The Worst Game Endings - Or How to Ruin Good Gameplay with Bad Writing (Spoilers, duh)

Modern Warfare 2. But not the actual ending, rather the ending of the “Loose Ends” mission where Shepherd kills Roach and Ghost. Shepherd took his sweet time killing them, so why didn’t they shoot him while he was covering them in gasoline? I wanted to kill Makarov in MW2, dammit! And MW3 sucked.
Iirc Roach was fucked up from an explosion, hence why Ghost was carrying you to evac, then Shepard shot him in the face immediately. Neither of you really had a chance to fight back.
 
Iirc Roach was fucked up from an explosion, hence why Ghost was carrying you to evac, then Shepard shot him in the face immediately. Neither of you really had a chance to fight back.
But then how was Soap able to crawl to the knife in the actual ending? I thought Ghost was supposed to be this invincible badass, why did he die like a bitch?
 
Biomutant.

Got it for cheap, which was good since it's super easy to beat and not hard at all to get all the trophies. The whole game it makes a big deal of morality and the choices you make. Which tribes you side with, how you treat other characters, how you deal with huge monsters destroying the world tree. Whether or not you kill the end boss. Light or dark, good or evil, or something in between.

I played as a pure good guy and found the ending pretty bland. Saved the world tree, spared the big bad, blasted off into space for some reason with some chosen friends. Narrator says something about trying NG+ to see how things would work out when you play as the ultimate evil. The end.

Watched a video of the pure evil ending, and it's basically the Mass Effect 3 thing where there's a few very small cosmetic differences and that's it. The narrator says "dark" instead of "light" and that's really about all. Maybe a few slight differences in the script. There's not even a different animation if you decide to murder the end boss. And who you take into space makes no difference. Not even if you choose not to bring anyone and just go by yourself.
 
tales of xilla 2. so you have a choice.

you could sacrifice yourself to save your not-daughter, saving the world and everyone calling you Jesus. or, you can sacrifice your not-daughter and have everyone hate you and call you a coward. the problem with those choices however is that the not-daughter is not actually your daughter and by killing yourself, you will reject your actually daughter who, you will have later in life and the women you will meet and fall in love with will now die alone childless.

the overall theme of xilla 2 is asking "what IS real?" we spent the entire game destroying fake worlds because those worlds are "not" real and threaten the destruction of the "real" world. instead of seeing the death of the fake-daughter as a sacrifice to wipe the slate clean, everyone calls you a monster (even the god, who could fix everything calls you whimp for not killing yourself.) simply for not wanting to die.

i dunno man, maybe im just a sociopath.
 
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Not really an ending so much as a forced fail state.

Addendum: I am fucking stunned with how a forum with as many oldfags as we have went this long in the thread without covering the slew of games from the 90s with basically no ending whatsoever beyond a single-screen textbox and credits. This wasn't a platform thing either, it happened with PC games, Console games, you name it, and from countless developers.

It was like the video game equivalent of that trend of bringing a character from a fantasy world to a modern setting so they didn't have to spend anything on sets or anything we saw in movies throughout the 80s and 90s.
I think its because a lot of them were very story light in a way that, most of the time, you werent really playing them for the narrative. A shit nothing ending matters less when the entire game has a shit nothing story to begin with.
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Not really an ending so much as a forced fail state.

Addendum: I am fucking stunned with how a forum with as many oldfags as we have went this long in the thread without covering the slew of games from the 90s with basically no ending whatsoever beyond a single-screen textbox and credits. This wasn't a platform thing either, it happened with PC games, Console games, you name it, and from countless developers.

It was like the video game equivalent of that trend of bringing a character from a fantasy world to a modern setting so they didn't have to spend anything on sets or anything we saw in movies throughout the 80s and 90s.
Probably the most notorious of the disappointing ending from that era was Rygar. At least, I've heard more than one person that was disappointed by the ending, which as you pointed out was a very common ending back then. Not sure why Rygar stands out from other games of the era like Metroid and Zelda, though.
 
Addendum: I am fucking stunned with how a forum with as many oldfags as we have went this long in the thread without covering the slew of games from the 90s with basically no ending whatsoever beyond a single-screen textbox and credits.
Worse, if it just started over at the beginning again, especially if the difficulty didn't even change and nothing new was introduced.
 
