ME859 wrote...
In the end everyone would win, fans get their conventional victory and Bioware wouldn't have to settle for a reaper "off switch."
Better yet, BioWare shouldn't even have tried to give fans a victory over the Reapers. They could have just given Shepard a victory over the Council idiots, especially that "Ah, yes (airquotes) Reapers. We've dismissed that claim" turian guy by proving right about the Reaper threat after all. The choices and earlier decisions could have determined whether maybe Shepard lives and vows to help the fight to come, or maybe instead Shepard is just too exhausted from everything that's happened and passes the baton on to others, or maybe s/he dies heroically or even just angrily going down fighting (possible last paragon/renegade interrupt options) as the squad or the Normandy escapes with the incontrovertible proof the rest of the galaxy needed to be convinced.
And perhaps the incontrovertible proof could have been incontrovertible to a greater or lesser degree depending on earlier choices and even how well certain missions/assignments were done. Did you only recover ten of those crates that Aria told you about? Or did you not bother getting them at all? Maybe part of the proof was in some but you needed to have stopped the mechs from destroying at least 15, and tough that we didn't realise it at the time. Thought the Matriarch writings and League of One medallions and other artifacts you were getting in ME1 were just for XP? Well they were, but maybe there was evidence tied up there as well and how many of them you got plays a significant part in determining the outcome both for Shepard and what happens next. This would have been the "lots of different endings" that got beaten up and talked about so much before ME3 came out, but whatever the actual ending is they all have in common that the most or all of the galaxy is convinced about the threat. If you stuff things up they're convinced because Reapers are dropping out of orbit pretty much as the beginning of ME3 really did convince everyone, but if you did it right then the better endings would have been Shepard's vidication and some or all the galactic races beginning to prepare.
That's not actually what I'd hoped ME3 to be but it is kind of what we should have expected EA and BioWare to sell us, the operative word being "sell". And the reason we should have expected that is because it does two useful things for BioWare/EA. First it brings Shepard's story to a close as they always said ME3 would, though it gives them an out if the fan demand for more Shepard was too great to ignore. Yes I know they could do that anyway but they've got the plausibility problems that come with all of the various Red/Blue/Green endings, even the one that hints of survival. But I'd agree that ending Shepard's story would probably have been right. The second thing it does for EA/BioWare is create an open ended Galactic Reaper War that could have been the background for as many future Mass Effect games in as many different styles as they were willing to produce and we were willing to buy.
Mass Effect 4 5 6 etc plus Mass Effect-MP, Mass Effect-MMORPG could all have been in the pipeline, all part of the galaxy's ongoing fight against the reapers. DLC? It's all DLC! It could have made Star Wars look small, and lets be honest most of us would have bought most or all of it. Endless Mass Effect for us, endless dollars for EA. All because ME3 focussed on Shepard being proved right instead of Shepard defeating the reapers. And we wouldn't have got an autodialogue heavy story full of implausible character behaviour that eventually leads to a multicoloured reaper off switch pulled out of a dead Prothean arse.
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