Soooo....Mass Effect 3

[Lissa]

Exactly, while I doubt the court would force BioWare to refund money, the court would see that BioWare's statements were the exact opposite of what happens. Pretty much all your decisions up to that final choice are thrown out the window, they literally have no bearing on the final choice where as BioWare is on record stating that all your choices up to that point would have an effect on the final outcome. Also, from what I have read from other people that have completed the game, if you just do the minimum story quest missions thus getting miminum war resources, your choice is made for you in that your ME 2 choice (paragon or renegade) ends up being the choice you take automatically (paragon or renegade ending -- effectively you have no choice at the end of ME 3 and are dictated what your ending is based on how you ended ME 2).

So, the court would offer what, moral support? It's not a fact-checking service. The question is whether you get some kind of legal redress. And I think the chances of that are so slim as to be hopeless. (As well they should be - I don't want consumers to be able to sue artistic producers over everything they ever promised over a development cycle!)

-Jester

As Thenry points out, they mislead their consumers. That is the problem here. And Jester, I agree to a point with your statement in parenthsis. That point ends when you are less than a month from release and you make a sweeping statement, as BioWare did, that your choices matter when in fact they do not. That's outright misleading your consumers, that's not hype. If that same comment had been made earlier in the development cycle and then later retracted, then I would say it was hype, but that is not what happened here.

And Jester, just to show you what I mean, this is a question and answer to/from Casey Hudson, the overall lead on ME 3 on Feb 17th of 2012 (just a little over 2 weeks from launch of ME 3 and pulled from the last link in the BioWare forums that Armin linked to):

Interviewer: Are there alternative endings depending on what you do in the game?

Casey Hudson: It's not so much that there is a fixed set of alternative endings, but all of your choices really determine how things end up in the universe. So, how you approach the end-game, for every player, you're going to have a different set of results in terms of who is alive and who is dead, and which civilisations survived and which ones were wiped out.

There is a huge set of consequences that start stacking up as you approach the end-game. And even in terms of the ending itself, it continues to break down to some very large decisions. So it's not like a classic game ending where everything is linear and you make a choice between a few things - it really does layer in many, many different choices, up to the final moments, where it's going to be different for everyone who plays it.

If you had played the game as I and others here, you'd see Hudson's comment for the bold face lie that it is. This is not hype, this is an outright falsehood at this late a stage of the development cycle. It is a fixed set of alternate endings and the only thing that changes is you get a third ending choice if your war assets are high enough. Every player will have the same definite ending with a minor differences between the three potential choices. So, you can sit here and say that it's hype, but less than three weeks to go and the head of the development team says one thing when something completely the opposite of what they say is the truth is false advertisement of the product. A court would definitely rule against BioWare in this instance.

That being said, outside of the ending, it's a great game. Where it falls flat on its face is the ending as it's presented now.