Critical Thinking: Creative Control in Game Development

The controversy over Mass Effect 3’s ending is long-since dead and gone, but the lessons learned from it – both by fans and by developers – still resonate within the community even now, more than a full year after the fact. For those of you who need a bit of a refresher, things kind of went something like this: Mass Effect 3’s ending was rushed and awful. Fans expressed outrage that it was rushed and awful, and demanded that Bioware changed it. After one of the biggest media frenzies seen in the games industry, Bioware eventually acceded to its players.