That is fine with me (and what happens in all 9 endings anyways even if she is breathing for a second in one end the Shepard the players used to know died in the last 10 minutes when she actually took the bullshit this DEM gave her).
As long as they remove the plot-holes and tell the players what happened to the crew. I could even live with them all blowing up.
Or they could make a "Super-Meat-Boy"-Ending and change it if you play through the game on the hardest difficulty (that was unlocked by finishing the game once in ME1+2)
It's far too popular a franchise to let die now. It's like Halo - just because the original story's been told doesn't mean there's not other ways the franchise can continue.
Huh? They're talking about having future ME product aren't they?
Yes. Tons of DLC for ME3.
I doubt there can be a Mass Effect 4 unless it's a prequel. Because of the end of Mass Effect 3. Have you ever played any of these games?
I believe Bioware has said any future Mass Effect games would take place before or at the same time as Mass Effect 3, and that it's ending the the chronological end of the entire franchise.
I believe Bioware has said any future Mass Effect games would take place before or at the same time as Mass Effect 3, and that it's ending the the chronological end of the entire franchise.
I guess they could always go with my other idea, which is a story that progresses from the worst ending in ME2 where everyone but Joker dies in the end. And then you would have to play through the Reaper invasion with only Joker and any new characters/non-suicide mission characters. Could be fun.
before Commander Shepard can make a choice, some kind of maintenance worker comes into the room and says, "Hey, you kids! You're not supposed to be in here!" And then he leads Shepard out to see his parents, and I guess he was just a little kid in an amusement park the whole time? But then that blue kid looks at the camera and his eyes are all evil, so maybe Shepard's just indoctrinated?
I've never played any of these games but I find this discussion fascinating. I've been ignoring spoiler warnings and just reading everything, and I've followed several links to discussions elsewhere.
Without knowing the full context, I feel like there was at least one writer pushing for the "indoctrination" ending, and at least one writer pushing against it, resulting in the messy ambiguity present in the current ending. It's like somebody wrote a draft that was set in Shepard's mind and then somebody else wrote the next draft without being aware of that context. I'm coming from nowhere on that though so I don't know if that could really be the case or not.
before Commander Shepard can make a choice, some kind of maintenance worker comes into the room and says, "Hey, you kids! You're not supposed to be in here!" And then he leads Shepard out to see his parents, and I guess he was just a little kid in an amusement park the whole time? But then that blue kid looks at the camera and his eyes are all evil, so maybe Shepard's just indoctrinated?
This sounds great. How do you come up with things like this?
And then in ME4
the Normandy is stranded in space without food or water and Shepard is sitting in it alone writing his diary
There will be no other Mass Effect game with Shepard as the main hero. I'm not quite sure what the Bioware guys said, but I'm VERY sure the ME series will go on (in stupid multiplayer sequels most likely).
Yeah, but there will always be an outrcy of fans for the original ending. Twenty years from now, the original writers would still close their mouth as Telltale makes Chronicles of Mass Effect.
Well, the thing with DLC is that you don't have to get it. If you're happy with the original endings, then hey, more power to you. You can have them. Not a problem. But if you're not, then the option is there, y'know?
Has anyone tried playing the game with the absolute minimum number of surviving characters from ME2? I only say this because I don't want to believe that there is NO way to completely doom advanced organic life and have Reapers eat everyone for tea. That should be allowed to happen.
I haven't played Mass Effect 3, but from what I've read, (I'm probably never going to play ME3 anyway...), I think I have to go with the fans on this one.
Essentially this ending is exactly like Fallout 3's ending.
Its unsatisfying, its poorly written, and it plain doesn't make any sense!
(Not in the funny way. Just in that terrible kind of flat "what?" way)
I think Bioware should take a page out of Bethesda's book and make a sort of small expansion, (free if they want extra Kudos) that removes the ending, and provides a new extension to the story that provides a more final confrontation.
I've seen the indoctrination theory, and I say Bioware should just go with that, (or something similar).
Make Sherpard fight some tough enemies, and have a FINAL FINAL battle with the heart of the enemy empire itself.
If you planned incorrectly and die - Everything fails and the cycle begins anew.
If you planned correctly but still die - Some things fail and the fight goes underground.
