There's an almost universal outrage at the moment over the ending of Mass Effect 3. After playing a series for what's usually over 100 hours, people are very upset at the manner in which the trilogy wound down.

And they have every right to be.

But not for the reasons I see so many putting forward. It has nothing to do with the story, or the writing, or the fate of Shepard, or indeed the fate of the Mass Effect universe itself. Those are creative decisions, and as the creators of the content, BioWare can do whatever the hell they like.

If Shepard had sprouted wings and gone off to fight Sephiroth, whatever, that's what they had in mind. Stories are subjective things. We can not enjoy them, hate them, even, but I don't think a story - however poorly implemented - can ever be a universal failing.

No, I think the biggest problem lies in something more direct, and thus culpable, than any of those offenders. It's in how the game's conclusion played out.

The Mass Effect series features walking, and running, and shooting, and mining, and flying, and what passes for science magic. But the core of the game, they thing that kept gamers on the hook and so invested in a story to the point they're this angry about a video game ending (remember, most endings suck!), is the game's dialogue mechanic.

Building on over a decade's work, across various BioWare franchises, Mass Effect 3 again let you alter the course of the game's story by selecting dialogue options that correspond to a desired moral compass. Want to be the galaxy's nicest guy? There are spaces on the dialogue wheel set aside just for you and your holier-than-thou answers. Vice versa for being the galaxy's biggest badass.

It's a system that worked as advertised across the first game, the second game and nearly all of the third. That's, for most people, over one hundred hours of gameplay.

And then, at the very end of the trilogy, at the moment your decisions matter most, the system gets thrown out the window.

SPOILERS BELOW

At the point where you face off against the Illusive Man inside the Citadel, he eventually gets hold of a weapon, and aims it at your series-long friend and ally, Anderson. As he does so, a prompt appeared on-screen for a Renegade intervention. On my first playthrough, I let this pass, as I let almost every other Renegade possibility (reporter punching aside) go, since I was playing as a Paragon (and had by now maxed out my Paragon rating).

Anderson gets shot. That's...unfortunate, I thought. No sooner has his body hit the ground, though, than the Illusive Man points the gun at me. Again, a Renegade prompt, again, I leave it, because that's not how I play. He shoots me. Game over.

I was speechless. I was being forced to take a Renegade option, even though this was the polar opposite of the Shepard I had built over the trilogy. Why was there no Paragon option? Why had the binary system built to power the games suddenly not working? Why tell me there's a choice when it's not a choice at all?

Maybe I missed something, maybe I didn't get the right amount of EMS or TMS or however the hell that stupid "go play multiplayer or buy an iOS" system worked (and to which there is still no definitive explanation/guide), but to encounter it felt like the worst kind of sucker punch. "Oh, that way you've been told to act and intervene over the last three games, yeah, it's different for the next five minutes".

Swallowing the need to be a little meaner, I reloaded, shot him as quick as I could, and sat back as the endgame began to play out. When the time came to make THE ULTIMATE DECISION, I was again floored. This time, because the decision had suddenly become unclear.

I had no idea which was the "good" ending I was after. All three choices I'd been presented with seemed ambiguous. Which was surely another creative decision on BioWare's part, but a poor one, because this one interfered with the trilogy's most basic assumption: that you can build the story the way you want to.

That's why every single choice you made previously with regards to Paragon or Renegade pathways was so obvious; because it needed to be. People were invested in building their character the way they wanted to.

The way the game's endings were presented didn't just undermine this, it threw it out the window. What had been the point of making all your decisions across three titles based on good or "evil" (well, "rude") if the final payoff did not represent these?

It feels like walking 100 miles to get lemonade only to get there and be told you can choose between a pair of shoes, some brass knuckles or a cheeseburger.

You can say part of this is down to, yes, creative decisions, but that only works to a point. In the case of Mass Effect 3's conclusion there's no separation between creative decisions and mechanical ones. They're one and the same. So when one directly impacts the other, it can't magically be spared criticism.

I feel for the developers on one level, because what's happening here is the result of a conflict that's been brewing since the series began. Since we first took control of Shepard, there's been a delicate line walked between who was actually driving the story, the developers or the players. Previously, that line was held because players were given clear and direct consequences for their decisions.

