"I remember about a week or so after we had launched, we'd seen all these excellent critical reviews," remembered BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn in an interview with Game Informer in 2016. The company needed to end the trilogy and thread the needle. All of the rent accrued over the trilogy-the incisive conversations with suspicious crew members, the emotional devastation during its fork-in-the-road moments, the ownership that BioWare claimed to offer its players-finally came due. In that sense, perhaps Mass Effect was doomed from the start. A franchise that emphasized choice so much that when its final act made a decision players did not care for, they chose not only to reject it but to demand it be changed." "Mass Effect is videogames’ own sword of Damocles finally coming loose. "Constraints that are easy to accept if you are Mario choosing one path over another become harder to grok in a narrative determined to woo you into believing your choices matter in a way that transfers authorship to you," wrote Rivera.
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It doesn't matter how much rope a studio concedes to the player over the course of a game story the director at the far end of the table still holds all the cards. He noted that "player choice" is a bit of an oxymoron.
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Joshua Rivera published a good take on this at the end of 2019 for Kotaku. It worked, and the industry hasn't been the same since. George Lucas waited decades before he had the chance to smooth over the loose ends in the first Star Wars trilogy, but this nascent generation of gamers correctly predicted that with the dawn of live games and constant DLC maintenance, they could put the screws to BioWare and demand the gratification they wanted. Once upon a time, it wasn't possible to retcon on the fly. If you played your cards right, there is a chance the Normandy blasts off from the planet it crash-landed on in the epilogue, offering palliative care to the many bereaved hearts in the pickled gamer symposium. The Mass Relays survived, as did many of Shepard's crew mates. Three months after the backlash, Mass Effect 3 earned an airbrushing in the form of an "Extended Cut," which sanded away some of the chief complaints. Convictions be damned.Ä«ioWare would eventually fulfill that pivot.
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It is a revelatory quote, and initial proof that for as much as this new generation of game studios dreamt of auteur autonomy, the customer was always right. "Our first instinct is to defend our work and point to the high ratings offered by critics-but out of respect for our fans, we need to accept the criticism and feedback with humility." "It's incredibly painful to receive feedback from our core fans that the game's endings were not up to their expectations," BioWare co-founder and general manager Ray Muzyka said at the time, as the rancor was picking up. But in 2012, I'm not sure if anyone fully understood the degree to which fans could influence the properties they love-especially when faced with a plot choice they didn't agree with. Years later, Disney financialized the Marvel brand into a juggernaut, causing every production house on the planet to desperately carve out their own bespoke multiverses worshipped by a global community of enthusiasts. When Shepard chose his path and ignited the internet, geekdom as a unilateral pop cultural force was rounding into form.
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If that sounds familiar to you, it's because Mass Effect 3 has become the blueprint for all varieties of insurrection. It just snowballed like crazy, and pretty soon the whole issue was on fire.