BioWare admits there was some feedback they couldn’t address

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   July 2nd, 2012   |  

News, Uncategorized

The Mass Effect developers conceded that there was some feedback they could not address regarding the endings of the game.

Mass Effect is one of the current generation’s best selling and loved series with the three games selling in the millions. The series centres around the game’s protagonist, Sam Shepard, whose gender is up to the player to decide, as he or she embarks on an intergalactic quest to stop the Reapers.

The game follows a third-person shooter role-playing game directive as players build up a team of characters who they recruit from different parts of the galaxy. The game has stirred up quite a bit of controversy as well as it had a particularly intimate scene between the game’s protagonist and another character, which raised quite a few eyebrows.

The latest game featured a similar scene but with same gender interaction, which raised eyebrows that had not been raised before.

However, those were controversies did not affect gamers as much as the on disc DLC and the latest game’s endings did.

The multiple endings that gamers unlocked based on how their choices in the game, did not sit well with the fans who immediately took to the forums to request that the developer change them.

BioWare has since released a DLC with new endings and commenting on why the studio listened to fans was Casey Hudson, the game’s executive producer.

He said that it “Wouldn’t make sense for us to make some kind of artistic statement, and then turn our backs on it forever.” Before going on to admit that, “There was some feedback that we can’t address. There are people who just outright rejected the whole concept of the endings, and wanted us to start from scratch and redo everything. And we can’t do that because that’s not our story, we wouldn’t know how to write that story.”

However, the executive producer did also point out how the entire experience was a great learning process and that they got a better idea of what their fans wanted and did not want in their games.

Hudson said, “What excites us is the challenge of learning how people consume our stories, so it’s a learning process for everybody. And then incorporating that feedback, that’s how we make our work better.”

He continued by saying that constructive criticism was always welcome and that as long as it brought out a positive outcome then BioWare was always willing to listen, which is what they intended on showing by releasing the DLC pack with the new endings to the game.

Whether or not the new endings will finally satisfy the fans or split them even further remains to be seen but one has to commend BioWare for being open to the fans.