User blog comment:Phantomdasilva/Fan Entitlement and the sanctity of artistic vision/@comment-3315068-20120503025435

My personal take on this is that if the fiction flows from starting point to ending based on plausible choices of people/organizations within the story, using resources the setting establishes they have, acting on information they believe is reliable at the time they rely on it, then a reasonable audience must accept how the story ends even if they don't necessarily like it.

Under this criterion, the "bad guys" will occasionally win, sometimes because they were smarter or stronger than the protagonist(s) or occasionally by pure luck. Flawed information, inadequate resources, deception by opposing persons or factions, or just bad luck might hinder or even kill popular protagonists. If these events unfold plausibly, with minimal author fiat, then one is well on their way to creating an internally consistent story free from plot holes. Of course, people occasionally act irrationally, whether from panic, despair, desire for revenge, etc, and while that can be more difficult to write believably, it can create interesting stories when used well.

However, Mass Effect 3 contains numerous plot holes the size of that crater at the end of Dead Space. As smudboy has pointed out on Youtube, no one is behaving rationally through the last act of ME3, with no explanation given. Shepard has failed to act on information e should have had since ME1, Anderson is providing a needlessly overcomplicated and potentially suicidal plan to solve a problem which was never sufficiently explained to the player in the first place, Hackett fails to call either of them out on it, and even the Reapers seem to be incapable of or refuse to use their most powerful strategic weapon: control of the mass relay network. The last act feels like it was written in a single draft, while very sleepy, but then no one was allowed to rewrite any part of it.

It's not just that the three endings exist in a space mostly divorced from the existing plot, but that the framework that leads up to those endings makes so little sense. As a single example, the reliance on the Crucible makes no sense from a military standpoint, since it's a complete mystery. If we may make an analogy to smaller-scale combat, if I knew a fight was inevitable and someone provided me an exotic weapon that they promised would make me certain to prevail, but which is completely unlike anything I have ever used before, I wouldn't use it. I would feel much safer fighting with my own strength, even if it was woefully inadequate, than rely on a weapon I am completely untrained on. I might very well wind up pointing the wrong end at the target and destroy whatever I was fighting to protect!

I suspect that the changes in writers, as well as possibly inadequate consultation of previously established details, combined with time pressure from the publishers led to the writers effectively painting themselves into a corner. The idea that all or most of the player's choices turn out to be irrelevant at the very end would not necessarily be a bad idea if the framework that that revelation came through was better constructed. If the Crucible had been established earlier and its function was thought to be well understood by the time the Reapers invaded, but then it turned out that the Crucible was a Reaper-constructed decoy, a last failsafe of theirs that would sabotage our last stand- that would be a hard blow to the audience but it might just be in-universe plausible. It would further establish the Reapers as perfect schemers - after all, we stopped Sovereign only with a combination of Vigil's help and pure luck. Sometimes you're forced into a position where you can't win, but that's also the sort of thing that creates the opportunity for upset victories, when the underdog realizes that they can re-frame the conditions of the conflict and take the fight to a place the opponent didn't expect.

Phantomdasilva's point is correct, and so are all the others who've pointed out that rewriting the game based on the backlash alone would violate the artistic integrity of the creators, but there is another point that I think some people are missing. Because of the rushed nature of parts of the project, and because of the change in writers, does the current state of ME3 really reflect anyone's artistic vision wholeheartedly? Few artists are ever completely satisfied with their work, of course, but I wonder whether any of the writers are completely comfortable with what ME3 wound up becoming.