At the end, the very end, that line couldn't be walked any further. Someone had to win, someone had to actually finish that story, and of course BioWare were always going to play the more important role in that. We, the players, were never writing the story, we were just the ones with our shoulder to the wheel.

But I think they played too important a part. With all three endings being incredibly similar, down to many shared assets, it gave players the impression their choices no longer mattered, that they were being Sheparded (sorry) through a cutscene rather than actively determining its outcome.

Would three clearly different endings have improved things? A decision is meaningless without consequence, after all, so giving the player genuinely differing outcomes from their decisions would surely have been a more satisfying end, if only in terms of design and following through on one of the key tenets of the series' gameplay. But ah, that would also involve making changes to the plot and story, and asking for changes to a story is a line a consumer should never cross.

BioWare's failure here, then, isn't in terms of its story-writing, or its pacing, or that Shepard dies (indeed, my Shepard clearly did not die). It lies in changing the way the game's most important decisions - the very things that gamers were so invested in - are made at the eleventh hour, with no indication or feedback to let players know this is going on.

If you died tomorrow, if some kind of disaster struck and removed you entirely from the world, would the choices you'd made with your life to date matter?

Would it matter what you had accomplished? Who you had loved? If you had saved another's life? Would your life's work have meaning? Would there not be at least a single day in the course of your years that managed to have repercussions beyond the limits of your own knowledge and time?

I know very, very few people who would say, "no, none of it matters." It's a nihilistic and bleak point of view to maintain, that the inevitability of the final conclusion — for indeed, we are all mortal — overrides the importance of what one does along the journey. To be human is inevitably to face death. The moments we live for, before the end comes, are what define us.

So, too, for the life and times of Commander Shepard.

When I played Mass Effect 3 through for review, I was short on time. I finished the whole thing in about 23.5 hours' worth of play, crammed into two weeknights and one very long Saturday. I completed the game successfully, in the sense that I ended the reaper threat, but it was more or less in the worst way possible. This Shepard (who was not my Shepard) and her allied forces were not truly ready, and I'd faced a long, agonizing series of lose/lose decisions along the way. One of Shepard's closest allies had committed suicide in despair, and many others had been lost on missions. Garrus and Liara, the Commander's right and left hands for so many years, her closest friends and most stalwart allies, died in London.

Rushed for time, exhausted, and deeply burdened by grief I was feeling for admittedly fictional characters, I simply made Shepard's final choice without much regard for which of the two available options I was picking. And so it came to pass that Shepard broke the cycle of chaos and order once and for all, but in so doing she didn't only sacrifice herself. She sacrificed pretty much everything, ultimately achieving destruction on a scale even the reapers couldn't achieve.

Shepard killed everyone. I killed everyone. After the credits rolled and the final scene faded, I sat up until well after two in the morning, unable to sleep, haunted by the outcome of a video game.

And there, on the sofa, in the darkest and most solitary hours of the night, I realized the truth: I need to be more selfish than that. I don't care if Shepard lives. I wish she could but I understand if she can't. But others need to. Some of them need to make it, need to carry the legacy of what they learned and what they did. Their worlds will never, ever be the same but they'll be there, to tell the stories and create homes. There is no "everybody lives" moment coming, no perfect moment to make everything work for everyone. But Shepard can save others, and to the best of my ability that is what I will have her do.

That's the Commander I need to play. And despite the finality and of Shepard's ultimate choice and the similarities of the conclusions, there still remain as many unique Commanders Shepard as there are players to control him or her.

The full story of Shepard, the whole Mass Effect trilogy, as it turns out, is neither a romance nor a tragedy. The closest analogue is an epic. Myths and legends handed down over centuries, told by parents to children, by prophets to followers, by bards and singers to halls full of eager ears. The story will always end the same way, will always have the same moral, the same sweeping vistas and battles, but the details — ah, the details. Don't those always change in the telling?

Shepard was a woman. A man. Dark-skinned. Pale as moonlight. In love with an asari, a turian, a fellow human. Kind and generous, ruthless and bold. She saved the council and pitied the geth. He destroyed the krogan and saved salarians. And no matter what, Shepard defeated Sovereign at the Citadel, escaped from the Collector base on the far side of the Omega-4 Relay, and came at long last to be standing with the Catalyst, there to decide the fates of all.

