![]() The trilogy, which followed the likes of Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic and overlapped with Dragon Age in BioWare’s rich release history, is a sweeping, heroic, and horny space opera starring playable protagonist Commander Shepard. In retrospect, Mass Effect made a perfect target for unfulfilled fans’ discontent. ![]() But perhaps the impulse to mold or unmake creations that some fans have found wanting has also spread partly because in the case of Mass Effect 3, the complaints (sort of) worked. Those subsequent controversies almost certainly would have occurred even in a world without Mass Effect 3, which probably became a precedent-setter because it happened to debut right around the time when social media made it easier for fans to team up and make their preferences felt. ![]() The movement to remake Mass Effect 3’s ending manifested signs of the discourse that would dog many of the highest-profile genre releases of the rest of the decade: calls to Release the Snyder Cut requests for a redo of Game of Thrones Season 8 demands to decanonize the Star Wars sequel trilogy. In the weeks after Mass Effect 3’s release, respectful, considered criticism of the game’s ending surfaced alongside the tantrums and tactics of aggrieved gamers who wielded a soon-to-be-standard-issue array of internet tools of provocation and persuasion, including campaigns and petitions, targeted threats, and review bombs. It was also a harbinger of the divided, demanding, and sometimes toxic decade of fandom that followed it. But the legacy of Mass Effect 3 is more than that of a really good game that couldn’t quite tie a bow on a mostly excellent saga. The game remains a largely lauded conclusion to an almost universally celebrated trilogy-one whose upgraded and repackaged Legendary Edition was one of the 20 bestselling games on three systems last year, and one whose disappointing 2017 sequel only slightly subdued anticipation for a forthcoming fifth game and TV adaptation. ![]() On Sunday, Mass Effect 3 will turn 10 years old. The ending, many Mass Effect fans felt, was a failure. By the middle of the month, though, that contentment had curdled, at least in some vocal quarters. ![]() A month earlier, BioWare producer Mike Gamble had promised players closure and expressed optimism about how the game’s audience would receive its revelations, saying, “I honestly think the player base is going to be really happy with the way we’ve done it.” At first, it appeared his prediction had proved correct: In early March 2012, happiness and prosperity prevailed. Shortly after its release, its Metacritic score sat at 94, falling between the similarly lofty aggregated grades of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. In its first month on the market, Mass Effect 3 doubled the U.S. But for BioWare, the storied RPG developer that launched the trilogy in 2007 and concluded it in 2012, the first impression produced by the franchise’s big finish wasn’t bad at all. Those opening lines set the desperate tone maintained for much of the final installment of the Mass Effect trilogy, in which an existential threat foretold in the first two games endangers all life in the universe. “How bad is it?” one military man asks another in the first few seconds of Mass Effect 3. ![]()
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