If you plan incorrectly but survive - Shepard abandon's the plan and escapes, but is severly wounded and irrepairably crippled by the fight, and becomes "the commander", the man organising and training the survivors in preperation for when the enemy eventually recovers. Finds a promising young recruit in training and smiles.
If you plan correctly and win - The saga concludes, but Shepard, exhausted from all his battles and yet satisfied with his ultimate victory, allows his crew to escape as he fights to the very end against the rest of the reaper forces. Your one-on-many battle gets timed, and how long you survive determines who escapes. Then an epilogue plays out that provides extra context.
EDIT: By planning, I mean the culmination of all the decisions you made in Mass Effect 1,2, and 3.
Even minor decisions can add up to a larger impact. You might make most of the right important decisions, but some minor decisions could change the detail in the final plans and make it fail.
There would be some deviance for failure in place, but the amount of success you would need would be around 70-80%
EDIT 2: Besides, I've seen artists change an ending before. I've seen people change entire parts of a story before.
I mean, Alien 3 had a lot cut out and then put back in. Most people argue that Director's Cut is better.
Blade Runner had loads of edits. The final version being the best in my opinion.
Blue Oyster Cult has a few different versions of some of their songs. The live versions especially are different. But Astronomy has two album versions.
Artistic Integrity is just an excuse, especially when people have a lot of validity in questioning it.
Has anyone tried playing the game with the absolute minimum number of surviving characters from ME2? I only say this because I don't want to believe that there is NO way to completely doom advanced organic life and have Reapers eat everyone for tea. That should be allowed to happen.
Hmmm...that would require letting the entire non-squad crew of the Normandy to be liquified by the Collectors, and finishing ME2 with only Jack, Samara/Morinth, Miranda, Legion, Mordin, and Tali alive. Then you would need to ignore the ME3 mission to save Grissom Academy, which would doom Jack to becoming a Phantom that you must kill at the Cerberus HQ. Samara is easy to get rid of, just let her kill herself. And if you had Morinth instead, then she becomes a banshee you have to kill. Miranda will die if you don't warn her about the assassin, didn't complete her loyalty mission, or don't talk her dad down/kill him. Mordin dies no matter what you do, unless you say to **** with the Krogans. And if you choose to upload the Reaper Code, but cannot broker peace between the Quarians and the Geth, Legion dies propagating the code among the Geth, and Tali commits suicide. This would leave you with Jake, Liara, EDI, and Kaiden/Ashley. And Javik if you have the From Ashes DLC and want a mopey Prothean on your ship.
Hmmm...that would require letting the entire non-squad crew of the Normandy to be liquified by the Collectors, and finishing ME2 with only Jack, Samara/Morinth, Miranda, Legion, Mordin, and Tali alive. Then you would need to ignore the ME3 mission to save Grissom Academy, which would doom Jack to becoming a Phantom that you must kill at the Cerberus HQ. Samara is easy to get rid of, just let her kill herself. And if you had Morinth instead, then she becomes a banshee you have to kill. Miranda will die if you don't warn her about the assassin, didn't complete her loyalty mission, or don't talk her dad down/kill him. Mordin dies no matter what you do, unless you say to **** with the Krogans. And if you choose to upload the Reaper Code, but cannot broker peace between the Quarians and the Geth, Legion dies propagating the code among the Geth, and Tali commits suicide. This would leave you with Jake, Liara, EDI, and Kaiden/Ashley. And Javik if you have the From Ashes DLC and want a mopey Prothean on your ship.
Honestly, if the choice is between Mordin and the entire Krogan race... fuck the Krogans, I'm keeping Mordin. When I play ME3, I plan to have him and Garrus flanking my alien-loving Femshep as she fights her way to the universe's demise.
Honestly, if the choice is between Mordin and the entire Krogan race... fuck the Krogans, I'm keeping Mordin. When I play ME3, I plan to have him and Garrus flanking my alien-loving Femshep as she fights her way to the universe's demise.
Sadly, Mordin still won't come with Shep, if I remember correctly. And what ends up happening is that you convince Mordin to not cure the genophage yet, and if Wrex is still alive, he finds out, gets pissed, and you'll have no choice but to kill him.
