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Well darn. Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3.
For those not familiar, ME3 was the divisive end for the Mass Effect trilogy which premised a meta-narrative of your choices mattering and having consequences over a trilogy of games with choice carry-over being designed from the start. Except many of the characters were a mix of woobie and sycophant, and the developers hadn't actually written out or designed a trilogy structure, or even figured out how they were going to overcome their own overpowering arch enemy. They were making up a series and key lore as they went along, and wrote themselves into a corner where the end-game solution to an unstoppable fleet was a macguffin from precursors that, if built, can kill them before they kill you. This culminated in ME3's controversial ending of the player basically choosing to nuke galactic civilization in one of three colors of techno-magic. And the only ending where survival was potentially implied was the one where galactic civilization couldn't be put back together again via an army of genocidal squid-machines or the involuntary organic-AI interfusion of everyone.
For a series that to date had basically no blow back to any of the moral highroad / 'damn the risks, I'm doing what's right' decisions that were the audience and writer's preferred Paragon playstyle, it was a sharp whiplash of tone. Mass Effect to date had rarely been about having to make hard decisions, because it had always let you avoid the hard parts if you just picked the golden route / nice thing, while the most common consequence of not doing the nice thing in a previous game was less content in the next. Hard consequences were the consequence of being a jerk, which is why surviving a suicide mission with no casualties was by far the most common import state between ME2 and ME3.
But if you were willing to take the less-than-golden route from the start...
To this day, I maintain Mass Effect 3 works best as a war story if you go into it with a lot of the fan-favorite characters dead from the previous games. Doing so denied players the opportunity for golden-path 'flawless' successes along the way, and so reframed the ME3 ending from being an out-of-place anamoly to tonally and thematically consistent.
A large part of this was the lack of trilogy design though put into the cast of characters introduced into ME2, a game built around recruiting and exploring a cast of characters for a suicide mission where Anyone Can Die. A lot of thought and care went into the character designs and their missions and such, but at a design level the mere fact that they could die meant that any sequel had to be designed around the possibility that they would not be there. No one could be entirely load-carrying for the plot, because the plot has to happen. So if they are to play a role in a later game, they need a substitute who can do it for them.
This can be done by using other characters already existing in the narrative. In Mass Effect 1, for example, one of the genuinely best choices of the series is when you can only save one of your two starting marine companions on a planet called Virmire, made juicier that one of them may be your primary love interest. There is no golden way to save both, and it can be gripping. However, post-Virmire the Virmire Survivors collapse into a single character in the narrative, and fulfill eachother's roles almost identically. So in ME2 they are a cameo character investigating the big bad and your mysterious post-death return, whether they are your former flame or not, in ME3 there's a generally identical reconciliation arc (or not), and so on.
But you can also fill the narrative hole by introducing new characters. For example, another ME1 character is Wrex, a jaded warlord of a species that's been genocided for warmongering by a bioweapon known as the genophage. It basically reduces the once hyper-fertility race that overwhelmed with numbers to such a degree that the race's own disregard for life is dooming it to extinction. Wrex has matured past the worst of the species hyper-aggressive warmongering ways, but in ME1 when he hears the antagonist has been working on a cure he sees the salvation of his species as too precious to lose. You can talk him down if you've invested enough in the persuasion / morality system, but if it's your first run you may have to put him down- or your marine companion may put him down. This is also on Virmire, so this is the mission that could kill two companions, and your Virmire survivor decision may be shaped by who puts Wrex down.
But if Wrex dies, he is replaced by his otherwise-never-referenced brother Wreave. And Wreave is as awesome a narrative foil as he is a terrible person. He is the sort of short-sighted, hyper-aggresive, civilizationally ruinous warlord that makes you understand why the genophage was employed in the first place. Where Wrex has mellowed out and likes a good brawl but will try things like 'diplomacy' and 'restraint,' Wreave is a vicious and brutal warlord with the sort of cunning to also rise in power, but makes it clear any good relations are transactional and probably temporary. Put another way- Wrex is a noble-savage king who might ally with a female clan in a deliberate breeding alliance that is barely breakinng above replacement rates by reigning in their worst impulses, and Wreave is a savage-savage who monopolizes the females with all that implies.
