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[heinoMK2]

Some time ago, somewhen shortly after the "Casey Hudson wants ideas" came up, i posted a suggestion about an exodus-like setting. The main idea was following:

During the last moments of the Reaper war a fleeing convoy of spaceships carrying many tousands if not millions of refugees gets caught in the Relay Collapse and gets catapulted to a completely unknown area of space where no communication can be recieved from the main civilizations and the few visible stars look different and strange. Refugees settle in, manage to keep the technology level and even invent and find new technologies thanks to ancient ruins in their area of space. But with time passing - several hundred years, maybe - they find out that they landed in what seems to constitute to some sort of a strange isle in space with no apparent way to leave it.

You as a player are naturally a refugee descendant. Your character's race doesn't matter because you don't have to know anything too detailed about the old Mass Effect lore and everything that you need to know you can learn at the beginning of the game, thus enabling other races as playable is much easier if needed.
Player's character was growing up hearing stories about the now almost mythical figure of Shepard and the struggle with Reapers, about the old glory of galactic civilization(s) and all the huge space with almost infinite amount of stars, so unimaginable on your little space isle. Naturally fascinated by these, the little kid grows up with a dream - to find the lost stars and give them back to his people.
Thus, among the first moments of the game, is the Stargazer Scene from ME3 and your first game mission starts with you as a part of the effort of exploring the few places left untouched and to try to find your way back to the rest of the universe.


This is about what i wrote back then. Now i was looking at the threads lately and there is suddenly indeed some talk about some sort of an "Ark" scenario and the game is said to be about exploration, which is pretty interesting. This of course let me come back to my idea and think about an interesting twist to spice it up and maybe even find a way to remedy the mess that we were served at the end of ME3.

And here it is:

What if the Starchild wasn't just a psychotic, serial murderering AI cannibal after all and the Reapers were not merely glorified space toasters under its command? What if the talk about preserving life was literal to the point and among all the annihilation they indeed preserved "worthy" species - not just as goo in a space tin can - but on a scale of entire planet populations, for the time when they finally would find a solution to the problem they tried to solve(and to make it interesting, maybe organics vs genetics is not the entirety of the issue and there was and is still a bigger picture/conflict, still unresolved and hidden)?

So what if after the first mission or two you find out that Reapers had a zoo - or something akin to a Reaper Garten of Eden with billions years of evolution spread across a huge yet still limited numbers of star systems and planets - and the refugee civilization was living on the edge of it the entire time. There would be some really crazy worlds to see - hollow planets, shattered planets still keeping their athmo- and biospheres with crazy gravitation fields, dyson spheres, micro black holes orbited by planets preserving the oldest harvested species in the slowness of time, huge space stations, gigantic space elevators and so on.

And since we could use another story twist to make it even more exiting, you would find this garden in a disarray - as if after a cataclysmic occurence -, with Reaper guardians dead for a millenium, remaining automatic defense systems running amok, clues for massive infighting and many many worlds and most civilizations wiped out by something. Something that maybe was a prisoner like the others... or maybe came from outside, feasting on weakened and defenseless worlds. Maybe there were two? You would have to find out by exploring, piecing the clues together and meeting the rare survivors while also fighting against the remnants of the fallen civilizations who have sank into their darker ages yet still field deadly weaponry instead of stones. And you will want to find a way out - so your little refugee civilization doesn't end up like the others in this slowly decying shadow of a paradise.


So what do you people think about such a setting for the next ME?

[Revan Reborn]

No more Reapers. No zoos. BioWare is going in a different direction with the next Mass Effect focusing on a new threat in a new region of space.

[heinoMK2]

Reapers gone? Check. Different direction? Yep, in a way quite radically different. New threat? Most definitely. New region? Yepyepyep. My post may be somewhat long - but really, give it a try.

[StealthGamer92]

Not looking good to me. Just not a fan of alternate universe or galaxy theories in general.

[Revan Reborn]

Reapers gone? Check. Different direction? Yep, in a way quite radically different. New threat? Most definitely. New region? Yepyepyep. My post may be somewhat long - but really, give it a try.

No more reapers in the sense that I do not want future games to be dictated by their actions. Your entire concept is based on some unknown plot the reapers and the Catalyst devised all along. I'd rather the reaper threat be done with and BioWare move on to new stories. As far as I'm concerned, High EMS Destroy is the most legitimate ending and the galaxy can finally move forward.

[MegaIllusiveMan]

Yeah, it won't have any connection with the Reapers... Come on, we don't even have a Time Span yet. I liked the idea, but the probability of it happening is null.

[x Raizer x]

I don't want to see Reapers anywhere neat a Zoo.

Didn't you see what Reapers did to the Council races?
Imagine that happening to a Tiger.

Or even more frightening...

A Penguin!

[Iakus]

Reapers don't have zoos.

 

Reapers have buffet lines. 

 

[Kabooooom]

More than likely, we will get a "stranger in a strange land" sort of scenario, and the new threat will be an advanced alien race that has either existed in isolation or has been hiding from the reapers like the Leviathans have - waiting for their chance to rise again.