The self-sacrificing savior is the central figure of modern Western mythology, and has been for centuries. That's the core of Christianity, and it's a major factor in countless stories. Even at the subconscious level, the story of the redeemer who gives his life for the future of all has become a deep and immutable link in our collective narrative tradition. Shepard is practically the platonic incarnation of the messianic archetype, inevitably martyred for the saving of all.

And that it is where we find Shepard in the end: on the plane of mythology, removed from the plane of men. And that is also where many players feel they lose Mass Effect, because until the final moment, the plane of men has been the only ground the game knows. Shepard may have died (in the act of saving her crew) and been resurrected to walk the world again, but she has remained firmly, immutably human. The first two entries in the trilogy, as well as most of the third game, concerned themselves entirely with physical, tangible needs: disable a gun, set up a supply chain, shoot an enemy, save a colony. The reapers may be an existential threat on a terrifying scale, but they are visible, and can be touched and beaten.

Where the physical plane gets lost by dallying too close with the metaphysical one is in conversation with the Catalyst. Appearing to Commander Shepard in the form of the young boy who died in Vancouver at the start of the game, the Catalyst takes on the role of deus ex machina in an astonishingly literal way, standing forth as the guiding hand over all organic and machine life in the galaxy for millions of years. This is the deity of the Milky Way, whether it calls itself that or no, and its presence creates a major shift in the tone and the goals of the series something like 98% of the way through the third and final game.

Some players embrace that tonal shift. Others will forever reject it. I personally, as a player, love Mass Effect 3 in a way I have loved very few games before, but even a week after first watching Shepard meet the god of the Citadel, I am of two minds about its presence. I wish that we could have had more clarity leading up to this point, while also understanding that even for the biggest badass in the galaxy, some things simply are, and cannot be changed.

The reaper threat has always been so incredible, so massive, that even the biggest and most united armada the whole galaxy could muster seemed insufficient to beat it back. We know, now, why the reapers have been designed this way and why they scour the galaxy clean. But the answers to mysteries, alas, are often unsatisfying, particularly when they raise more questions than they answer. And in this case, the lingering questions are as philosophical as they are logistical.

Perhaps Mass Effect 3 really is a bleak endorsement of a joyless philosophy. In an argument between fate and free will, we are left with the reasonably free will of the player against the stark and unforgiving fate handed out by the game's designers. And yet, to argue that Shepard's choices cease to matter, to argue that the player's input ceases to matter, seems to miss the point not just of the game but of existence itself.

The player's control over Shepard's fate always was, in most ways, an illusion, across all three games. But what a strong and passionate illusion it was. At the end of all things, when Shepard's story culminates in one painful, limiting final choice, the player truly feels the limits of the walls that a game puts up. We cannot ask a "why" that isn't coded, and we cannot force a happy ending through sheer force of will.

Did Shepard love well? Did he do the best he could with the time that was given to him? Did she stand strong against unrelenting odds, and inspire faith and courage in others? Did the player laugh, gasp, and cry while guiding the Commander through his trials? If so, then Shepard's martyrdom and ascent from history into myth serves the purpose it was meant to do.

Some would say that the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic phenomenon has nothing at all to do with video games. I've got several images that prove otherwise.

Grown men in love with a cartoon aimed at little girls? Preposterous! Outrageous! Truly, truly, truly outrageous!

The Brony phenomenon is really nothing new. Over the years boys of all ages have found themselves drawn to the bright and colorful worlds cartoon production companies create in order to capture the hearts of the younger female demographic. Look at She-Ra: Princess of Power or The Powerpuff Girls; neither of these shows were specifically aimed at adult males, yet they watched and enjoyed.

The only difference with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is that nowadays folks that enjoy off-kilter things have better means of communicating and finding each other.

The point is that MLP fans are everywhere, and the video game fan/Brony audience crossover is much larger than you probably think. See for yourself!

Final Fantasy Dissidia Duodecim: Friendship is Magic

As you may have seen last week in the Cloud Strife article, Final Fantasy and My Little Pony fans are often one in the same. DeviantArtist LynxGriffin embodies this notion, having painstakingly recreated every single character from the PSP's Dissidia Duodecim in pony form.

