Summary
Picture this: there’s a great movie playing at the theater, and just as the action reaches its climax, all the actors freeze. A message appears asking the audience to head out to the lobby to purchase their tickets to see the end of the story. Ridiculous? Preposterous? Not so for video games! Gaming is as big as the movie and music industry combined, and big bucks are to be made for those with talent (or a penchant for penny-pinching).
These days, with a little luck,anyone can make a fortune by working hard and putting out great products. Alternatively, companies can just wind up the ol' nickel and dime machine, as is the case for publishers who lock their game’s real finale behind a paywall. For those without the cash to spend for these endings, beware of spoilers ahead.
Isaac Clarke’s heroic sacrifice at the end ofDead Space 3may have been a tear-jerker, but at least he gave Earth a fighting chance against theLovecraftian entities hungering to devour all life in the universe. However, although he was seen falling, practically naked, down onto an alien world, gamers who picked up the Awakened DLC would come to find out that Isaac survived.
However, he probably wished he hadn’t, as the final moments of theDead Spaceseries show how Isaac and Co accidentally led the moon-mouths to exactly where they wanted to go: Earth. The developers actually said that they saw the DLC as closer in execution to their original vision for the third entry.
Like theLegend of Zelda: Oraclegames, which allowed the player to link both games togetherwith a post-game password system,Fire Emblem Fatessplit its story into two branching paths (Conquest and Birthright) that featured a single concluding story chapter, Revelation. UnlikeSeasons and Ages, however, this final chapter required players to fork over extra cash for the satisfaction of putting down the big bad and saving the day.
Without the Revelations DLC, players were given a rather bleak finale and the feeling that the story had suddenly come to a halt. While drawing characters from Birthright and Conquest together was nice, most fans can agree that it didn’t exactly feel “optional.”
Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC doesn’t exactly fix or recontextualize the infamous “now choose your favorite color!” that ignored most of the player’s choices (and which many fans of the series regarded as one of the greatest let-downs in gaming), it did at least offer a pallet cleanser to a bitter-bitter finale to an otherwise legendary trilogy that concluded withMass Effect 3.
The player and their crew get to go on one more adventure, featuring many of Sheppard’s exes, an expanded hub, and a storylinein which the player gets to fight their evil clone. It may not have been what fans wanted (presumably for BioWare to change the original ending), but it was a much better way to see the saga go out.
5Prince of Persia (2008)’s Cliffhanger Misstep
The 2008 reboot of thePrince of Persiaseries really got off on the wrong foot in part due to its downer ending that left a big “to be continued” to its players. The Prince doesn’t get the girl, but instead, he becomes responsible for releasing the ultimate evil on the world in order to return life to the one he loved.
However, the “Epilogue” DLC (ten dollars) helpfully recapped exactly what happened during the finale, revealing thatrather than having become consumed by evil, the prince is working on a plan to take down the demon without having to make a grand sacrifice, and that all will be revealed… in the next game.
2015’s fantastic first-person parkour zombie survival masterpieceDying Lightended on a high note, with the protagonist, Kyle, ultimately deciding to stay to help the people of the undead-ravaged city. However, the developers offered DLC that explores what Kyle got up to while trying to help.
Unfortunately, he didn’t exactly do a great job. After getting to the bottom of a cure rumor, Kyle discovers that the medicine is worse than the affliction, as it turns its user into a sentient zombie in the daytime and a mindless beast at night. The player is tasked with choosing to take the cure or setting off a nuke, killing everyone in the city. Either way,it’s a real downer endingfor Kyle Crane.
Kingdom Hearts 3ended on a somewhat ambiguous note, with Sora literally walking into the horizon and fading away with the world safe, albeit with the hint that evil may return, in a way that many fans assumed was a set-up to another title that they thought would conclude withKingdom Hearts 3.
However, with the arrival of Re Mind, fans were offered the chance to bring Sora back (if the player is able to win a deathmatch with another character). This more grounded ending wasn’t exactly “groundbreaking” but was likely intended to play on the minds and wallets of fans who just couldn’t let Sora go. Or perhaps the developers couldn’t decide which ending they preferred and left it up to consumers to vote with their wallets.
For all its wacky, atom-bomb-worshipping cannibal cults and giant, communist-hating robots, the Wasteland can be a bleak setting. Perhaps for this reason, the writers behindFallout 3probably thought it would be cool if the player were faced with a grim decision at the end of the main storyline: create a source of pure water by dosing yourself with lethal radiation, or dosing your friend, or just letting everybody die.
No matter what the player chooses, it’s game over. The fact that there’s a radiation-immune companion who refuses to help for fatalistic reasons is bad enough, but if players wanted to continue to explore the wasteland with their bodies intact, they’d have to purchase the “Broken Steel” DLC. Without the DLC,it’s an impossible choice, but for all the wrong reasons.
This one is perhaps the most famous and egregious use of a pay-gated ending. The DLC forAsura’s Wrathreveals that Asura’s true enemy (the creator of the universe) was the true perpetrator of Auras' problems (betrayal, murdered wife, kidnapped daughter) all along.
For the privilege of paying an extra chunk of change, players get to finally murder the divine creator and get Asura’s daughter back. However, there’s a meta layer of betrayal to this story, as it turns out that the DLC ends with a sequel bait cliffhanger teasing the next game. Since nobody wanted to shell out the extra seven bucks, sadly, too few were turned on to the idea of anAsura’s Wrath2.
