Drew Karpyshyn, one of the former writers of BioWare, shared interesting information about Mass Effect 3 at the AMA event he attended on Reddit. The original ending they thought of for the game was different from what we saw, and it was directly linked to Mass Effect 4.
You may remember that the end of Mass Effect 3 caused this successful series to leave a bittersweet taste in the mouths. BioWare then changed the ending of the game to be more beautiful (and detailed), but it’s still hard to say that it can fully satisfy players.
Spoilers for those who haven’t played Mass Effect 3 after this, so if you plan to play it one day in the future, I recommend you not to read this section:
At the end of the game, Catalyst was giving us three options.
Destruction: Destroy reapers and all other synthetic life forms (including friendly species such as EDI and Geth).
Control: Controlling the Reapers by copying Shepard’s influence into the new AI (the Reapers will be a kind of galaxy cop). However, this option requires us to leave our human form behind and become artificial intelligence.
Synthesis: Synthesizing organic and synthetic life forms. Thus, these two life forms, which were combined with the elements, can now live in harmony. Although this may seem like the most peaceful ending, it is not really so.
We also had a fourth option, and that was to reject all that and shoot Catalyst. So we were saying that “whatever the Reapers do in this cycle, the future cycle will find a way to deal with the Reapers differently.”
Karpyshyn said the other end they were thinking about was to lure the Reapers into Mass Relays and then blow up the entire network to get rid of it all. So doing so would destroy the relays, and the communities in the galaxy would become disconnected and isolated from each other. What would happen next would be explained in Mass Effect 4.
This would be the end at which we could destroy the Reapers without killing anyone else (Karpyshyn didn’t say if this was in addition to the other endings, but even if the player was given the option, this would be considered the last canon for Game 4). We would probably try to rebuild and repair the Mass Relays in the fourth game, and reassemble the galaxy.
If you want to refresh your knowledge about the history of Mass Effect, I strongly recommend you to read the History of Mass Effect articles:)
History of > Mass Effect – Part 1
History of > Mass Effect – Part 2
