Mass Effect 3 director Casey Hudson has finally spoken out on the controversy surrounding the game's ending, amidst growing complaints from long time franchise fans.
"I didn’t want the game to be forgettable," Hudson told DigitalTrends, "and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people — debating what the endings mean and what’s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in. That to me is part of what’s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it’s a story that people can talk about after the fact."
While it's nice to see someone at BioWare finally speaking openly about Mass Effect 3's ending, Hudson's comments seem to paint a picture that's rosier than the reality of the situation, evading many of the key points that disgruntled fans are raising. Hudson seems to want to whisk all the controversy away by merely stating that the game is open to interpretation and debate, and that's a bit disingenuous in light of the specific lists of plot holes and pointed criticisms fans have compiled.
So what are the odds that the much requested ending fix DLC is on the way? Hudson's remarks aren't clear one way or the other, but he did say that BioWare takes fan feedback very seriously.
"It's very important to us and we will always listen to feedback, interpret it and try and do the right thing by our fans. That’s why if you look at Mass Effect 2 we knew that people wanted to spend more time with a character like Liara, and so we created an ongoing storyline with her as part of the comics and then built it into the DLC stuff, and we’re always listening to fans.
"We have some really great multiplayer content and some really great single-player content coming over the air, and their feedback will become part of how we design that."
Hudson also took some time to address the other looming Mass Effect 3 controversy, which centers around allegations that crucial content was cut from the game to make the From Ashes DLC.
"Initially, it was spun in a direction that suggested that we had taken the lore out of Mass Effect 3 and were holding it inside the DLC only, which now the people who actually have played Mass Effect 3 and the DLC they know that that’s not true. So that fear was set aside and, ultimately, I think people get it now.
"They get the fact that sometimes the way that things work in game development isn’t known very well by a lot of people, so there’s an opportunity for misunderstanding, including the fact that as a multi-studio team and company, we have many projects that are ongoing. When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves and that team goes on to work on something else that in those intervening months represent millions of dollars of development time, which either goes towards the next game that you might not see for several years, or a different game that they might go to work on like Dragon Age or the Old Republic.
"We work on all these different things. So in this case, we chose to work on a DLC which people really enjoyed for Mass Effect 2 and we also wanted to make sure that people had it as an opportunity to build it into their first play-through if they wanted that as an optional thing. That’s what they did and now that people have played it they can see that, yes, it was optional versus the way it was initially spun by some people on the Internet."