I haven't played ME3 yet. I have played ME2, loved it, but never finished it. If the complaint is that the ending sucks, well....endings to video games suck more often than not. I still have nightmares of spending all week beating the NES game 1942 only to have it just give me a black screen with "CONGRATULATION" written in tiny font on the center, and then back to title screen. Or the horrendously bad "ending" in the otherwise decent budget title Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. And Final Fantasy VII had a great story, but the ending to that was pretty controversial also.
However, it seems like the developers were actively promoting the game as having many wildly different endings that are depending on the many decisions your character has made during the course of the trilogy and DLC. It really was kind of a big selling point for the series. (see this thread for details). Apparently there are only three different endings, with minimal differences? And the only important decisions that affect it are near the very end of the game? Regardless of the quality of the actual ending, that doesn't seem right.
This all kind of reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, actually. The studio was rushed and short of money and the director was having a nervous breakdown, so the final two episodes ended up being an incoherent mess that had little relation to the episodes that preceded it, which left viewers going "Huh? That was it? WTF just happened?" Of course, the demand for the series was so high and the complaints were so vitriolic that he eventually made the movie The End of Evangelion as an alternate ending. The movie was also bizarre, but it felt like a more appropriate conclusion that fit in with the rest of the series.
EA probably rushed Bioware to finish the game I'd wager.
Because the more I think about it, the more the ending doesn't seem to fit.
Maybe they planned it all along. Rush that game out; see how people react to the ending, then if its too negative, convince EA to let them change it as DLC.
(The writers must surely of had several different endings in the pipeline, just in case)
Scheduling is everything these days. Artistic intergrity doesn't mean diddly squat if the game has to be finished by X date. Cuts are made. Placeholders can become final. Things are cancelled outright.
Its worse on large-scale projects since the huge teams tend to hemmorage money for a company the longer they stall.
EDIT: I just kind of feel that its not like Bioware to just turn around and change the ending, unless they already knew how people would have reacted, and had put resources by in preperation to work on it.
Sadly, Mordin still won't come with Shep, if I remember correctly. And what ends up happening is that you convince Mordin to not cure the genophage yet, and if Wrex is still alive, he finds out, gets pissed, and you'll have no choice but to kill him.
Aww.
This makes me sad. I always took Mordin everywhere with me just for the comments. Oh, and because he could one-hit kill Harbingers. That too.
“There’s great value in thinking about the story of a game as a collaboration between the player and the developers. In the collision of fiction and game mechanics, my experience of a game is never exactly the same as yours; the more systemic and divergent the results of the player’s contribution, the better. Much of the player’s experience of Deus Ex or Skyrim is the story of how the player played that game, and how they shaped the gameworld to express themselves; the experience of Minecraft is entirely that. It’s incredibly powerful.
But things like “cutscenes” and “endings” are completely authored by the developers, and the developers altering the authored content of a game after the fact has nothing to do with the systemic player-developer collaboration described above. It’s no different than a movie or book being released and, upon fan outrage, being edited and re-released to pander to the most vocal dissenters in the audience. It’s not unique to games; it is unique to a certain type of entertainment media that attracts fans who feel entitled to dictate exactly how the product should bend to their desires, instead of standing as a unique experience to be enjoyed, or not, on its own merits.”
Should there really be such a distinction, artistically, between the interactive and non-interactive segments of a game? Something about that feels wrong, though I'm having trouble coming up with a specific point against it.
Also I think Chuck Jordan missed the point of the backlash against direct control. Or at least, what he perceived as being the main argument against it doesn't gel with what my argument against it was. Oh well. Still stings to be included in a point which boils down to "guess fan feedback is worthless sometimes, haha"
EA probably rushed Bioware to finish the game I'd wager.
Because the more I think about it, the more the ending doesn't seem to fit.
Maybe they planned it all along. Rush that game out; see how people react to the ending, then if its too negative, convince EA to let them change it as DLC.
(The writers must surely of had several different endings in the pipeline, just in case)
Scheduling is everything these days. Artistic intergrity doesn't mean diddly squat if the game has to be finished by X date. Cuts are made. Placeholders can become final. Things are cancelled outright.
Its worse on large-scale projects since the huge teams tend to hemmorage money for a company the longer they stall.
EDIT: I just kind of feel that its not like Bioware to just turn around and change the ending, unless they already knew how people would have reacted, and had put resources by in preperation to work on it.
