“Consider this,” the blog began, “if you had purchased a game for $59.99 or $79.99 for the digital download version and were told that you had complete control over the game’s outcome by the choices your character made and then actually had no control over the game’s outcome, wouldn’t you be disappointed?! Many gamers have spoken out in online forums, via Facebook and Twitter, leading to the creation of Facebook fanpages in favor of and against the game’s outcome. What caused all of this hype had to do with the marketing of this product.”

BBB then went to list some of the false advertising made by EA and Bioware, including the ability to “experience the beginning, middle, and end of an emotional story unlike any other, where the decisions you make completely shape your experience and outcome”, and “along the way, your choices drive powerful outcomes, including relationships with key characters, the fate of entire civilizations, and even radically different ending scenarios.”

The firm continued: “The issue at stake here is, did Bio Ware falsely advertise? Technically, yes, they did. In the first bullet point, where it states “the decisions you make completely shape your experience”, there is no indecision in that statement. It is an absolute. The next statement is not so absolute. It states “your choices drive powerful outcomes”. A consumer would have to very carefully analyze this statement to come to a conclusion that the game’s outcome is not “wholly” determined by one’s choices. This statement, really though, is very subject to interpretation. Also this is just a small example of their advertising and does not take into account anything that might have been said, as far as their public relations and other advertising campaigns.

The lesson to be learned here is companies should give careful consideration to how they word their advertisements. Otherwise, there could be detrimental effects, especially in the era of social media and online forums.”

Hopefully, EA will learn a lesson here, because they did the same thing with Battlefield 3 when they pushed the PC version of the game in ads for consoles, knowing full well it’d be a different experience.

It’s called Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut, a free DLC pack that will expand on the game’s ending, hopefully bringing closure to the franchise-damaging issue.

Said EA: “Through additional cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes. Coming this summer, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will be available for download on the Xbox 360 videogame and entertainment system, PlayStation3 computer entertainment system and PC for no extra charge.”

“We are all incredibly proud of Mass Effect 3 and the work done by Casey Hudson and team,” Dr. Ray Muzyka, Co-Founder of BioWare and General Manager of EA’s BioWare Label added. “Since launch, we have had time to listen to the feedback from our most passionate fans and we are responding. With the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut we think we have struck a good balance in delivering the answers players are looking for while maintaining the team’s artistic vision for the end of this story arc in the Mass Effect universe.”

Finally, here’s the man who’s apparently solely responsible for the game’s controversial ending: “We have reprioritized our post-launch development efforts to provide the fans who want more closure with even more context and clarity to the ending of the game, in a way that will feel more personalized for each player,” Casey Hudson, Executive Producer of the Mass Effect series said.

This whole problem stemmed from Bioware advertising Mass Effect 3 as having many, many endings, but when gamers played the game, they realized it didn’t matter how they played, or what class they chose, Mass Effect 3′s ending was the same. A massive failure on Bioware ‘s end, who’ve, in the past, made multiple endings for the popular WRPG.

Patrick Weekes’ Tells All

When the scandal became overwhelming, Mass Effect writer Patrick Weekes decided that he’d reveal what really happened behind the scenes, making known that he and others had nothing to do with how the game ended because they were essentially banned from even giving input, adding that what you experience in Mass Effect 3′s conclusion is completely Casey Hudson’s take on the franchise.

Here’s Weekes:

“I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn’t automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali’s goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft.

And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn’t need to be peer-reviewed

And again, it shows.

If you’d asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I’d break them down as:

Galactic Alliances

Friends

Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay — a deliberate “nothing happens here” area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the “nothing happens here”-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me — every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn’t have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here’s the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here’s the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be — something that I’ve been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson’s goodbye.

For me, Anderson’s goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he’s not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.

And then, just to be a dick… what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked “Destroy the Reapers”. When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you’d show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory

b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.

c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren’t in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don’t know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it’d be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to “which color is stuff glowing?” Or maybe they ARE in, but they’re too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that’s… yeah.

Okay, that’s a lot to have written for something that’s gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn’t tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn’t have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don’t even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes — all three of them.”

In recent days we’ve seen Amazon and Origin refund disgruntled gamers, and the ‘Take Mass Effect Back‘ movement collect more than $40,000 to raise awareness of the RPG’s ending. We’ll reach out to Hudson for a response on this damning write up by Weekes.