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Fuck Halo 2. I remember beating that game as a teen, super excited for this final epic three way confrontation, Chief is in the ship to confront Truth when Lord Hood asks what Chief is doing
"Sir. Finishing this fight. "
ONE FINAL LEVEL BOYS LET'S GO!
why are the credits rolling?

Fuck. You.
Fuck the endings of all 3 Halo games.

Halo 1 : You beat Robot Eyeball Nigger..NOW DRIVE OR DIE
Halo 2 : Cliffhanger City
Halo 3 : You beat Robot Eyeball Nigger again..now DRIVE OR DIE>

Imagine having a pure driving level 2/3 of your games and not being Rockstar games.
 
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It has been said many times but the worst ending I have ever seen in both video games and in any form of fiction was the Mass Effect 3 ending. I have never seen an ending so pretentious and up its own ass that left me wondering if the writers were just huffing their own farts during the writing of the ending. The extended cut didn't help any. In fact, I would argue that it made the ending worse. I look forward to how Bioware is going to hand wave the ending in Mass Effect 4.
 
have never seen an ending so pretentious and up its own ass that left me wondering if the writers were just huffing their own farts during the writing of the ending.

Considering Casey Hudson and Mac Walters literally wrote it themselves and kept anyone else involved out of it, yeah they were pretty much just huffing their own farts the whole time.
 
SMTV. that game had its problems but the ending was its worse offender.

lets not get into how to unlock the true ending (its a pain). so you finally face lucifer who has gotten enlightened and he tells you that there multiple universes and real choice is a myth but, if we kill him and absorb his power, we can become a true god and destroy the multiverse that pretty much purge the universe of all gods and free humanity.

turns out, it did fuck all and now your just a all seeing god observing humanity for who knows how long until everything goes to shit and someone else will replace you.
 
What did Notch mean by this?
View attachment 2795495
Its not really an ending I know but I felt like I was being indoctrinated into some new age woo cult reading this. It reads like complete schizo babble that's pretending to be deep and philosophical, in what is essentially a lego video game no less.
tbh notch used to be kind of a faggot.
He still is, but much less so.

Even as a kid I knew that this ending was a giant masturbratory wall and I quickly averted my eyes.
Also from what I recall he didn't even write this he got random people to send him potential endings on twitter. He sure knew how to fucking pick em' :roll:
 
Fuck Halo 2. I remember beating that game as a teen, super excited for this final epic three way confrontation, Chief is in the ship to confront Truth when Lord Hood asks what Chief is doing
"Sir. Finishing this fight. "
ONE FINAL LEVEL BOYS LET'S GO!
why are the credits rolling?

Fuck. You.
God of War 2 is the same way, the story builds and builds to this epic climax and then boom, cliff hanger.

In many ways God of War 2 is the best game in the series, save for that cliff hanger ending, at least 3 did eventually deliver.

Fuck the endings of all 3 Halo games.

Halo 1 : You beat Robot Eyeball Nigger..NOW DRIVE OR DIE
Halo 2 : Cliffhanger City
Halo 3 : You beat Robot Eyeball Nigger again..now DRIVE OR DIE>

Imagine having a pure driving level 2/3 of your games and not being Rockstar games.
I liked the driving finales tbh.

System Shock 2, it was a rather good game and then they ran out of budget so things got weird towards the end. "Eh, Nah."
That ending left me so befuddled, it feels like a joke, totally clashing with the game's serious, horror atmosphere.

What makes it worse is how difficult the game is, especially near the end, I myself had to cheat because I found myself in an unwinnable situation with too little ammo and resources, imagine struggling through the game and that's the ending that awaits you.

It says it all that the two times I've tried to replay SS2 I always petered out before finishing it because when you know the ending is as dumb as it is, what's the point?
 
That ending left me so befuddled, it feels like a joke, totally clashing with the game's serious, horror atmosphere.

What makes it worse is how difficult the game is, especially near the end, I myself had to cheat because I found myself in an unwinnable situation with too little ammo and resources, imagine struggling through the game and that's the ending that awaits you.

It says it all that the two times I've tried to replay SS2 I always petered out before finishing it because when you know the ending is as dumb as it is, what's the point?
It was an amazing let down but from what I heard they had the plug pulled late into development so they just had to make do with what they could. That's why the level map turns into a static ship image in the last part of it instead of being a full dynamic map like in the first part when you call it up. I was still surprised they didn't actually just come up with an ending that was more than a bad joke though, it was just some dialogue that they needed.
 
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