<\/div>Let’s do the bad news first:<\/p>\n
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- The ending of Mass Effect 3<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n
- For a series that likes to remind audiences that their choices matter, this is a tricky issue. It’s a tradition in Mass Effect<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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<\/em> and just bring them back to life. Together, we can do better.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Stalling<\/h2>\n
Mass Effect 4<\/em>, if it’s ever made, should be set a significant amount of time after the events of the original series. By “significant” I mean anything from 50-200 years or so, though I’m open to flexibility on the timeline. But whatever happened in the immediate aftermath of the Crucible going off should happen offscreen.<\/p>\n
Instead, the player will be someone born on Earth after all that. Said Earth will in some kind of post-apocalyptic state, either mild, severe, or medium, depending on what tone you want. What happened to the Reapers, exactly? No one knows. They used to be flying around and blowing everything up, and now they’re not anymore. They say someone called “Shepard” defeated them somehow, but there are a hundred conflicting stories.<\/p>\n
<\/div>Nothing against the SR2, but I'm an SR1 man.<\/div><\/p>\nStalling in this way accomplishes several things.<\/p>\n
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- You avoid a long exposition dump right at the beginning. No one likes those.Okay, very few people like those.<\/span><\/li>\n
- If you write carefully, you can leave it ambiguous which ending happened. For example, don’t have any synthetic or partly-synthetic life forms enter the story for as long as you can manage.<\/li>\n
- You can make a clean break from whichever characters you want, but it also leaves open running into Liara or maybe a getting-too-old-for-this-shit Garrus or something.<\/li>\n
- When a setting moves forward in time, it can make it seem more real. The Fallout series did this from one to two to New Vegas<\/em>. It also leaves the intervening time as open space for quest\/character hooks.<\/li>\n
- Got some crazy idea that would need fifty years to be plausible? Now you can put it in. The gap between Mass Effect 3<\/em> and the hypothetical Mass Effect 4<\/em> is your canvas. Go nuts.<\/li>\n
- It’s a perfect excuse for whatever mechanical changes you want. Personally, I recommend deciding that thermal clips are once again not a thing, but that’s just me.<\/li>\n
- Thanks to the events of the third game, all the setting’s various species are well represented on earth, meaning you can bring them all back. I know someone still has those old Hanar models saved somewhere.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The action of the main quest can involve sorting out the truth from the stories, and discovering what exactly happened. And, when the time comes that you can no longer write your way around which ending the player picked, you limit the effects of that choice to certain limited and manageable parts of the game.<\/p>\n
For example, the main quest involves a mission in an area full of leftover husks. If you picked destroy, there are a bunch of husk corpses, colored red. Maybe some somehow survived and are hostile. Control, and the husks are blue, and controlled by an NPC or something. Green, and the husks are NPCs themselves. This way, the player’s choice in the previous game is acknowledged, and you don’t need to move heaven and earth to do it.<\/p>\n
That’s a deliberately oversimplified example, but hopefully you get the idea. The question of “what did your Shepard do in the original series” can itself be transmuted into story content for the new game. That’s what stalling gets you. But stalling alone is not enough – it’s like the jab that sets up the right hand. The right hand – the knockout punch – is retconning.<\/p>\n
Retconning<\/h2>\n
- For a series that likes to remind audiences that their choices matter, this is a tricky issue. It’s a tradition in Mass Effect<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n
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