into legend, and The Stargazer talks about interstellar travel as though it had all the complexity of crossing the street. But what next? That is precisely the kind of question I like.

That, I believe, is the fundamental disconnect between the seemingly intelligent people who were fine with it, and those of us who feel like Bioware took a gigantic shit on us.

He can disassociate the story of Shepard from the 2001 ending we were given. And that’s because he never experienced the space opera that I did.

Mass Effect is not hard science fiction

Mass Effect, on the surface, is just an action piece in space. If that’s all it was, then the only fitting ending would certainly be for the generic laser-gun-toting hero to ride off into the sunset. The space ice cream. The space segway.

But that’s not the case. To most of us, Mass Effect is not about shooting lasers in space and killing big scary aliens. It is quintessentially Space Opera. It does not speculate on what living in space would actually be like. It does not speculate on the dynamics of actual xenopolitical interaction. It only provides us with enough technobabble to make the world feel believable, so that we stay engaged while the Space Opera does what it does best: explore human themes.

Mass Effect has a lot more to do with the prison movie on the left than the “evil AI in space” movie on the right. It was ultimately not about speculating on technological singularities and conflicts between AI and organics – those conflicts were quite emphatically portrayed as allegories for simple, human xenophobia. Legion is more Spartacus than he is HAL. Shepard is more Oskar Schindler than she is Paul Atreides.

The plot-hole ridden, badly motivated deus ex machina ending in the form of the Star Child would be terribly sloppy writing even in a Foundation or a Dune, but it would be a trivial criticism because the story would be about what happens to galactic civilization in the long run.

It is a travesty in Mass Effect because the entire dramatic arc of a Paragon Shepard was focused on fighting ideas. The Reapers are the embodiment of the primary Bad Idea that Shepard fights throughout the series. That idea is “there are terrible things hiding in the dark, and keeping those things out justifies anything we do”. This idea is the antagonist, the primitive and wholly human fear of the dark and of the unknown that has led to untold massacres and pogroms and monstrous war crimes.

Throughout the trilogy, doing the right thing, and siding with trust, hope, and open-mindedness was shown to be the right course of action. The Quarians and the Geth can be united, enriching and uplifting both of them. The Krogan can be saved from both the genophage and a future of brutishness. Fear of the dark is shown to be a wicked, corrupting thing, and we are shown that we are ready to evolve past it.

And then the elevator lifts you up.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

In the space of a few minutes, this entire narrative is completely undone. The Star Child tells you that he controls the Reapers, and the purpose of this is to stop the “created from killing the creators”, which is inevitable. Wait, what?

Why is it inevitable? What possible justification is there for this idea? We have spent 100+ hours learning that the unknown is not a danger, that even the xenomorphs of this universe are actually misunderstood and manipulated victims who do not wish us any harm. The only universally malevolent force left is the Reapers.

And their motivation turns out to be protecting us from all the scary things in the dark? Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Shepard should never, ever accept this false dilemma. But you never get to argue, because the lead writer is suddenly enamored with being a latter-day Asimov, and the Ending-Tron 3000 must give you three slight variations on the Only Option That Leads To Hard Science Fiction. The destruction of the relays, and “The Shepard” being remembered as the savior of the galaxy from itself.

All that you actually accomplished is undone, both in-world, because the handwaved “I’m Arthur C. Clarke” ending leaves everyone you helped in this supposed denouement stranded in a single shelled out solar system, and thematically, because the protagonist meekly accepts that we are irredeemable after all and need to be magicked into a better future.

And you get to watch as your beaten and defeated husk meekly limps into the incinerator. Once you start moving, you even lose control of your character. You go out with a whimper, and the bang is just a multicolored distraction from the cold hard fact that this game just told us “The Reapers were right after all, but we’ll not grind you into paste quite so much”.

So no, I don’t want fucking space ice cream. I don’t want my Shepard to kick the Reapers in their space nuts, and fly off to have space beers with her space waifu. I want my Shepard to win, live or die.

I want her epitaph to be this:

What I got was this: