I want to comment about the podcast's discussion on gamer entitlement, specifically Mass Effect 3's ending and the outrage that followed.
I'm not sure how many people in the podcast – can't recall right now – played the ME series to the end of ME3 (I think Domino was the only one), but I got the feeling that everyone in the room was missing (not deliberately), or unaware of, a very large point of the outrage. Ghaleon most especially was missing the mark.
Let's take a Halo example (two, even!). The stories in Halo 3 and Reach are largely considered bad, or at the very least not up to par. In the fallout of both releases, you never saw a campaign to change the stories for either game (at the very least not to the level there was of Mass Effect 3). The fans, by and large, accepted the stories and moved on. The only semblance of a campaign you got, story related, was after the release of Reach, and that wasn't a campaign to change the story, but to provide clarity about the differences between Reach and The Fall of Reach. Is Reach's story canon? Is The Fall of Reach not canon any more? How will 343 resolve the differences between the novel and the game?
Mass Effect 3's situation is not entirely the same. Ghaleon, at some point in the podcast, was singling out the story as if the only problem was the story. It was not. You can't single out the story and take it by itself, concluding that this is what the storyteller wanted to say, because the story was intrinsically linked to the gameplay. I.e., the decisions you made along the way. You cannot simply say "this is the story the writer wanted to tell" when the whole point of the franchise to let the fans shape their own story. I was there for Mass Effect in the beginning. From the first rumblings about the franchise, BioWare repeatedly said your choices will matter. The story you shape will largely be your own; your decisions will affect the outcome. Even during ME3's development, BioWare was saying the same thing: Your choices will matter. Mass Effect 3 comes out, and your choices have little if any affect on the ending. BioWare lied about ME3.
I think the fan reaction to Mass Effect 3 would be very different if BioWare had delivered on the promise of "your choices will matter" even if every outcome lead to a "bad" ending. I can't say for certain, though, that there would be no campaign to change any of these many endings – and/or add new ones – but the outrage about the ending was as much "your choices don't matter" as it was "the ending sucks." Combine the two together and you got the reaction that you did. That's how I saw it.
Personally, the ending was bad, and I was disappointed that my choices never had any meaning. I did some complaining on the internet, shrugged it off, then went back to my daily life. But I was very disappointed – I had been following the franchise since 2006 (nearly six years) and to end up with something like that... Now, I understand BioWare's position somewhat. If they realized at some point in the development cycle that they wouldn't be able to deliver many different endings depending on any number of decisions a player can make, I see why they wouldn't state that publicly during the development process (fan reaction).
With Mass Effect 3, I think it largely came down to this: BioWare over promised and under delivered in too many ways. The conclusions you guys reach – gamer entitlement is to blame – may be correct even with the point I bring up, but it's an important factor that I felt was missing from your conversation. The discussion felt cheapened.