The post was first written on Penny Arcade where Weekes is a frequent visitor known as user Takyris, but it was deleted and several other posts with quotes from the original post have been edited to steer clear of the controversial comments, however a screencap of Weekes’ comments was captured and sent to Gameranx by an anonymous source.

Here’s the entire text, unadulterated, giving great insight into what took place in the final days of Mass Effect 3′s development:

I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn’t automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali’s goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft.

And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn’t need to be peer-reviewe.d

And again, it shows.

If you’d asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I’d break them down as:

Galactic Alliances

Friends

Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay — a deliberate “nothing happens here” area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the “nothing happens here”-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me — every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn’t have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here’s the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here’s the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be — something that I’ve been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson’s goodbye.

For me, Anderson’s goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he’s not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.

And then, just to be a dick… what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked “Destroy the Reapers”. When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you’d show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory

b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.

c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren’t in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don’t know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it’d be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to “which color is stuff glowing?” Or maybe they ARE in, but they’re too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that’s… yeah.

Okay, that’s a lot to have written for something that’s gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn’t tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn’t have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don’t even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes — all three of them.”

Thanks, Josh.

Here’s the full letter:

“As co-founder and GM of BioWare, I’m very proud of the ME3 team; I personally believe Mass Effect 3 is the best work we’ve yet created. So, it’s incredibly painful to receive feedback from our core fans that the game’s endings were not up to their expectations. Our first instinct is to defend our work and point to the high ratings offered by critics – but out of respect to our fans, we need to accept the criticism and feedback with humility.

I believe passionately that games are an art form, and that the power of our medium flows from our audience, who are deeply involved in how the story unfolds, and who have the uncontested right to provide constructive criticism. At the same time, I also believe in and support the artistic choices made by the development team. The team and I have been thinking hard about how to best address the comments on ME3’s endings from players, while still maintaining the artistic integrity of the game.

Mass Effect 3 concludes a trilogy with so much player control and ownership of the story that it was hard for us to predict the range of emotions players would feel when they finished playing through it. The journey you undertake in Mass Effect provokes an intense range of highly personal emotions in the player; even so, the passionate reaction of some of our most loyal players to the current endings in Mass Effect 3 is something that has genuinely surprised us. This is an issue we care about deeply, and we will respond to it in a fair and timely way. We’re already working hard to do that.

To that end, since the game launched, the team has been poring over everything they can find about reactions to the game – industry press, forums, Facebook, and Twitter, just to name a few. The Mass Effect team, like other teams across the BioWare Label within EA, consists of passionate people who work hard for the love of creating experiences that excite and delight our fans. I’m honored to work with them because they have the courage and strength to respond to constructive feedback.

Building on their research, Exec Producer Casey Hudson and the team are hard at work on a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey. You’ll hear more on this in April. We’re working hard to maintain the right balance between the artistic integrity of the original story while addressing the fan feedback we’ve received. This is in addition to our existing plan to continue providing new Mass Effect content and new full games, so rest assured that your journey in the Mass Effect universe can, and will, continue.

The reaction to the release of Mass Effect 3 has been unprecedented. On one hand, some of our loyal fans are passionately expressing their displeasure about how their game concluded; we care about this feedback, and we’re planning to directly address it. However, most folks appear to agree that the game as a whole is exceptional, with more than 75 critics giving it a perfect review score and a review average in the mid-90s. Net, I’m proud of the team, but we can and must always strive to do better.

Some of the criticism that has been delivered in the heat of passion by our most ardent fans, even if founded on valid principles, such as seeking more clarity to questions or looking for more closure, for example – has unfortunately become destructive rather than constructive. We listen and will respond to constructive criticism, but much as we will not tolerate individual attacks on our team members, we will not support or respond to destructive commentary.

If you are a Mass Effect fan and have input for the team – we respect your opinion and want to hear it. We’re committed to address your constructive feedback as best we can. In return, I’d ask that you help us do that by supporting what I truly believe is the best game BioWare has yet crafted. I urge you to do your own research: play the game, finish it and tell us what you think. Tell your friends if you feel it’s a good game as a whole. Trust that we are doing our damndest, as always, to address your feedback. As artists, we care about our fans deeply and we appreciate your support.

Thank you for your feedback – we are listening.

Ray”

One user called t_i_e_ posted a thread on Bioware’s social network about how he successfully got Origin customer service to issue him a refund after expressing his dissatisfaction with the game’s ending.