Yeah, that was always my impression, it was rushed. I presume EA didn't want to delay it, so they rushed the ending so it would be ready in time to print. It explains the lack of choice inclusion(Let's face it, taking into account a good couple of choices from the trilogy would take quite a lot of time to implement) and also the palette swap endings.
Should there really be such a distinction, artistically, between the interactive and non-interactive segments of a game? Something about that feels wrong, though I'm having trouble coming up with a specific point against it.
Also I think Chuck Jordan missed the point of the backlash against direct control. Or at least, what he perceived as being the main argument against it doesn't gel with what my argument against it was. Oh well. Still stings to be included in a point which boils down to "guess fan feedback is worthless sometimes, haha"
That's not what it boils down to really. It's just, if the authors wanted all three endings to be negative, they're all going to be negative. They can revamp the choices and make it more robust, but changing the ending because people don't like it robs the authors of control.
I guess it's just like, don't you agree to give up some control when you decide to make a video game instead of a film or a novel? If you allow your players to decide what sort of person they want their character to be, shouldn't that choice be reflected in some way even in the non-interactive portions of the game?
Also, the Chuck Jordan point I was making was more of an aside
I guess it's just like, don't you agree to give up some control when you decide to make a video game instead of a film or a novel? If you allow your players to decide what sort of person they want their character to be, shouldn't that choice be reflected in some way even in the non-interactive portions of the game?
Also, the Chuck Jordan point I was making was more of an aside
I think with a videogame its different, because its interactive.
The devs and the gamer have to work in harmony with each other, to create the best experience.
Mass Effect 3's ending is bad because it forces the control away from the player.
Now in Bioshock its different. That control is taken away, but the game doesn't give you investment (or illusion of investment in this case...) at the level Mass Effect does, (its very linear), so a player tends to feel a little less cheated.
The signs that it would happen were subtle, but they were there, so in reflection, the player goes "oh right. That makes sense now".
In Mass Effect 3, its not there. Its kind of a "big lipped aligator" moment. Its alienates the audience, and considering the huge build-up, its understandable that the player feels betrayed, feel like all their effort was pointless, because Bioware flipped the table, or just screwed the rules because they had money.
Now again, Metal Gear Solid series is different. The game tells you exactly how its going to be from the start.
Its going to take control away from you alot. Its going to play out like a film for most of it. Heck! It starts like a film!
Transparency is important. Sure a story can be unpredictable, themes can change at any time, but without the right cue, then its going to leave the audience confused.
There has to be some context, some understanding.
All the gameplay context, the decisions you make, the actions you do to prepare yourself for the conclusion, are just made completely irrelevant.
Hell, after seeing the ending for myself, I don't even want to go and buy and eventually play Mass Effect 3.
I've been spoiled on 1 and 2 before, but I still WANT to play those games.
The endings are satisfying by themselves. The gameplay is not the focus point of the game. Its there to let the story sink in, and provide the player with a goal to progress to the next "chapter" as it were.
EA/Bioware dropped the ball in thinking people would ever seriously care about changes to the gameplay.
Multiplayer? It was not necessary in the first two, and it still isn't.
Put that in a seperate game where its designed to have its own significance, don't just tack it onto this game.
All that effort and resources wasted in working on the multiplayer, could have been put into making sure Mass Effect 3 works by itself, and concludes that contract between the player and the dev with satisfactory results on both sides.
Comments
That is fine with me (and what happens in all 9 endings anyways even if she is breathing for a second in one end the Shepard the players used to know died in the last 10 minutes when she actually took the bullshit this DEM gave her).
As long as they remove the plot-holes and tell the players what happened to the crew. I could even live with them all blowing up.
Or they could make a "Super-Meat-Boy"-Ending and change it if you play through the game on the hardest difficulty (that was unlocked by finishing the game once in ME1+2)
It's far too popular a franchise to let die now. It's like Halo - just because the original story's been told doesn't mean there's not other ways the franchise can continue.
I doubt there can be a Mass Effect 4 unless it's a prequel. Because of the end of Mass Effect 3. Have you ever played any of these games?
Sort Of what was alluding to.
And every enemy kills you in one hit.
Not to mention just things like tripping over a tree root. I think his bones would shatter with that...
I guess they could always go with my other idea, which is a story that progresses from the worst ending in ME2 where everyone but Joker dies in the end. And then you would have to play through the Reaper invasion with only Joker and any new characters/non-suicide mission characters. Could be fun.