I'm make a witty comment here, but that Kefka pony might be the most glorious thing I have ever seen. I might need to find a bare spot on my arm for it.

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Street Fighter: Fighting is Magic

Not to be confused with My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic, an actual fighting game in development by fans of the show, this image depicts the most famous of World Warriors in equine form. It stands to reason there's a palette-swapped version with blond hair wandering about with a similar moveset.

While I can't find the source for this particular image, it was used to illustrate a My Little Pony / Street Fighter semi-crossover epic (update: yes I can, it's DeviantArtist c0nker) , available to read in its entirety at Equestria Daily. It's ponies hitting other ponies, which makes it okay.

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Uncharted 2: Treasure Hunting is Magic

From Drake to horse in one fell swoop of DeviantArtist Saber-Scorpion's mighty pen! Yes, even PlayStation 3 exclusives are not immune to the ponification of video games. I particularly enjoy the cutie marks—the picture brands on each pony's flank—the artist came up for Drake and crew. Nathan sports a compass, indicating his dedication to exploration. Elena-pony has a movie camera on her hip, which indicates she should probably get a job at Fox Photo.

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Phoenix Wright: Friendship is Legal

Overruled, unknown artist that may or may not be named Zeph!

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Friendship Effect 2

Recognize DeviantArtist SugarFreeSprite's Mass Effect 2-inspired creation? Hint: She's a complete bad-ass, might be slightly insane, and does not sleep with women.

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Ponies of War

When is a pony not a pony? When an artist like DeviantArt's JohnJoseco transforms them into humans with pony-like features. Why do this? There are several theories, many of them pretty filthy.

Here we have the mane six — Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy — dressed like members of COG, ready to help Marcus Fenix (likely an actual phoenix) take down the Locust, the Lambent, and anything else evil beginning with the letter L.

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Halo: Finish the Friendship

Not only does DeviantArtist SableGear show us what a genetically-altered super pony might look like, he's even removed Master Pony's helmet, giving us a peek at what lies beneath that stoic helmet. Turns out it's a stoic face. A stoic horse face.

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That's enough for now. I believe I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that pony fans and games aren't so different, or more to the point, pony fans and gamers are often the same. Try it right now. Go to Google image search and type in your favorite game title followed by "ponies". There is no escape.

If you want to see a specific game or franchise featured in Freaky Fan Art, use the comment system for its intended purpose and who knows, I might actually do this weekly instead of teasing you all and then not following through!

As if the Reapers, the Geth and a twisted web of intergalactic political intrigue weren't enough to deal with, Fan-Fiction.net author Master-of-Mythology has to throw one of Final Fantasy's most powerful villains at him. Some days it's just not worth getting out of bed with Tali.

Ah, the heady freedom of being a fan fiction author. To be able to toss aside the accepted facts, cross otherwise corporately-enforced borders and merge your favorite games into a single satisfying experience.

At least that's how it sometimes works. Master-of-Mythology prefaces the first chapter of his world-spanning epic, "Fantasy Effect", by informing readers that A: "Chronologically, this story takes place four months after Mass Effect 2 and six months after Final Fantasy VII" and B: "I don't own Mass Effect 2 or Final Fantasy VII."

Of course that doesn't mean he never played the games; maybe he's a renter, the trip to Blockbuster Video an important part of his creative process. He certainly demonstrates a working knowledge of the series as his tale opens.

Harbinger and Warmonger looked over the image of the man before them. Appearing out of nowhere through the Mass Relay Network, the silver-haired man had a feeling of malice and power coming off of him that impressed even the two ancient Reapers.

See? The Reapers, Mass Effect's most powerful evil, recruiting Sephiroth, Final Fantasy VII's greatest evil. Only the Reapers could be powerful enough to yank Sephie through the Lifestream. Of course controlling him is another matter entirely.

Warmonger released the stasis field that had been placed on the man, and his green eyes shot open. With a fluid movement, the man flipped onto his feet, grasping the hilt of his enormous sword.

He brought it in front of him, poised as if to attack the two ancients. "Who are you, and where am I?"

"Be at ease stranger. We mean you no harm. In fact, we have a proposition, if you are willing to listen to it."

The man lowered his sword only slightly. "Then speak quickly."

