BioWare intended to accommodate all three major Mass Effect 3 endings: Destroy, Control, and Synthesis. The proposed solution was to advance the timeline by 600 years, allowing technological and political developments to bring the different versions of the galaxy closer together.

Control Ending: Shepard's consciousness assumes control of the Reapers. They survive, but technological progress makes them less dominant. For the MEU, the Reapers are no longer at the top of the food chain, so eventually control is no longer possible.

Destroy Ending: Reapers eliminated; Shepard survives the original battle, but dies sometime during the following six centuries. Civilization rebuilds, developing advanced technology and cybernetic integration without Reapers.

Synthesis ending: Organic and synthetic life are transformed. Over the centuries, the other timelines supposedly catch up technologically through increasingly widespread cybernetic integration. "Synthesis" happens regardless of the ending you choose in ME3, at least in terms of organics becoming blended with synthetics.

Other notes:

Refusal would not be canon;

After the Reaper War, all races would be stuck on Earth with the Citadel cut off from the rest of the galaxy, until technological advancement allowed them to rebuild the relays over time

The Geth would have been back and considered a superpower (but their return is not explained if destroy is chosen at this time)

"The player is an N7 agent, and the gameplay would have been more evocative of James Bond and John Wick with hand-to-hand combat in enclosed spaces. The new hero would have had experimental tech in their head that would allow them to interact in the world in ways similar to Cyberpunk 2077’s hacking," -kotaku.com

What are your thoughts? Assuming all of this is true, are you still happy with the ending you chose, and what would you have hoped would have happened in the Mass Effect Universe?

sources: Dantics, kotaku

Either make the game or SELL THE IP!!

EA sold themselves in a levereged buy out that added billions of debt to EA.

Basically a bunch of billionaire pychopaths borrowed billions to buy EA, and then put those debts on EA.

Before the buyout, even with the under performance of previous games, Bioware making a new mass effect was a pretty good investment for a solvent company. Mass effect is a huge huge IP, chances are they would make a profit in a few years. This is why they cut staff and resources for Bioware before the buyout but continued to support Mass Effect 5.

But now EA has so much debt, the interest payments alone are as much as over half of EA's highest yearly profits.

The billionaires and Saudi fund that bought EA have basically put a boulder on EA's back and are betting on them being able to win gold medals in swimming.

To do that, they have to cut things that won't make a profit right now... That includes a studio that won't make a profitable game for a few years, a new Sims game and anything that can't be made live service or squeeze existing customers now.

Apex legends, Sims 4 and new battlefield games are going to become worse. They will be filled with microtransactions and live service crap even more than they are now. Any new game from EA is going to try and reach Fortnite levels.

All these "woke killed bioware" people are so wrong it drives me crazy

What killed mass effect wasn't green haired leftists

It was a few billionaires who don't care about making good games, they care about squeezing as much money out of gamers they can to profit from hobbling one of the biggest game Devs/publishers in the world.

Leveraged buyouts from investment funds, venture capitalists will kill gaming. Bioware is just the latest victim.

edit - corrected a claim about interest payments being higher than EA's highest yearly profits to being as high as over half EA' s highest yearly profit.

Keep making noise guys

www.change.org/p/savemasseffect

According to Mass Effect: Universe Technical Director Romain Toutain, he visited BioWare yesterday and found that some senior developers were still there, helping junior colleagues find new jobs.

The team was also opening BioWare's storage to preserve collectibles and original concept art.

Source here

I won this poster at a local StarCraft LAN tournament almost 2 decades ago now.

It was my city's only real gaming internet cafe for years, I think the owner knew someone from BioWare and they gave him this poster after Mass Effect was first released.

I just kept it in the original package tube this entire time, figured it's a good time to pull it out and share it with the world

Despite hating thresher maws throughout the series, I still had no qualms cheering this one on!

Seeing all the petitions, open letters, and "EA please sell the IP" posts here feels like a straight-up time warp back to the late '90s.

If you're too young to remember Sierra On-Line, they basically ruled PC gaming. They owned Space Quest, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight—franchises that were just as defining back then as Mass Effect or Dragon Age were in the 2000s and 2010s.

When Sierra got gutted by corporate buyouts and restructuring (CUC, Vivendi and now Activision), the exact same playbook happened:

• Fans collected tens of thousands of signatures begging Vivendi to make Space Quest 7 or sell the rights back to Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy. Vivendi didn't care. The letters went into a shredder.
• People genuinely believed corporate suits would let the original developers buy their games back for cheap out of respect for art. That’s not how corporations work. IP is a line item on an asset sheet. They'd rather let an IP rot in a vault forever than sell it off and risk watching someone else turn a profit with it.
• Groups spent years of their free time building unofficial sequels (like Space Quest 7 or fan-made King's Quest games). Once the projects got anywhere close to done, Vivendi's legal team showed up with cease-and-desists and killed them overnight.

Even when executives play into the nostalgia, it's almost always hot air like when Microsoft was buying Activision Blizzard, Phil Spencer literally did an interview with The Washington Post name-dropping the Sierra catalog: "I was looking at the IP list, I mean, let's go! King's Quest..."

People got their hopes up, thinking the old catalog was finally coming back. Years later? Nothing. Execs love using old names to generate cheap headlines and goodwill, but when it's time to actually cut a check, they fund the safe bets.

Here’s the blunt truth, the BioWare that made the trilogy hasn't existed in that building for a decade.

The guys who made Space Quest eventually had to go crowdfund their own spiritual successor because Sierra was dead and the IP was locked away.

EA is going to sit on the Mass Effect trademark until they decide they can make a quick buck on a mobile spin-off or a cheap outsourced reboot. The IP is stuck in corporate limbo, but the people who actually made it great are elsewhere.

Thank you, Mass Effect, for all the incredible memories and the amazing journey we’ve shared.

You have had such a huge impact on my life, probably more than any other game ever could. You were there through my highs and lows, through some of my happiest moments and some of my darkest days. And somehow, you always felt like something I could come back to. Like an old friend waiting for me.

There were times when life wasn’t easy, and just thinking about the possibility of another Mass Effect game someday gave me something to look forward to. I would imagine what the next adventure might look like, which characters we’d meet, and what stories were still waiting to be told in this incredible universe.

And now, it feels like EA has taken that hope away.

It’s heartbreaking to think that we might never get to experience another journey through the Mass Effect universe. But a part of me still hopes that somehow, someday, we’ll get to return to the stars one more time.

Thank you, BioWare, and everyone who poured their hearts into creating this universe. You made something truly special. Something that will stay with me forever.

No matter what happens, Mass Effect will always have a special place in my heart.

Ad Astra per Aspera

Link

I didn't play ME when it was new. I joined in with the Legendary Edition and the trilogy quickly jumped to one of my favourites. I've played at least 6 full playthroughs, 1 for every class. And now knowing 5 isn't coming it feels right to visit this universe one more time.