Without knowing the full context, I feel like there was at least one writer pushing for the "indoctrination" ending, and at least one writer pushing against it, resulting in the messy ambiguity present in the current ending. It's like somebody wrote a draft that was set in Shepard's mind and then somebody else wrote the next draft without being aware of that context. I'm coming from nowhere on that though so I don't know if that could really be the case or not.
This sounds great. How do you come up with things like this?
And then in ME4
There will be no other Mass Effect game with Shepard as the main hero. I'm not quite sure what the Bioware guys said, but I'm VERY sure the ME series will go on (in stupid multiplayer sequels most likely).
Sounds like some sequel that could only be written if the original writers wouldn't be involved in it.
Well since a bunch of rabid chimps wrote the ending to ME3 there is no harm in changing the writers.
Essentially this ending is exactly like Fallout 3's ending.
Its unsatisfying, its poorly written, and it plain doesn't make any sense!
(Not in the funny way. Just in that terrible kind of flat "what?" way)
I think Bioware should take a page out of Bethesda's book and make a sort of small expansion, (free if they want extra Kudos) that removes the ending, and provides a new extension to the story that provides a more final confrontation.
I've seen the indoctrination theory, and I say Bioware should just go with that, (or something similar).
Make Sherpard fight some tough enemies, and have a FINAL FINAL battle with the heart of the enemy empire itself.
If you planned incorrectly and die - Everything fails and the cycle begins anew.
If you planned correctly but still die - Some things fail and the fight goes underground.
If you plan incorrectly but survive - Shepard abandon's the plan and escapes, but is severly wounded and irrepairably crippled by the fight, and becomes "the commander", the man organising and training the survivors in preperation for when the enemy eventually recovers. Finds a promising young recruit in training and smiles.
If you plan correctly and win - The saga concludes, but Shepard, exhausted from all his battles and yet satisfied with his ultimate victory, allows his crew to escape as he fights to the very end against the rest of the reaper forces. Your one-on-many battle gets timed, and how long you survive determines who escapes. Then an epilogue plays out that provides extra context.
EDIT: By planning, I mean the culmination of all the decisions you made in Mass Effect 1,2, and 3.
Even minor decisions can add up to a larger impact. You might make most of the right important decisions, but some minor decisions could change the detail in the final plans and make it fail.
There would be some deviance for failure in place, but the amount of success you would need would be around 70-80%
EDIT 2: Besides, I've seen artists change an ending before. I've seen people change entire parts of a story before.
I mean, Alien 3 had a lot cut out and then put back in. Most people argue that Director's Cut is better.
Blade Runner had loads of edits. The final version being the best in my opinion.
Blue Oyster Cult has a few different versions of some of their songs. The live versions especially are different. But Astronomy has two album versions.
Artistic Integrity is just an excuse, especially when people have a lot of validity in questioning it.
I've heard that isn't possible. Which is sad because it would be fun to try and play through as Joker and turn it into a survival horror game.
That 5 minute sequence in ME2 was more than enough, thanks.
Hmmm...that would require letting the entire non-squad crew of the Normandy to be liquified by the Collectors, and finishing ME2 with only Jack, Samara/Morinth, Miranda, Legion, Mordin, and Tali alive. Then you would need to ignore the ME3 mission to save Grissom Academy, which would doom Jack to becoming a Phantom that you must kill at the Cerberus HQ. Samara is easy to get rid of, just let her kill herself. And if you had Morinth instead, then she becomes a banshee you have to kill. Miranda will die if you don't warn her about the assassin, didn't complete her loyalty mission, or don't talk her dad down/kill him. Mordin dies no matter what you do, unless you say to **** with the Krogans. And if you choose to upload the Reaper Code, but cannot broker peace between the Quarians and the Geth, Legion dies propagating the code among the Geth, and Tali commits suicide. This would leave you with Jake, Liara, EDI, and Kaiden/Ashley. And Javik if you have the From Ashes DLC and want a mopey Prothean on your ship.
Honestly, if the choice is between Mordin and the entire Krogan race... fuck the Krogans, I'm keeping Mordin. When I play ME3, I plan to have him and Garrus flanking my alien-loving Femshep as she fights her way to the universe's demise.
I have to agree on that.
