Nowadays, this sort of obnoxious overreaction is commonplace. One fan took the issue to the Better Business Bureau, which agreed the game falsely advertised complete control over its final outcome.īioWare ran a poll on its website asking fans if they were happy with the ending, and well over a million people voted. One fan made an official complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, another complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, saying the game was guilty of false advertising.
Mass Effect, you could argue, birthed the online petition as a mainstream device of outrage. Today, online petitions are extremely normal, but back then a petition was a big deal. There was a petition to change the ending, of course. Post release, the Mass Effect 3 discourse evolved into an out-of-control blazing inferno that threatened to burn the internet to a blackened crisp. "Then all of a sudden people were saying, 'I felt the ending was weak.' And someone would say, 'Yeah, I thought it was actually pretty bad.' And someone else would say, 'I hated that ending.' It just snowballed like crazy, and pretty soon the whole issue was on fire." "I remember about a week or so after we had launched, we'd seen all these excellent critical reviews," remembered then-BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn. Publisher Electronic Arts faced criticism over the way it finished the otherwise celebrated game. (If you want to dig deeper into the games themselves, the remastered trilogy collection Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is available from Friday.) The details of the ending, for the purposes of this article, aren't all that important. It rendered players' choices inconsequential. The ending, which many called inconsistent and contradictory, made the fatal mistake of breaking Mass Effect's initial, cast-iron promise. No, fans weren't just disappointed, they were incensed.
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