I started playing Mass Effect 3 on release day and I was amazed by just how action packed the first few hours of the game was. The combat is much more frantic than it was in the previous two games and there’s a fight for survival feeling that keeps you on your toes, always anxious about what could happen next. Many characters are forced to make sacrifices and not even Commander Shepard can save them and every loss has a toll on Shepard’s emotions as well as the emotions of the player. The game just seems to be perfect all around.

Yet I keep reading about this ending controversy and it has me worried. At about 14 hours in I took a break from Mass Effect 3 to return to Dragon Age II, Skyrim, and lately MLB 2k11. I’m not sure if being worried that the ending will disappoint me has caused this break, or if it’s the fact that a lot of times missions have been feeling pretty repetitive (shoot your way into some building / cave / camp, find someone or something and defend this area while waves of enemies are all of a sudden dropped off until you reach a climatic battle against an Atlas that ends in a cut scene). Or maybe I’ve just been in the mood for something different. I honestly don’t have the answer.

Part of me wants to reach the ending of Mass Effect so that I have an idea of what everyone’s talking about (and also every week I come closer to having the ending spoiled for me by overhearing a conversation or glancing at an article on the internet), but another part of me wants to wait to see if there will be an alternate DLC ending that will make my Mass Effect experience more enjoyable so that I don’t suffer any disappointment at all.

Maybe I’ll jump back into the battle soon, but for now I think I’m going to continue to leave it alone.