I'm disappointed with the end of games lately. [Massive spoilers]

[Variable]

That pretty much sums it up. I've been finishing and re-finishing a lot of titles lately, and I'm almost sickened at the lack of thought or creativity that goes into something as simple as an end came cinematic. Lemme go ahead and sum up what the past week has been like. Caution, spoilers ahead.

Arx Fatalis: After playing for 12 hours or so, you deserve more than a 30 second explanation of how you did exactly what you were supposed to do but now you have to leave this dimension because you're too cool for school k thx bye.

Deus Ex: Invisible War: This game tries to get around having a ****** ending by giving you 4 different outcomes. The detractor here is that your actions are supposed to effect that outcome throughout the game...turns out that no matter what you do during the ENTIRE GAME, you can still change your mind in the last 5 minutes to get any of those outcomes. And they all suck. Once again, no more than 30 seconds long with the vaguest of descriptions about how you changed the future.

Sid Meier's Pirates!: I love this game, don't get me wrong, but I spent a lot of time trying to achieve every goal possible. At the end, you're rewarded with a single screen that recounts to you exactly what you did, and based on how much Fame you've accumulated you get a job at the end. Unfortunately, this is predictable, because the end game professions are based on a 1-10, 11-20 etc scale, so you can retire as soon as you start the game, calculate what ending you want and decide if you really want to spend enough time for that screen to actually say "You are the Bishop."

Star Wars Republic Commando: The equivalent of "I'm sorry, your Princess is in another castle!" You fight all the way to the end of a relatively short game to be rewarded with one of your buddies disappearing and you getting jacked off the planet and told he doesn't matter. You'd think that this means theres a sequel, but the final "content" that you unlock by winning is an interview with a person who wrote a book that is actually the ending you were hoping to get. So if you want to find out what happens to your friend, the war effort, etc, go buy a 20$ 'companion' book.

Ballance: This game has no ending. It doesn't matter. It's the bee's knees. This is a shameless plug for a little known game.

Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich: An in game epilogue that takes less than a minute, is rather disappointing and leaves room for another game in the series which may or may not be made. It's not exactly a bad ending, but it's painful to know you went to the considerable effort of beating the last few stages to be told "...tune in next year!"

Lionheart: It's been like a year or two since I finished this and it still pisses me off. "Different" endings amount to the SAME EXACT SCENE at the end with two out of three paragraphs of dialogue having changed. Either the evil you killed is coming back, the evil you killed is already back, or everyone in the cathedral is undead and the evil is coming back for them instead.

Now I'm not a creative guy, so I'm not going to sit here and suggest better endings for all these games, but it seems to me like developers just stopped caring. A college student could have whipped up the endings to Deus Ex as part of his term project inbetween bong hits. Back in ye olden days of lore, when you finished a game you were treated to a nice littly chunk of story wrapping up all the loose ends and generally making you feel like you had accomplished something. The best I can note (and it isn't even that old) is Arcanum, where every little dealing you had in the game effected the way the epilogue would play out and made it very much worth trying to go back through and do things differently. The endings to these games not only made me not want to play them again, but in some cases they made me regret having played them in the first place. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the games listed above only to be so disappointed in the endings that it jaded the whole experience for me.

Now my question is, am I expecting too much of developers to think this part of games through? I know it's probably an afterthought in most cases because it's the last thing you have to do before you ship your product, so the faster it gets done the faster you start making money...but this has to piss off more people than just me. Anyone else want to gripe?

Oh...and don't get me started on the console type games where the only thing you get at the ending is new 'content' that unlocks that you can use the next time you play...to unlock more new content. I had a friend that played through Dead or Alive 2 Hardcore about three hundred times just so he could get all the levels/outfits/extras that unlocked each time you beat the challenge mode. It was disgusting.

[SiFi]

I though the endings of the Homeworld series of games were well done, personally. Plus the Thief series, and SC. But yeah, some games do kind of leave you hanging.

[Gambit]

It depends on how story-driven the game is. If the game is a good story-driven game, then heck yes I want a decent story ending. For the most part, though, I think you're right and they should spend a little more effort on the end. Technically it doesn't add much to the project cost, but given that endings can be difficult to write and that the game industry is not known for stellar "screenplays," it explains much of what we see.

My commentary per game:

FFvTTR - I agree. It's moderately story-driven, and could do with a more elaborate ending, but compare it to the comic-book inspiration - "Tune in next year" is right in line.

Pirates - I think it's ok. Pirates is not a story-driven game, although it provides an illusory thin veneer of story. It's really more of a high-score type game, just more elaborate than your Dead or Alive, etc.

Homeworld 1, Cataclysm, Thief 1 & 2 - Great endings!

Homeworld 2 - eh, whatever.

Star Wars KOTOR - w00t!
KOTOR 2 - Pfff.

Morrowind was good, but then thats an RPG. Could have been better, but the thing is so much more about the environment than the main plotline...

Tribes:Vengeance had a decent ending to the single-player game.

[SiFi]

Actually, yeah, Homeworld 2 was kind of an "oh, is that it?" ending. Though I found an interesting mod in development for it that caught my interest on that subject
http://mods.moddb.com/4119/
Seems to not have died yet, and is something to watch, I think

Gambit, did you never finish/play Thief 3? If not, I can reccomend it. Very, very strongly

[Gambit]

Never played. I'll get around to it eventually.

[Raiyven]

a thread on Homeworld? SiFi, how dare you not inform me here we go..

pretty much to echo SiFi and Gambit, Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm had excellent stories, and excellent endings. I think the problem with Homeworld 2 is that they had an incredible universe built with an epic story already unfolded, but the problem came when they realized a) Cataclysm didn't serve well enough as a sequel, despite how great it was, story and all. I might add it was done by a different developer (Barking Dog Studios, HW and HW2 were done by Relic Studios). Also, b) they could easily capitalize on a full sequel to the game easily, c) as we've seen with the original Star Wars trilogy bleeding into prequels, sometimes it's hard to create something that amounts to, or exceeds prior success.

I found the story of Homeworld 2 to lack the epic feeling of the first and HW:C. An epic storyline involves a journey, physical or spiritual, or otherwise. HW gave you a new and innovative engine with a beautifully crafted storyline of an exiled people's journey home. HW:C gave you an incredible underdog story of a single ship, belonging to a disrespected lower-class clan, Kiith Somtaaw, whose efforts single-handedly bring down a biological menace that the haughtier clans were powerless to stop, giving them high respect and lasting honour by the game's conclusion.

Homeworld 2, sad to say, was a game of tying up loose ends of the story. While as a fanatic I would welcome a third instalment, I'm not sure how much else they can spin off this yarn before it ruins the series. Deux Ex, for example, could have stayed as a standalone game and been left to fond memories, without the unfortunate stigma of a crappy sequel.