Comment "Artistic Integrity" is bullshit. (Score 2) 235
Everyone who is going on trying to defend the ending and BioWare's laziness is missing the point. If I go to an art gallery, I want artistic integrity. If I buy a game, I want entertainment. It's not that the two can't overlap, it's that the place to express your inner postmodernist isn't at the end of a mainstream entertainment product where you promise the players (and they are players, not participants in your interactive art project) that their choices matter only to say "haha, I lied" at the end and swat them away like annoying little philistines while you gleefully burn their world down. I don't see how anyone who played the first two games (especially having played other games from the same studio in the past) could have predicted that this would be the sort of ending they'd get in the game. It's not that the end was sad or dark that bothers me. It was lazy, incomplete, and a ripoff of the Matrix's Architect mixed with the endings of a typical Deus Ex game.
This is on top of the fact that there is a fair amount of evidence (if only by repeated anecdote/rumor) that the ending was rushed and that it was literally a case of Casey Hudson and the lead writer writing the ending without requesting any feedback from the rest of the writing team with whom they'd collaborated up to that point. It certainly appears to have been written by someone who did not play and love the series as a game and saw it as a chance to be controversial for its own sake.
A real letdown. This was one of my favorite series by a studio I previously would buy titles from without a second thought, but the utter, utter laziness at the end of this game combined with the painful rush job that was Dragon Age 2 means I'll probably never buy another BioWare title new. I'd rather pirate them and decide first if it's actually a fun game or if it's yet another case of some "artist" jerking off.
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