Mass Effect Legendary Edition is coming out in the Spring of 2021, and, naturally, players already have a good idea of what to expect from the story. Many fans are hoping for a major graphical upgrade, perhaps the reintegration of some cut content, and little else.
Some fans will be hoping that the Mass Effect Legendary Edition makes a change to Mass Effect 3’s controversial ending. While not impossible, this is very unlikely. However, the ending of Mass Effect 3 did go through several different iterations during its development and after its release, when it was edited with DLC content. With that in mind, here’s an interesting history of how ME3 could’ve ended and how it changed after it did.
Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer on Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, has spoken about some of the endings he had in mind while writing the first two games in the series. One idea he had was that the Reapers may be trying to stop the universe from ending in some kind of inversion of the Big Bang, but only biotics could do that so Reapers were frequently doing a ‘hard reset’ in order to find the right Biotic capabilities. This depended on an ultimately canned plotline which focused on the inability of synthetics to use the biotic tools the organic characters were able to, as well as organics having a unique relationship with Dark Energy which was hinted at in Mass Effect 2 but never came up again.
Talking to VGS, Karpyshyn also described another dropped plotline. “At one point we thought that maybe Shepard could be an alien but didn’t know it. But then we thought that might be a little too close to Revan,” he said, referencing the main character of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic. It’s possible that this reasoning was also behind the decision not to pursue Indoctrination Theory or make it explicit, which stated that Shepard could be indoctrinated by the Reapers, and would later claim that the ending of Mass Effect 3 was a mental construct of Shepard representing his battle for his mind.
Once the game actually released, the original ending of Mass Effect 3 was met with a lot of controversy. After every decision made in the series, the final decision boiled down to this: walking towards a blue light which would allow Shepard himself to take control of the Reapers, walking towards a green light which represented synthesis between organics and synthetics, or walking towards a red light which would destroy the Reapers and all synthetic life.
Though the ending’s consequences also factored in the player’s Effective Military Strength, many players were upset that it felt like so many of their choices were ignored by the game. BioWare then released extended versions of these three main endings to placate fans in the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut DLC. These endings mostly added cutscenes after Shepard’s decision showing the consequences of their actions, though the changes were mostly supplementary, not revisionary.
Finally, the Citadel DLC added a new prologue to the ending, a side adventure that let players say goodbye to Shepard and their companions properly before embarking on their final mission. It adds a little more nuance to the ending, but that’s about it. While it’s unlikely that Mass Effect 3’s ending will be revised for the remaster, it’s possible that the degrees of change applied to the ending could be a good litmus test for the amount of change BioWare will be willing to make to the Legendary Edition.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is in development for 2021.
Source: VGS
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