PS: I had no idea it was such a controversial statement to suggest that things matter even if the universe is ultimately doomed.
Personally... I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. etc. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game.
(Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!)
Stupid mistake and definitely avoidable. I'm convinced Bioware sealed their fate with that (making mediocre games after did not help them though).
* * * * * *
/ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
* * * * * * *-->*
\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /
* * * * * *
You can't build this (story goes down):
*
/ \
* *
/| /|\
/ | * | \
* * * *--
/| |\ |\ \ \
/ | | * * * * *
* * *
The problem is, no matter how you disguise it, gamers sense in the first case that they're on some sort of rails. Then companies promise the second, whether they mean to or not. But they can't deliver across one game. I remember thinking when I heard the announcement about the Mass Effect trilogy laughing at the idea that they could do it across three. You just can't let the combinatorics explode that much and make decisions that change the story. (Note things like "whether or not a Krogan squad is there" are consequences, yes, but you'll note they do not impact the future flow of the story, so they don't contribute to a combinatorial explosion. It's a linear contribution; you have to model the event and voice act it, etc., but it's still just two story nodes not significantly interacting with anything else.)
Fallout 1 & Fallout 2 were structured as several parallel instances of the first example, which is probably the best compromise you can make to prevent exponential explosion while still giving some heft to the choices.
But ultimately, if you want your "choices to matter", you'd better stick to "classic" roleplaying. A Dungeon Master can react to your unexpected choices and set you in a standard "fetch the thing" quest but then react to you actually accidentally literally destroying the world when that wasn't written into their "plan", and then carry on with the resulting consequences if you like. Computer games are still a long, long ways away from anything like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-1WJtuzPg
Star Ocean: The Second Story is yet another example of an RPG that does this; it has 70-80 endings, many forking paths including mutually exclusive party member choices, relationships between characters, etc. The trick for making it feasible seems to be to make the ending modular so that it includes/removes different cutscenes based on what happened before. As I understand it there are quite a few old-school RPGs that do this.
Of course it is harder if you are talking about voice acting and super-detailed 3D assets. But assets aren't that hard considering you already made most of them for the rest of the game, and realistic voice synthesis is perhaps not that far away. So I don't think most people were expecting model (B), but even that could be viable if you controlled the number of forks carefully.
I don't think it is. The decisions made did matter, as much as anything matters, they just didn't effect the ending cut-scene you got. Is there an intentional philosophical message here? Maybe, maybe not. But there is opportunity to reflect on our relationship with decisions and outcomes. Is our time spent with the game less meaningful because of how it ended? Given a time machine, would we have chosen not to play if we knew the ending? If the ending is the thing that is important, why play the game at all instead of just watching cutscenes on youtube?
Affecting the ending is part of the promise given.
We want to talk about Mass Effect and whether promises were kept, not existential ennui. Whether or not we can truly know ourselves or whether or not the good life is led by trying to live as an ubermensch is not particularly relevant to whether promises about the game were broken.
It's sometimes helpful to step up a meta level, but you're trying to derail the conversation by stepping up something like five or six. It's not helpful.
Yeah, you're right, I should have known better than to expect more from Hacker News.
"But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion. If people enjoy the shift and engage, you talk about it. If they don't, you don't dig in your heels and accuse them of not understanding your viewpoint.
EDIT: You can enjoy the journey of a game and still be upset that you were sold a lie. You can enjoy the journey in part because you believe there will be a story-based payout. If you do this, the natural arc of the views enjoyment of the story is to be angry that the payout never came. Maybe you enjoy that feeling of being betrayed by a publisher, it's is a story experience. It's not the kind of twist that satisfies most audiences.
Honestly I couldn't care less about ME3, I didn't play it for completely different reasons. I just found the philosophical concept of "decisions matter" much more interesting to talk about. I misjudged how much Hacker News would rather have a bitch-fest.
> "But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion.
First of all, my point is that choice do matter even when they do not affect the ultimate outcome. And I'm not saying it to disregard how the commenter feels about the game, but to highlight that their description of why they feel that way is a bad rationalization, and that they could learn something about how they approach the world from examining it.
If I appear upset, it's because Hacker News, ever willing to consider themselves above redditors without justification, seem to have decided that I was defending ME3 during their collective bitching sessions and expressed their displeasure with downvotes.
And if you want to see it like that anyway: Yes, we die, but our actions influence the people around us. People we help might help us later etc. None of that was properly covered.
However, even then I contend that eternity is just another kind of ending. Given an infinite time, everything that can happen will, and therefore it will also repeat. That means that every decision we make will be made again infinitely, every path followed an infinite number of times, always eventually returning back around again, and ultimately the outcome will still be the same.
So you see, under cosmologies of eternity, we just exist in a stasis of infinity and our decisions will not change that. Under cosmologies where the universe ends our decisions will not change that either. Does this mean that nothing we do matters?
By using "admits" you mean they accept your point of view, even if they do not want to? Thats a bit telling about your worldview.
And have you ever considered, that cosmology can only make relative observations and speculations?
In other words, if our whole universe is just a small part of a bigger universe, how could we tell for sure, if all we can observe is within those borders?
Also, how likely is it, that out of eternal nothing someday came a whole universe which wents back to nothing forever?
Sounds more like religion than science.
"admits" can also be used to mean "accepts as valid"
These philosophical questions are not as separate from the day to day reality as you want to believe.
So... you didn't enjoy anything at all up to that point? Really? Then why bother playing it at all? Why not let someone else play it and just watch your preferred ending cutscene on youtube? Is it really all just about the destination and the journey means nothing?
Not really the same thing at all.
Humanity will one day no longer exist and it will be as if we never existed at all. The universe is that massive and indifferent to our existence, and it too will come to an end.