When Mass Effect 3 was released, its underwhelming ending was the controversy of the year. The blowback was of course over the top, however, it was enough to get BioWare to release a post-launch update tweaking it, though not substantially. And it’s a shame, because Mass Effect 3 is as good as Mass Effect 2, but it’s not remembered as fondly because of the ending debacle. That said, it sounds like it almost avoided this fate as its ending was not how it was originally going to end.
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Drew Karpyshyn was the lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games, but did not reprise the role for the third game. That said, when he was at BioWare, the ending for the third game, or at least the plan for it, was different. According to the writer, the game was going to directly lead to Mass Effect 4.
“As for Mass Effect, we had some very rough ideas planned out,” said Karpyshyn over on Reddit. “Basically, it involved luring the Reapers through the Mass Relays then detonating the entire network to wipe them out… but also destroying/damaging the relays and isolating every galactic community from the others. But we still had to figure out a lot of the details, and there were some issues with that option… like what we would do in the next series of games.
As you can see, this is pretty different from the original ending. It’s unclear how we got from Karpyshyn’s ending to the ending we actually got in the third game. As one Redditor points out, the original ending actually sounds quite a bit like the Arrival DLC, which connects Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3. It’s possible bits of the original ending made it into this content, but this is just speculation.
As always, feel free to leave a comment or two or 77 letting us know what you think or, alternatively, hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_ and let me know over there. What do you think of the trilogy’s original ending? Is it better than what fans ended up ultimately getting in Mass Effect 3?
