T w e n t y S i d e d
We will now get down to brass tacks.
Some of you are now hearing Gilbert and Sullivan in your heads.
Let’s do the bad news first:
- The ending of Mass Effect 3 offered the player three primary options for defeating the reapers: destroy, control, and synthesis. It’s not clear what the exact consequences of each choice are, but the three are mutually incompatible outcomes regardless. The effects they would have on the game world are so big that anyone trying to make a sequel would almost have to make three entire seperate games to account for the three separate game states. And that’s just the three “main” endings – trying to account for the gajillion sub-endings is most likely impossible.
- For a series that likes to remind audiences that their choices matter, this is a tricky issue. It’s a tradition in Mass Effect to import your saves from the previous games into the new one. Reasonable or not, some people are going to expect to see their choices in the original series reflected in the new game.
- The ending destroys the Mass Effect relays and strands multiple species on unfamiliar planets in a way that would make survival an immediate and alarming problem. This particular element has been since been half-retconned into clarifying that the relays are only “damaged,” but there would still certainly be a desperate situation in the short-term.
- The primary antagonists of the series – the Reapers – are gone, and you’re going to have to find new ones. (By the way, don’t pull a Star Wars and just bring them back to life. Together, we can do better.)
Those are some pretty big problems. Especially the first two. If we can lick those first two, we can salvage this thing. Here’s how: stalling and retconning.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hypothetical ME4: Stalling and Retconning”
