Here’s the problem with ending stories: when you let them go on too long, you’re never going to satisfy everyone. There have been times that I’ve been satisfied by the ending to a long TV show or series of movies (Lord of the Rings, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood) and there have been even more times when I’ve been dissatisfied by an ending (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix Trilogy). There’s just a lot of expectations and to be honest its probably daunting to a writer to satisfy all of them without turning the whole piece into a pile of garbage (they often manage to do this anyway).

It looks like Bioware has noticed this phenomenon and admits their ending might not satisfy everyone completely.

“It’s going to make some people extremely happy. It’s going to make some people angry. But that’s part of it, right? To invoke the emotion putting some of these stories to bed will naturally bring up. -Mike Gamble, Bioware producer

I applaud Bioware’s honesty, but I think this is a bit of a misdirect. Bioware absolutely kills it when it comes to stories (see what I did there?). I will still have some very high expectations just going off of Mass Effect’s track record, but should probably keep in mind that many of the characters I love and adore are in harm’s way or that things may not turn out so shiny and perfect as we would hope. Nothing about the previous Mass Effect games would lead me to believe any of these things in the first place! I mean, SPOILER ALERT: you can literally kill everyone at the end of Mass Effect 2!

We might even be missing the fact that its those angering story-lines that make Bioware games so endearing, their stories so memorable and their characters easily identifiable. Who can forget punching that reporter girl in the face (Mass Effect 3 gets an automatic A+ if I get to do this again).

So bring it on Bioware, I think we can take it, hell we’ve been groomed to take it. Bioware story-lines are brutal and harsh and maybe an unhappy ending is what they’ve been preparing us for from Day 1.