Here’s a screenshot:

This has gotten totally out of control now. Completely.

Playing the demo way before the game was released, I decided to first go with a straightforward action class Shepard where decision making didn’t matter. I played the demo through, started over again, this time choosing the classic Mass Effect 3 RPG class, but to my surprise, after playing through using the RPG class a few times making different choices, all my actions winded up being the same – it became as if choosing different classes didn’t matter because they all lead to the same conclusion.

I didn’t take it too serious back then, knowing that it was just a demo, trusting Bioware was probably saving the best for last, but now that gamers have voiced their opinions on the game’s ending, I realize Bioware got somewhat lazy with Mass Effect 3. And it would be okay if they didn’t advertise something else, but the developer did promise gamers different results depending on how they chose to play the game.

Mass Effect 3 is more linear that the prior games, and your choices are less effective when changing course this time around.

The controversy was inevitable, then, being that gamers were expecting (and promised) closure and multiple endings, yet winded up with nothing more than little variations, of course they would be upset. People say Bioware are the creators and gamers should simply accept the ending as what it is. But isn’t Apple the creator of the iPad? What if the firm advertised a Retina display for the device, yet when you purchased it you found out it had none, wouldn’t you return it? Of course you would! You paid money for it.

Gamers are now getting refunds for Bioware’s false advertisement, I don’t blame them.

Now, I believe Mass Effect 3 is a great game, one of the best in franchise history. But I also believe Bioware could have worked harder to give gamers more satisfaction, especially in the end. Especially when you have such a dedicated following. And especially when you promised to bring closure to the trilogy.

Hopefully, some good comes out of this. Hopefully developers will learn to actually deliver what has been promised. And although I’m don’t know if Bioware will change Mass Effect 3′s ending, I know for sure they’ll think carefully when making promises in the future. We hope all developers do.

“Amazon is giving me a refund on my opened CE. Sweet! Maybe I can find another game that doesn’t crush my soul to spend that $80 on,” said one disgruntled Mass Effect 3 purchase on Bioware’s Social Network.

This whole problem stemmed from Bioware advertising Mass Effect 3 as having many, many endings, but when gamers played the game, they realized it didn’t matter how they played, or what class they chose, Mass Effect 3′s ending was the same. A massive failure on Bioware ‘s end, who’ve, in the past, made multiple endings for the popular WRPG.

This comes as fans recently filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission arguing that Mass Effect 3′s ending didn’t live up to advertised claims. Apparently someone from Bioware “mistakenly” said on the firm’s Social Network that they had no plans of changing the ending, a post that’s been since deleted, but didn’t stop fans from descending into a massive uproar.

In fact, it’s gotten so out of control that Bioware was forced to clarify the situation via its Facebook page:

“We are aware that there are concerns about a recent post from this account regarding the ending of the game. In this post it was stated that at this time we do not have plans to change the ending.

We would like to clarify that we are actively and seriously taking all player feedback into consideration and have ruled nothing out. At this time we are still collecting and considering your feedback and have not made a decision regarding requests to change the ending.

Your feedback and opinions are of the utmost importance to us. We apologize for any confusion this has caused. Our top priority regarding this discussion is to keep communication with you, our loyal fans, open and productive.”

The irony of this backlash is that more copies of Mass Effect 3 will fly off store shelves as curious gamers will be eager to know what’s all the fuss about. It’s been one intriguing situation after the next. It’s also a very different Bioware from when the scandal first broke, initially stating it had no plans of changing the game’s ending in the first response, then showing signs of retreat in the second, now the firm’s backtracked completely.

We’ll keep you posted.

“We appreciate everyone’s feedback about Mass Effect 3 and want you to know that we are listening,”BioWare community manager Chris Priestly on the Bioware Social Network.

“Active discussions about the ending are more than welcome here, and the team will be reviewing it for feedback and responding when we can.

Please note, we want to give people time to experience the game so while we can’t get into specifics right now, we will be able to address some of your questions once more people have had time to complete the game. In the meantime, we’d like to ask that you keep the non-spoiler areas of our forums and our social media channels spoiler free.

We understand there is a lot of debate on the Mass Effect 3 ending and we will be more than happy to engage in healthy discussions once more people get to experience the game. We are listening to all of your feedback.”

Two days ago Casey Hudson held his stance, saying the ending would remain as is, but all that’s changed now.