Bad endings happen. Probably more often than we would like. A bad ending can afflict any game, any studio, any time, and anywhere. No one is safe, as you will soon see. The ending needs to pull together the entire story that had come before it and leave off on a conclusion that feels satisfying from a gameplay perspective, as well as tying up the important loose story threads.
Wrapping up the events of a story is already difficult, but you begin to implement game development restrictions and astronomical budgets and expectations, and you begin to see just how wild it is that we have endings that we enjoy at all. This list is comprised of games whose endings might have missed the mark a little, made absolutely no sense, or seemed to run off a cliff without a parachute.
12 Minutes
12 Minutes has a great concept, but the longer it goes on, the more absurd it gets. There are several endings that help to give a different perspective on the situation behind the story, but each one makes you feel grosser and more confused. The protagonist turns out to be the son of the cop as well as the brother of his own wife. Yeah, you might need to read that a few times. I still don’t believe it, and I played through each ending twice.
The wife and husband both have amnesia apparently because they can’t remember who the other is or their own history. I thought it might become a little poetic or that there might be a thread to understanding. But there is no way you could have figured this out organically without the game spelling it all out for you—great concept for a game but terrible execution in the writing.
Dead Space 3
No matter how you slice it, Dead Space 3 had a terrible ending for a series that only had its story going for it by the end. The original ending in the base game was simply Ellie escaping the final destruction of the only known source of the necromorphs.
However, it was revealed that the alien planet was just another group that had been fighting off the infection just like the humans, and they froze their planet to save the rest of the universe. Isaac is left behind, and we get a single voice com of him calling out for Ellie. Pretty bleak and anti-climatic, but good news, DLC was released that only made things worse. Isaac wakes up and is dealing with violent visions as he tries to escape the planet and find a way home.
He has become a truly unreliable narrator, but the final scene we get of the Dead Space universe is Earth about to be devoured by the planet-eating necromorph. If this is real, that makes everything feel so pointless in the rest of the series, and if it’s just a hallucination, then the DLC was a terrine missed opportunity for a franchise that has been dormant for nearly a decade.
Mass Effect 3
There are so few games that have been so universally criticized for their ending. The level of hype that quickly turned to outrage felt palpable back when Mass Effect 3 was released. I felt like even the cashier at the local convenient store was complaining about Bioware’s misfire. It seemed every single choice the developers chose to end the series on was problematic to the fanbase. From the awful level design of seemingly endless waves of enemies to the terrible writing conclusions.
The franchise had always been praised for its ability to give the player interesting choices to make that truly felt challenging and unique; however, the conclusion to the series felt overly simplified compared to the rest of the series. The player was forced to choose what to do with the Reapers.
The problem is that the choices given to the player with the Reapers are incredibly basic and often buck against the themes of the franchise as a whole. On top of this, many choices that the player makes throughout the series become irrelevant no matter what final choice they make. It made certain aspects of the game feel pointless in the grand scheme of everything.
Borderlands
Borderlands was a wacky looter shooter that changed the genre for the better when it was released in 2009; however, it didn’t come without its own problems. The biggest of which was the ending because, throughout the entire game, the player was hunting down the Vault.
People who search for this mysterious location are even called “Vault Hunters,” and yet the final prize is a mythical alien creature that attacks the player. Which I mean is fine, but after this big final boss is defeated, there aren’t rare weapons waiting; all the happens is that the credits roll.
This was so close to being interesting and worth the player’s time, but Gearbox was too interested in a twist that they forgot to make it interesting. All they had to do was say that the Vault Hunters were a scam for aliens to collect weapons from all of Pandora by killing everyone who found the Alien location. However, when you defeat the alien, you are able to reclaim these fallen hunters’ weapons. That would have been sick. As it is now, I don’t think I have ever replayed this boss since I originally fought it in 2009.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
I know that most people get upset with the base game of Half-Life 2’s ending but see as it’s been over 15 years, Episode 2’s ending is a true travesty. It ends on a massive cliffhanger which would have been fine if Valve had promised to keep to their release schedule of a new episode every few months. Cliffhangers can be great, but when they become the final bit of story we receive for a game, they feel more like a crime.
Episode 2 sees hints at a mysterious cargo aboard a ship in the arctic. Eli is killed by an advisor who the player has only seen hints of during their playtime so far, and Alyx is left distraught over her father’s body.