Which makes the ME3 core plot arc of 'build a galactic alliance against the Reapers' so much more juicy, since both Wrex and Wreave are basically holding out on alliance in exchange for the same bribe: a cure to the genophage. This is pure crisis bartering for both of them, a demand they know will only be given in an existential crisis. They'll be your army if you remove the shackles driving them to extinction, except the extinction is because they'd be able to survive regardless if they weren't so self-destructive. But while Wrex is a guy you can see has been trying to make a society that maybe you could trust to not rampage across the galaxy, Wreave makes no such pretensions- it's just that that is the next generation's problem if you can survive the current apocalypse.
Which is what makes the story arc's big decision- do you sabotage the genophage cure- such an interesting option. You have the option to secretly sabotage the genophage, but let the Krogan think it worked for a time. Eventually the evidence will be clear, but that is the next generation's problem if they can survive the current apocalypse.
Saving Wrex and delivering the genuine genophage clear is part of that paragon golden route, and it's not even subtle about it. Basically all the cultural drawbacks and survival-through-reform themes from before are thrown out and not mentioned again. The morally nuanced and internally conflicted alien doctor Mordin, from the species that made- and re-enforced- the genophage, goes from grappling with his conscience and competing ethical complications and responsibility to a moral certainty that this is the right thing. There's even a 2010s feminist Krogan female who's introduced, subtly named Eve, who is wise and virtuous and the key to saving the hyper-masculine testosterone-poisoned species. If you do this golden route, despite the genophage being about reigning in massive broods, the post-credits slide (after the 'improved' endings post-controversy) show a nuclear family of two parents and a single child. All is good, and nothing is implied to happen.
Have Wreave, though, and the context changes. He's clearly not interested in listening to the advice of the wonderful woman that is Eve. He fantasizes of the wars he's going to fight. He is a giant alarm bell of the future, and even the guilt-plagued genophage doctor Mordin can be convinced that, no, sabotaging the cure is for the best. This is treachery, no doubt about it, but it's for the best. It doesn't hurt that Wreave is an idiot. He won't know until it's well, well too late.
But Wrex isn't an idiot. And the best / most deliciously painful writing in the arc comes from if you betray him. Your friend. Your homeboy. And your other homeboy, Mordin.
See, Mordin's character arc has always been grappling with the genophage, something he felt was necessary because of how bad the Krogan had become, but regretted all the same. With the golden route of Wrex and Eve, he doesn't think it's necessary anymore. In the culmination of the genophage arc, if you try to sabotage the genophage, Mordin does something almost no companion character franchise does-
He defies you, and disregards your choice. Rather than submit to your take-as-long-as-you-need dialogue option to decide the fate of the species, Mordin goes 'no,' and moves to cure the genophage anyway. The actual choice to sabotage the golden path is if you literally shoot your companion in the back via a special in-cutscene decision. He dies, gasping, in the fires that consume his hopes for the krogan species. Your sacrifice for a bitter-sweet betrayal of the golden path.
And when Wrex puts the pieces together, he is furious, and tries to murder you in the middle of the galactic capital. No evasion, no dialogue checks. He even brings up how you talked your way out of that Virmire situation long ago. He's throw accusations, and you've really no choice (other than death) but to kill him. Two friends lost to the same narrative decision.
But what makes it best? The local police chief (who you know) who comes to assist asks what's going on. And accepts a lie because, well, everyone knows Krogan are irrationally aggressive. There was no helping it. Life goes on, despite the loss. This is the sort of narrative tone for the early and into mid-game that makes the ME3 ending feel in place, and not shoehorned in for 'forced tragedy.'
But the meta-mechanics of 'why' this tension worked- why Wrex was better than Wreave- apply elsewhere.