Sadly, Mordin still won't come with Shep, if I remember correctly. And what ends up happening is that you convince Mordin to not cure the genophage yet, and if Wrex is still alive, he finds out, gets pissed, and you'll have no choice but to kill him.
However, it seems like the developers were actively promoting the game as having many wildly different endings that are depending on the many decisions your character has made during the course of the trilogy and DLC. It really was kind of a big selling point for the series. (see this thread for details). Apparently there are only three different endings, with minimal differences? And the only important decisions that affect it are near the very end of the game? Regardless of the quality of the actual ending, that doesn't seem right.
This all kind of reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, actually. The studio was rushed and short of money and the director was having a nervous breakdown, so the final two episodes ended up being an incoherent mess that had little relation to the episodes that preceded it, which left viewers going "Huh? That was it? WTF just happened?" Of course, the demand for the series was so high and the complaints were so vitriolic that he eventually made the movie The End of Evangelion as an alternate ending. The movie was also bizarre, but it felt like a more appropriate conclusion that fit in with the rest of the series.
Because the more I think about it, the more the ending doesn't seem to fit.
Maybe they planned it all along. Rush that game out; see how people react to the ending, then if its too negative, convince EA to let them change it as DLC.
(The writers must surely of had several different endings in the pipeline, just in case)
Scheduling is everything these days. Artistic intergrity doesn't mean diddly squat if the game has to be finished by X date. Cuts are made. Placeholders can become final. Things are cancelled outright.
Its worse on large-scale projects since the huge teams tend to hemmorage money for a company the longer they stall.
EDIT: I just kind of feel that its not like Bioware to just turn around and change the ending, unless they already knew how people would have reacted, and had put resources by in preperation to work on it.
Aww.
This makes me sad. I always took Mordin everywhere with me just for the comments. Oh, and because he could one-hit kill Harbingers. That too.
Some interesting points there.
Steve Gaynor's bit kind of bugs me:
Should there really be such a distinction, artistically, between the interactive and non-interactive segments of a game? Something about that feels wrong, though I'm having trouble coming up with a specific point against it.
Also I think Chuck Jordan missed the point of the backlash against direct control.
That's not what it boils down to really. It's just, if the authors wanted all three endings to be negative, they're all going to be negative. They can revamp the choices and make it more robust, but changing the ending because people don't like it robs the authors of control.
Also, the Chuck Jordan point I was making was more of an aside
I think with a videogame its different, because its interactive.
The devs and the gamer have to work in harmony with each other, to create the best experience.
Mass Effect 3's ending is bad because it forces the control away from the player.
Now in Bioshock its different. That control is taken away, but the game doesn't give you investment (or illusion of investment in this case...) at the level Mass Effect does, (its very linear), so a player tends to feel a little less cheated.
The signs that it would happen were subtle, but they were there, so in reflection, the player goes "oh right. That makes sense now".
In Mass Effect 3, its not there. Its kind of a "big lipped aligator" moment. Its alienates the audience, and considering the huge build-up, its understandable that the player feels betrayed, feel like all their effort was pointless, because Bioware flipped the table, or just screwed the rules because they had money.
Now again, Metal Gear Solid series is different. The game tells you exactly how its going to be from the start.
Its going to take control away from you alot. Its going to play out like a film for most of it. Heck! It starts like a film!
Transparency is important. Sure a story can be unpredictable, themes can change at any time, but without the right cue, then its going to leave the audience confused.
There has to be some context, some understanding.
All the gameplay context, the decisions you make, the actions you do to prepare yourself for the conclusion, are just made completely irrelevant.
Hell, after seeing the ending for myself, I don't even want to go and buy and eventually play Mass Effect 3.
I've been spoiled on 1 and 2 before, but I still WANT to play those games.
The endings are satisfying by themselves. The gameplay is not the focus point of the game. Its there to let the story sink in, and provide the player with a goal to progress to the next "chapter" as it were.
EA/Bioware dropped the ball in thinking people would ever seriously care about changes to the gameplay.
Multiplayer? It was not necessary in the first two, and it still isn't.
Put that in a seperate game where its designed to have its own significance, don't just tack it onto this game.
All that effort and resources wasted in working on the multiplayer, could have been put into making sure Mass Effect 3 works by itself, and concludes that contract between the player and the dev with satisfactory results on both sides.