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.īioWare would eventually fulfill that pivot. 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. 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.

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