Go back to survivability design. If a character can die, future stories must exist without them. If the character is absent, another must fill in. Put another way, though, the future plots exist without the killable-character, and the returning character is just a cameo in their own episode plot.
But, Mass Effect was a franchise built around the characters. They are the central appeal in otherwise middling writing. Moreover, the characters from ME2 were introduced as 'the best of the best.' They are awesome, far more awesome than random replacements. But they've also generally arrived at the end of their character arcs, since most characters from ME2 had self-contained character arcs that were concluded by the suicide mission they could die in. Because, for narrative purposes, helping them find closure is the secret ingredient for them surviving the suicide mission.
So you have characters, who have already concluded their character arcs, who may or may not be coming back as cameos. How do you make those cameos the fan-servicey things they are?
In short, by making things turn out better when they are around. New sympathetic characters who have to be introduced in ME3 can survive if fan-favorite returns from ME2. Menacing threats can be dealt with just in time with returning champion. The AI who learned what it meant to have friends becomes the key to saving two species from an AI-vs-organic war. ME2 cameo characters, in other words, become the key to the golden path.
But the golden path leads to narrative dissonance with the ending. And often isn't better writing, as much as saccharine.
For another example- take the character of Jack.
Jack is the ultimate woobie, destroyer of worlds. If you remember that scene from the first Deadpool movie where Deadpool and his love interest trade who has the worse childhood abuse backstory, that's Jack, except played striaght instead of laughs. Jack has the most powerful space-magic telekenitics in the galaxy because of how much she was abused as a child by inhuman experiments, which were done for the sake of giving her the most powerful space-magic telekenitcs in the galaxy. Don't ask how human child abuse by human specist-extremists makes a woman strong, it's symbolic and characteristic of that era of Bioware. Jack's ME2 character arc is about overcoming personal trauma and starting to heal. (Naturally, this progresses most explicitly comes out in the romance scene if you sleep with the traumatized girl.)
Jack's ME3 cameo is that she goes to a school for other space-telekinetics, and became the cool teacher. The school is attacked by the same human-extremist that kidnapped and traumatized her, and whose current style is to take people and make cybernentic slave-soldiers out of them. Its up to you and Jack to save the kids, but really this is Jack's epilogue story and you're just enabling her. With Jack on board, the mission is a triumph over past abusers, an unmitigated victory, and Jack basks in the adoration of her adoring students. Those students exist merely as background cheerleaders as she trounces the enemies, and at the very end one over-eager one has to be saved to give Jack her big goddamn hero moments. At the end, the moral decision is whether your conscript these young adult-age level telekinetics into the space army against the apocalypse, which Jack doesn't like the thought of but hey, she'll be there to make sure the worst doesn't happen.
If Jack is dead, the academy is still attacked, and those students have to save themselves, learning to fight for themselves or be enslaved to fight for others. A cathartic victory romp is instead becomes a harrowing school shooting / hostage rescue, as the students band together to try and resist an overpowering opponent systemically dismantling their defenses. The students are cracking, but under pressure from adversity the models that would have been caricatures of adoring fans in another timeline have to develop into actual characters in another. It's not the longest mission, but it's long enough for one of them to stand up and emerge as a potential leader, someone who can hold the team together and get them safe.
In another timeline, this is the student who Jack saves in her big goddamn hero moment. In this timeline, he still needs a big goddamn hero of his own, as he's being a hero to others. But Jack isn't here, and he is shot. The other students are saved, but traumatized all over again- the rising hero that was inspiring them cut down, as so many are in the greater apocalyptic war.
Now do you conscript these traumatized, but blooded, teens to be soldiers instead of students during the apocalypse?
As with the genophage, this is the sort of writing that makes a hail-mary play with no ideal outcomes feel tonally consistent.
In your golden route paths, nuking civilization galaxy-wide is so jarring because it feels it should be unnecessary. You basically roll from victory to victory, and if it's not enough that just means you should just keep playing and saving the day more. You've always taken the high road to date- why should it fail you now? It's only when it fails that the saccharine sweetness becomes apparent.