The intended threat amused Harbinger. "What are you called, stranger?"

A single black feathered wing emerges from the man's right shoulder, fanning out to full length. "I am called Sephiroth. The One-Winged Angel."

No, you are called Sephiroth, and "One-Winged Angel" is your theme music, but it is a catchy name that would sound really menacing if it were to crop up repeatedly in distress calls.

It's also nice to see that Seph's great and mighty power amuses the Reapers so. Maybe they should take out Shepard instead, dicks.

This is all prologue, however; the opening scene to the brilliant film playing in the author's mind. Let's move on to scene one, in which I was pretty sure Shepard was going to launch into a gratuitous sex scene.

Commander John Shepard breathed deep and stretched as he woke up from a deep sleep. The quiet breathing next to him told him that Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, the Quarian he loved, was still asleep.

Easing slowly out of the bed, Shepard put on his robe and walked over to his sink. Filling up a glass, he drank the water in one swallow, and ran a hand through his hair.

While sitting at his computer, checking his e-mail, he felt a pair of arms encircling him, and a kiss on his cheek. "Morning, John."

Smiling, Shepard whirled in his chair and embraced Tali. "Good morning, lovely."

Tali sat on Shepard's lap, and their mouths met. But as Tali leaned in deeper, a voice interrupted them.

Dammit! *fans himself* I was getting into that! This had better be good, Admiral Hackett.

"We've received an emergency signal from Horizon. They say they're under attack by a mysterious enemy."

Shepard rubbed his face with his hands. It had only been four months since Horizon was attacked by the Collectors, and repopulation had been slow at first. But now the colony was almost to full capacity again.

"Did you get any information from the message? What's the nature of the attack?"

"One phrase was always repeated. One-Winged Angel. I need you to take the Normandy and fight this threat."

This is where the music would break into Latin chanting. Well, this is where the music would break into chanting, the camera would focus on Commander Shepard's steely expression, and the last sentence would be cut in half. Speaking of cut in half...

Shepard and his crew stepped off the shuttle, and surveyed the damage to the colony. Several buildings had enormous pieces missing, as if they had been cut through. Others had mysterious burns and other signs of battle.

But the worst was the bodies. They littered the ground, many of them cut in half or otherwise dismembered. Men, women, children, all of them were on the ground, the looks of fear still on their faces.

Shepard's grip tightened on his SMG, his anger boiling. This level of violence was senseless and unnecessary.

That really depends on the context, doesn't it? What if the men, women and children were affected by a crossover strain of the T-virus from Resident Evil? What if they all wouldn't stop singing "Somebody That I Used to Know" (SOMEBODY!)? Is there such a thing as necessary senseless violence?

. As they walked through, listening for any sounds, Shepard thought he felt something.

Shepard is so bad-ass. He thinks. He feels. He thinks he feels. He has hyper-awareness!

Through his years of training, and his hyper-awareness, Shepard felt the attack before he saw it. "Get down!" he shouted to Tali and Garrus, and ducked just as something sliced through the air above him.

Turning and raising his gun, Shepard looked for the attacker. What he saw stopped him cold.

Oh Jesus. After all that Shepard went through over the course of Mass Effect 1 & 2, what could possibly be so amazing that it would give his experienced mind pause?

Standing behind them was a man with long silver hair and glowing green eyes. He wore a long leather coat that left his chest exposed, and black pants.

Ah. Yeah, I'd stop cold for that, I suppose. You can't just causally start shooting at a guy like that. Especially when he's carrying a giant sword and sprouting a single wing from his back.

"One-Winged Angel," he whispered to himself.

Told you it was menacing.

Sephiroth informs Commander Shepard that he's there to kill him, and Tali, this particular Shepard's love interest, goes completely apeshit, nearly getting him killed in the process.

He raised his sword, but before he could do anything else, a shot rang out from Shepard's left.

"You will not touch him!" Tali shouted as she cocked her shotgun and prepared to fire again.

But the man simply turned, and slashed down, slicing Tali's shotgun in half. Then he raised the sword again, this time going for Tali herself.

"NO!" Shepard dove in front of Tali and opened fire with his Revenant, sending bullet after bullet into the enemy. He had the satisfaction of seeing his enemy back up from the impact.

