14 DAY TRIAL // The controversy that has affected Mass Effect 3, mostly centered around the ending of the last game in the saga of Commander Shepard, seems to have reached the highest level of both developer and publisher and to have forced a reaction that defends the game while also reaching out to unsatisfied gamers.
Ray Muzyka, one of the co-founders of BioWare and the current leader of the role playing and MMO division at Electronic Arts, clearly states that, “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.”
The developer and executive believes that a delicate balance needs to be reached between the artistic vision of the team actually working on a video game and the demands of the player base that makes each series important.
Muzyka adds, “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.”
The tone of the entire letter to Mass Effect 3 fans is conciliatory and suggests that BioWare and Electronic Arts are ready to listen to any clearly formulated feedback and are beginning work on extra game content that will clarify the end and other points of contention.