There were technically three endings depending on the player's choices up to that point, and while the implications of each were different, most of what the player saw and heard was the same, with largely cosmetic differences like the color of various explosion effects.įor fans who spent 100 hours or more playing through the series on the promise that the ending would reflect their particular story and choices throughout the games, it was understandably disappointing. The critical reception to the game was overwhelmingly positive, but the response from players would be far less enthusiastic.Īs people got their hands on the game and played through it, those who raced to the end began to send word back of a rather disappointing conclusion to the saga. We saw a very clear example of that a decade ago, when BioWare released the much-anticipated Mass Effect 3, the finale to a trilogy of sci-fi role-playing games that spanned the Xbox 360-PS3 generation. As a result, when the slightest friction comes up between the artistic goals and commercial needs of a project, it often resolves itself to the benefit of the latter. Between the deeply collaborative nature of AAA game development, growing team sizes, escalating budgets, advanced analytics and the importance of community management as a marketing tool, AAA developers are conditioned to treat their work as a product first and artistic expression second (if at all). And as much as the games industry has grown in the past half century, it's always been far more comfortable with games as products than games as art. Art has no real criteria it needs to fill.īut products have to sell. Art just has to exist, or to express something, to spark a thought, to elicit a reaction, perhaps to gesture vaguely at an emotion. And the needs of art are often different from the needs of a product. They're good art, bad art, weird art, boring art, experimental art, offensive art, enlightening art, edifying art, disappointing art, and every other kind of art it is possible to be.īut like a lot of other art, they're also a product. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before.
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