But his clip ran dry, and as he ejected it and fumbled for another, the man recovered and slashed down, cutting right through Shepard's armor and slicing him from shoulder to hip.

This reminds me of the time Hot Rod jumped on Megatron who then used Hot Rod as a human shield as he killed Optimus Prime. If you didn't follow that you probably don't need to. All that matters is...

"Shepard!" Garrus screamed and opened fire on the target using his armor-piercing ammo, trying to get him away from Shepard.

Garrus screams. Not shouts, not gasps. He screams. Dear BioWare, please make this happen.

The battle continues, Shepard loses more blood, and the Normandy's crew retreats. The final shot of the scene is Sephiroth emerging from a massive explosion completely unscathed. Master-of-Mythology may have stolen this from every Final Fantasy VII fanfic ever, but I can't be sure.

Tali held tightly to Shepard's hand as he was wheeled on a stretcher from the elevator to the medical bay. Dr. Chakwas was already prepared, having been informed before they arrived.

Chakwas shooed out the rest of the crew, except for Tali, who refused to go, and prepared for surgery. As she and Tali removed his armor, Tali was aghast to see the wound he received, a long gash going from his right shoulder to his left hip.

Chakwas pushed her out of the way, and started the long process of repairing the damaged organs and muscles.

For hours, Tali sat in a chair, running her hand through Shepard's hair, waiting as the doctor went through the process of repairing him.

I've a feeling Tali and Shepard might be a thing. She sticks around until the Commander is stabilized, visiting him every day until he regains consciousness two weeks later.

When a whiskered Commander Shepard finally wakes up he demands to know who attacked him. Only former commanding officer David Anderson can deliver the information with the ominous weight it deserves.

"The entity you encountered was described to me by Tali, and while we don't know anything about him, some people who appeared here on the Citadel do know who and what he is." Anderson stuck his head out the door, and said, "You can come in now."

Man, Anderson reduced to setup man. Who could be so important that we'd waste Keith David's voice on a dramatic introduction?

Through the door came a man with spiky blonde hair, a blue uniform, and carrying an enormous sword on his back. But what drew Shepard's attention were his eyes. They were the same glowing green as the enemy's.

"The man you encountered, the one with the black coat and giant sword, is named Sephiroth, and he is far deadlier than anything you've ever encountered."

The man you encountered is far deadlier than anything you've encountered in all of your encounters. Except that last encounter, of course, because that's when you encountered him. Look, I've already spoken more than I did in the entirety of Advent Children, you figure it out.

How did Cloud Strife make his way to the Mass Effect universe? How does Yuffie react to Geth machine-man Legion? Why did Master-of-Mythology kill off Wrex (spoiler: Oh dammit, this should have gone first)? The answer to all this and more can be found via the link below.

Yep, everything but the conclusion. Master-of-Mythology hasn't updated the story since June of last year. Apparently he got bored with his own imagination. Hit up the link to see if you bore just as easily.

Fantasy Effect [FanFiction.net]

Who controls the story of a video game—its writers or its players?

The obvious answer—that a storyteller is a storyteller, end of discussion—has driven some reporters (including me) to condemn and dismiss the widely-circulated fan petition that asks BioWare to change its ending for Mass Effect 3, the popular sci-fi roleplaying game that came out last week for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

But by cutting all discussion and discarding the question as if it were some mathematical equation with an immutable answer, maybe we're doing a disservice to the entire medium. Maybe games can be more than just expressions of auteur theory. Maybe video games can be the first form that allows for the democratization of storytelling.

From a narrative perspective, video games have several distinct advantages over other forms of media, like television and film. The biggest advantage is that games aren't stuck to one final form. Thanks to a regular stream of patches and expansion packs, the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft looks drastically different in 2012 than it did in 2005. Downloadable content adds extra levels and features to everything from Call of Duty-level blockbusters to Costume Quest-type indies. It's tough to find a game that hasn't been modified in one way or another since release.

(Of course, we have to acknowledge Star Wars, whose creator George Lucas has done his absolute best to alter everything on a near-yearly basis. But that's an anomaly in the film industry. For games, change is the norm.)

