Mass Effect 3.

Leb wrote:The only way for me to buy ME3 now is if they will go down the route of releasing an actual closure to the game. Right now, to answer Erik, the series is like this:

Spoiler:

You spend ME1 finding out about a horrible plot(in what it results in, not that it's horrible as in story) of a super-advanced machine race showing up to "kill" all organic life, then put a stop to their invasion.

In ME2, you find out that the invasion can still occur, it was told about already in ME1 but anyway. ME2 is sort of Bioware stalling on the plot to figure out what to do, but the game is actually pretty good. It improves on the combat parts that ME1 had, but sort of dumbs down on stuff like special abilities(the system isn't that bad though so whatever). By the end of ME2, you once again screw over the Reaper plans to invade and slow down their attack even more by finishing Arrival DLC(if you didn't buy it, you still will have completed it in ME3 fluff-wise).

ME3 is where all your decisions in ME1 and ME2 show up, characters who are alive can contribute to your success in the final stages of the game, you forge alliances, gather an army to fight the Reapers who have shown up and are curb-stomping EVERYONE. Then in the end, the assault begins, all the fleets and soldiers you have gathered launch a massive assault on Earth, you right there with 'em on the ground to infiltrate the Citadel and finish the job thanks to an ancient "super-weapon" that has been slowly built by different races in all of the Reaper cycles. None have been able to successfully use it to defeat the Reapers, but you intend to be the one who does it.

Then comes the ending, where it turns out that all your choices from the previous games actually have no meaning in which option you choose. There are 3. The game lists 16 or was it 17 endings, but the only thing that's different for 'em is how much you had "galactic readiness" or whatever. For example, go with one option, below 4k points, Shepard dies. Above 5k points, Shepard lives.

It's not that the endings are sad, it's that all the choices you do don't really impact the outcome to make you feel like anything you did in the games was worth anything, except in one route where Shepard may survive. But even then, the ending specified there is bleak.

And to make it even worse, the game ends with an old man going "AND THAT WAS THE STORY OF THE SHEPARD", it was all a story that he's telling to a kid. So the kid goes "IS THAT REALLY WHAT HAPPENED" and the old man says "WELL SOME OF THE DETAILS HAVE BEEN LOST."

So in the end, when you finish ME3, you get no closure on what actually happened to the galaxy you tried so damn hard to save through all the games. Everything you did, the people you saved or killed, the hard decisions all are handwaved away with "THE DETAILS HAVE BEEN LOST."

If they had actually bothered to put real closure to the game, things would be fine. But right now, we as players have no damn idea what we even accomplished, if anything. The indoctrination theory is nice on this part, but again, that means that the game ends before we actually manage to end it. Shepard survives, and then what? What happened next? We just don't know, and I feel that for fans of the games, it's a major slap to the face.

It's like Bioware tried to be deep all of a sudden, and they forgot that MAYBE they should make an ending that would let us finish the story of our Shepard and know that in the end, we managed to do something.

Even when they said that for one ending it may be possible for Reapers to win, it'd be fine if it was along the lines of "you weren't prepared enough, try again harder by replaying."