I wasn't particularly impressed with
this article.
Game writers and designers work within the industry, so you'd hardly find someone who would actively criticize BioWare's efforts. So on the whole it's just plain "audience participation/ player feedback is so important" here, and "artistic integrity" there. So this article mostly explicitly tiptoes around the real issues. Well, of course the ending should not be changed "
because the fans demand it". It should be changed because it's shitty!!
Chuck (Jordan, duh) uses a rather strange equalization between the present protest and movie focus group tests and arrives at the idea that the player should not be "given what he wants" all the time - something that, in my opinion, has scarcely anything to do with the topic at hand. This is all the more confusing because he is about the only one in this bunch of interviewed people who knows and speaks his mind about things that were really essentially wrong with Mass Effect 3:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Chuck Jordan
Essentially, BioWare created the problem for themselves by, to be blunt, promising more than they or any other developer could deliver. They’ve sold the Mass Effect series on the premise that the player can completely customize his character and his character’s story—entire planets with complex storylines that some players will never even see! (And also sex with aliens). But even the largest team of writers and content creators won’t be able to deliver an indefinite number of conclusions that all have the same level of impact, satisfying enough to conclude a multi-year, multi-game epic series. People have been spending years trying to come up with a way to create systems that generate compelling narratives, and no one’s cracked the problem yet.
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