But in your 'inferior' routes, the routes you get by 'failing' to save people before, you are already steeped in losses. Your world is 'objectively worse' than the golden route, but also much more visceral and gripping. You get character drama and tragedy, as competing visions of greater goods leads to betrayal, and as the promising potential of the future dies and the survivors are scarred/corrupted just to keep fighting. Survival at a cost, at almost any cost, without losing your humanity even if human nature isn't as noble as you'd like.
But then, I'm also one of the minority of people who unironically enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda as a deliberately campy B-flick story of alien first contact and exploration, so what do I know.
Good post. But I think you're off base when it comes to why people don't like ME3. It isn't because the ending is a dire stakes, Hail Mary play which has a huge cost for the galaxy. No, it's because the ending a) is the culmination of a plot that existed only in ME3 and is retarded anyway, b) it gives you a decision that has nothing at all to do with what came before, and c) it makes no sense with the previous rules of the setting anyway.
First, the Crucible. This partly comes down to that you said about how the writers didn't have a plan for the trilogy (more accurately: they had a tentative plan, but the writer in charge left/got kicked off the project and his ideas got rejected so they threw out the plot threads they had built). But they don't get a pass for that. So the Crucible never gets mentioned until ME3, and players quite reasonably go "wait what" when the plan to stop the Reapers is something they've never heard of before. But even if the writers had brought it up sooner... it's retarded. There is no way in hell that you could have a tech project where every Reaper cycle progresses it a little bit further. The researchers of all these different species wouldn't even be able to understand what came before (remember: Shepard is literally the only one in the galaxy who can speak Prothean, no way a research team is going to be able to decipher Prothean blueprints), not to mention the fact that it's going to be nigh impossible to do tech development while in the midst of a galactic genocide, not to mention that it's going to be nigh impossible to keep it secret every single cycle so that the Reapers never discover it. So even if they had started to build up the Crucible earlier, it's a bad idea.
Then we have the continuity with what came before. Your previous choices don't matter to the Star Child. It's not the natural consequence of the rest of the game's narrative. It's this completely separate thing tacked onto the end which has no relation at all to your adventures with your space homies. People want the ending to come from somewhere, especially in a series which prides itself on being responsive to player choice, and this didn't.
But even if the ending had related to what came before, it would still suck because it disregards the rules of the setting. First of all, the supposed reason that the Reapers kill everyone is... because otherwise organic and inorganic life will kill each other and the Reapers would rather cull the universe every so often than have a dead universe. But that makes no sense. The game shows you, time and again, that organics and inorganics can learn to get along. It's not easy (as with any people who have tension), but it is possible. Legion and Tali learn to get along and respect each other. Joker is banging your ship. It's clearly possible for the two sides to get along, but the game contradicts itself and says "no it's not"without any evidence to support that. Then you have the mass relays blowing up. In the Arrival DLC for ME2, we are told that such an explosion is so violent that it would kill everyone in the system. And yet, at the end your people land on a planet which is pretty close to a mass relay, but they... somehow survive the cataclysmic explosion. The ending is simply not playing by the rules of the setting on multiple levels.
One very common criticism leveled at ME fans at the time ME3 came out was "you just want a happy ending". But that isn't what people really wanted. They wanted an ending that made some semblance of narrative sense, and which cohered with the things that came up to that point in the series. The ME3 ending did neither of those things, which was the real problem.
I just want to say I agree with you much more than I would quibble, and fully confess to moving past the ending specifically because I wanted to address the thematic alignment and how the 'punish the player' trope in earlier parts made the story thematically work better than the issues with the ending itself.
Which, as you demonstrated, is a load more text, lol.
That said, there were more than a small number of players who were more upset about the end of their power fantasy than the writing rigour. Mass Effect was always pretty squishy on the writing rigour, and this was well apparent even in ME2. For a lot of people, arguments like your above- which I agree with!- were excuses to justify/validate how they felt... when they were acting far more akin to scorned lovers. Hence how one of the 'fixes' of the post-ending fracas was the medical evac goodbye scene at the finish line.
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