It’s a heartbreaking ending that sets up the next entry really well, but that entry doesn’t seem like it will ever come. I wish Valve would release something that would give some closure to the series instead of toying with our emotions.
Fallout 3
There might be a pattern to this list as it seems development expectations and practices began to change around the 6th and 7th generations. Fallout 3 was one of the best games of the 2000s, but it suffered from one flaw initially, it had a terrible ending.
The game ends with the player going to shut off a giant reactor in order to bring clean water back to the wastes. The problem is that, unlike the rest of the game, there isn’t much choice given the player in regard to this ending. It also felt like it came out of nowhere as the famous narrator begins to relay the events of the game and what became of the various characters that the player met during their journey.
That’s the end, and it was impossible for the player to return to the wastes afterward unless they loaded an old save. Thankfully, Bethesda rectified this mistake with DLC, but it was paid, so it felt a little like extortion if the player wanted to continue to use their character after the main quest.
Alan Wake
Alan Wake is a phenomenally written game (for the most part), but the biggest issue is the ending. At best, the ending is confusing and gives the player the chance to dissect whatever the developers intended. You may even be forced to play the DLCs in order to get a more concise idea of what exactly happened (or look it up online).
If you are someone who loves to dig into lore searching for an answer, Alan Wake might not have disappointed you, but if you were looking for a slightly more straightforward answer that didn’t require you to take an entire college class to understand, then you might be looking for a tutor.
No game should have to rely on a sequel or DLC to make its ending more understandable. A story should be able to stand on its own, with sequels only enhancing that story.
Assassin’s Creed
Before the franchise took the world by storm with the Ezio trilogy, Assassin’s Creed had a very divisive start. It tried a lot of new things but repeated those things over and over again. It was like a prototype, but it ended in a way that would cement many people’s aversion to ever revisit it once other games began to release. In all honesty, Assassin’s Creed was an ambitious title that introduced a lot of pieces but didn’t make the most of them.
The final bad guy in Al Mualim was fairly anti-climactic, and Altair’s story sort of just ends (explains why we revisit it later in other games). We then are brought back to the current day with Desmond, where he learns that he might never make it out of the Templar’s clutches.
This, too, ends with Desmond walking around his bedroom cell, considering everything that has happened and wondering when his sequel will hit store shelves. For a game that lept into the hearts of gamers initially, it sort of just fizzles out in the end.
BioShock
Like many of the entries on this list, BioShock has a phenomenal story and boasts one of the best twists in gaming, but the final 20 minutes of this game feel like a joke in comparison to the rest of the plot. Frank Fontaine confesses that he is Atlas and that he had been playing Jack like a fiddle the whole time.
However, with the help of Tanenbaum, Jack frees himself from the mind control that Fontaine had him under and begins to pursue him. The final battle literally juices up Fontaine to look like the cover of Atlas Shrugged. It’s ridiculous and feels so out of place with the rest of this masterpiece.
Fontaine is a hulking monster who bounces around the arena, punching at Jack while sending robots and splicers in to help. Jack must drain the adam from Fontaine’s body to kill him, and then the Little Sisters come in and finish the job. The final scene of the game shows Jack growing old and either releasing all the Little Sisters or taking over Rapture for himself. The “good” ending is considered canonical, but it makes the choices made throughout the game feel incredibly cheap.
Halo 2
In retrospect, Halo 2’s ending doesn’t hurt quite as much, but without Halo 3, it’s a mess. Since there are two storylines occurring simultaneously, there are two endings: The Arbiter’s ending and the Master Chief’s. The Arbiter’s wraps up fairly nicely with the index being removed and the activation of the ring being stopped by Miranda.
However, the final scene is Master Chief chasing after the Prophet of Truth in a forerunner ship barreling through space. His final words, “Sir, finishing this fight,” were epic and became the tagline for the marketing for Halo 3, but it also made the game feel unfinished. It hurts even more when you consider how little you play as the Chief during the course of the campaign.
Halo 2 was plagued with development problems, so it’s honestly amazing the game is as polished as it is; however that doesn’t excuse it for a lackluster ending which only stands out more by how great the rest of the game is.
Note: For the foreseeable future, I will not be able to post regularly. Thank you for your understanding.
The Game Campaign 