[heinoMK2]

 

More than likely, we will get a "stranger in a strange land" sort of scenario, and the new threat will be an advanced alien race that has either existed in isolation or has been hiding from the reapers like the Leviathans have - waiting for their chance to rise again.

 

A Stranger In a Strange Land scenario would actually be exactly an exodus/arc scenario where you come back to the known galaxy wielding some vastly superior tech/powers and experiencing what has become of your old galactic civilization in the mean time. At least if you go by the same-named book.

I see people completely discarding any sort of reaper presence in the new ME - be it as live reapers or just some sort of reaper legacy. I strongly agree with the former(live reapers) and really disagree with the latter. After alll, reapers have shaped the glaxy for billions of years, channeling the evolution of countless species on immense number of worlds and amassing vast amounts of technology that is surely still left somewhere lying around. Just doing away with it completely, not even trying to establish this as a part of a broad story background, which you would encounter in the next ME, is in my opinion not doing the ME universe a favor.

Of course, we could go to a completely new galaxy where everything is totally new and where we could completely forget about ME1-3. But if there is a chance to try and partly redeem what has gone wrong at the end of ME3, why not try and use that chance to correct the Reaper image of a a bunch of space toasters from outer space enslaved by Skynet back to somewhat mysterious robotic beings? For this you absolutely do not have to make them a center point of the story, just a logical part of the main story background in some way.

p.s: I am too a fan of destroy ending, btw.

[Kabooooom]

  

A Stranger In a Strange Land scenario would actually be exactly an exodus/arc scenario where you come back to the known galaxy wielding some vastly superior tech/powers and experiencing what has become of your old galactic civilization in the mean time. At least if you go by the same-named book.

I see people completely discarding any sort of reaper presence in the new ME - be it as live reapers or just some sort of reaper legacy. I strongly agree with the former(live reapers) and really disagree with the latter. After alll, reapers have shaped the glaxy for billions of years, channeling the evolution of countless species on immense number of worlds and amassing vast amounts of technology that is surely still left somewhere lying around. Just doing away with it completely, not even trying to establish this as a part of a broad story background, which you would encounter in the next ME, is in my opinion not doing the ME universe a favor.

Of course, we could go to a completely new galaxy where everything is totally new and where we could completely forget about ME1-3. But if there is a chance to try and partly redeem what has gone wrong at the end of ME3, why not try and use that chance to correct the Reaper image of a a bunch of space toasters from outer space enslaved by Skynet back to somewhat mysterious robotic beings? For this you absolutely do not have to make them a center point of the story, just a logical part of the main story background in some way.

p.s: I am too a fan of destroy ending, btw.

So, you basically want to retcon the Catalyst?

And most people seem to not want the Reapers to return. And that's mostly irrelevant anyways, because Bioware will just do what they want...and they've already heavily implied that they want to be over and done with the reaper story arc.

[heinoMK2]

"Retcon" doesn't describe it properly. Part of the idea above was to add another angle and complexity to the Reapers, because i think it's quite unfortunate to turn them from almost a sort of space enigma from beyond the time to a mere robot, apparently with no free will and slave to a single rogue AI. Reaper legacy would be just a part of the story background, with possibly very different main actors.

The idea started out with a fairly simple exodus scenario because i was wondering how the RGB ending of ME3 could been resolved to allow a sequel. I then read "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein to get a better idea what Casey Hudson meant back then describing the new ME. And i was fascinated by the idea of a such a refugee group building up their own civilization and then at some point going back to their old homelands, with us as the player right in the middle of that story.

And while i was spinning all the possible little story twists in my head, i would always come back to the conclusion that the reaper arc is from now on an essential part of the ME universe, an integral part of its fundament. Just think about what such a cataclysm on a galactic scale means to the civilizations in their cultural and historical sense - every single surviving race was basically born a second time, it faught tooth and nails for their right to survive. The victory at the end will turn into the at least an equivalent of a creation mythos for every involved species . And there will be remains and evidence of this war for millenia all over the galaxy even with reapers long dead and/or gone.
This brought me then to my dissatisfaction about the evolution of ME1 reapers, each independent, a nation, without a fault(according to Sovereign) with powers and motives far beyond our reasoning, to the sad little space toasters who can't even hit a single human with their main cannon, who blurt out some cliched phrases worthy of a trash movie from the 60ies and who are merely slaves, worse than a pawn to an AI caught in a logic loop, who can be switched off at will.
Thus i thought they deserved more than that, thus i went back to their beginnings, the main plot devised by Kapryshyn and thought that there is maybe still room for something on a similarly grand scale but maybe somewhat less fatal at the end.

And well, there it is. If you pay attention you might also notice how my suggestion offers possibility to give the players an immediate, clear threat while there is a lot of room for a vastly bigger picture to speculate about and build upon - just like in the original ME story.

Please keep in mind, this is merely me throwing out an idea to see if people might like it and not demanding to make the next ME game just like that.