There's even some precedent for gamemakers altering their stories' endings based on fan response. Fallout 3 DLC pack "Broken Steel" added a new conclusion to the post-apocalyptic RPG, allowing players to continue their adventures past the game's original finale. Bethesda boss Todd Howard acknowledged that the dev team "underestimated how many people would want to keep playing" after the end and added a new option accordingly.

When fans complain that a game is buggy or unbalanced, developers are often quick to accommodate and patch their games accordingly. So if a large contingent of fans is upset about the way a game's story ends, maybe its writers should consider taking the same route.

In a video game, a player's desires are constantly at odds with a game's limitations. A player will always try his or her hardest to do things that the game doesn't expect him or her to do. Developers usually anticipate that struggle. The best ones use it to enhance a game's story, building contingencies based on what they think the player will do to screw everything up. Open-world games might install safeguards or change their stories if you go out and kill the wrong person, for example. You might see an entirely new piece of narrative if you head someplace too early, or do something too quickly, or make too many bad decisions. Good gamemakers subvert your expectations.

Can't fan-driven change be another form of this subversion? If a fan makes a sharp, passionate argument for why a story should have gone a certain way, is it unreasonable to expect a developer to consider that, and maybe even implement it? If online experiences like StarCraft and League of Legends can constantly evolve based on community feedback, why can't their stories?

I don't think it's productive for fans to demand that a developer change a game's ending because they're unhappy with the way it turned out. No matter how terrible Mass Effect 3's conclusion may be (I haven't seen it yet), it's the ending that developer BioWare chose. It's their story.

But there's a second side to that coin. In a medium that is constantly changing based on what audiences want and how players play, maybe there's room for stories that evolve and adapt based on our criticism. The solution won't come through petitions or message board moaning. It will come through smart, reasoned discussion and interaction and justification on both sides of the aisle. It will come in a way that is more like the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, in which the audience is just as important, if not more important than the storyteller. Stories don't have to flow in one direction.

As seen on my Xbox Live friends' list, Saturday night. So much for game sequels that make their predecessors obsolete.

Reader Sgt.LulzJager has kept the same female Commander Shepard model across all three Mass Effect games. That's a lot of time spent with the same character. So it didn't take long for him to notice something different about her in Mass Effect 3.

Beside a few tweaks to her face, he didn't make any changes to the rest of her physical appearance. That all just...happened.

I noticed my Shepard's arms had gotten bigger, but figured, hey, he's been in what's essentially a prison for a while. And dudes in prison pump iron.

I may not watch enough documentaries on women's prisons to be an authority on this subject, but I'm pretty sure women in the slammer don't come out with complimentary cosmetic surgery.

In addition to a Dragon Age anime, EA and BioWare also have a Mass Effect anime in the pipeline. It's been pretty low-key until now, but at SXSW we've finally got our first look at the project.

Sadly, it's not a trailer, or even finalised art, but what we do have is concept art for the animated feature that's due for release later this year.

The Mass Effect anime is a joint production between FUNimation, T.O Entertainment and Production I.G. There's plenty of art in the gallery above, while to see more, check out the video linked below.

From The Floor: SXSW 12 - Mass Effect Teaser [DailyMotion]

Before the default female Commander Shepard received her very public and slightly drastic makeover, artists had to come up with a ton of ideas on just what she could/would look like.

While those designs were eventually whittled down to six, which were voted on by fans, artist Jason Chan (who we've featured on Fine Art here on Kotaku previously), the man behind the official images, has shared what a lot of the unused and unseen concepts looked like.

It's...interesting. Look closely and you see that there were wildly different variations on the theme, spanning races, faces and features.

Take a step back, though, and they're an army of scowls, unified by cranky eyebrows. Well, most of them are. If you squint (or click below to embiggen), you'll see that some, realising they are the star of a blockbuster video game franchise, are actually smiling.

You can see more of Jason's art at his personal site.

This is an excerpt from the official livefeed last week of the line outside a GameStop in Los Angeles. All these guys are waiting for Mass Effect 3.

One of those guys is Harley Morenstein, star of Epic Meal Time. Harley is understandably excited at the possibilities inherent in a BioWare game. Less excited is BioWare's David Silverman, the host of proceedings.

Harley Morenstein (EpicMealTime) Trolls Bioware @ Mass Effect 3 Launch Event [YouTube, via Reddit]