Patching a Broken Game, this guy says the truth

There wasn't going to be a sequel to ME3 anyways, regardless of how they set it up. It was a trilogy after all. The choice you made at the end of ME3 was the final decision and sealed the fate of the Milky Way for good.

I dunno, did the head honchos at Bioware really think ME3 was going to be the last Mass Effect game ever?  That strikes me as incredibly naive.  Mass Effect is a huge name in video games, and a money maker.  EA was never going to let this series die there.  ME3 could have ended with them blowing up the entire universe and EA was still going to tell them to make another one.

If they were trying to sabotage efforts to make a sequel they did a fairly decent job of that.  We had to move millions of lore breaking light years away in order to carry on, but that is kinda my point.  I mean maybe this is why a lot of talent left after ME3, feeling like their "artistic integrity" wasn't being respected when told to make another one, but once EA bought BW up those decisions simply aren't theirs to make anymore.  Did anyone really ever think EA was going to shelve the entire series after ME3?  I certainly didn't, not so long as it was receiving such huge critical praise and making money by the boatloads.

Well, pessimist or no, it would be pretty difficult (impossible) for any future titles in that setting to account for the fates of various factions on top of the state of the entire universe. Heck you can neglect the hanar and their planet gets wiped out. Sure, this stuff can get retconned to hell and back, but it still makes it feel like a totally final chapter for the setting. 

I certainly don't feel the need. I'm pretty against the whole thing.

Thanks .  The worlds didn't FEEL thrilling, they where to unfocused and generic (actually an issue I had with SWTOR) and the complete lack of grey morality, along with the complete lack of spine shown by Ryder just didn't work for me, their was not that 'are we doing the right thing?' or choices that felt like choices, so to go with this lack of agency, we have a protagonist without charisma, with a decent combat system tacked on, sorry but COD and BF have that market pretty much cornered, and do it better, (don't own those games, my house mate does, have seen them played and played them) the empty open worlds where both to big, and paradoxically to small, if they had gone 'Skyrim' open world, so that buggering off to gather herbs and be a chef for a few hours was a perfectly valid option, that would have maybe worked, and filled the emptiness with completionist obsessive behavior, and actual exploration, but it didn't so we end up with empty space and not much to do apart from a touch of dakka, on the other hand the approach they did take with a few widely spread objectives just felt like an excuse to have the nomad, seriously 5km of nuts all, just so I have to drive to whatever the flag is, isn't an open world. it's a wasteland, (ohh the Wasteland must reinstall New Vegas) a more focused hub based world, that was navigated as jump infantry with an improved jump pack in a 'travel' config (cool pop out forcefield wings required) would have felt as large due to travel times, but have been far more packed with interesting events and artifacts to hunt down, even if the travel time was the same.  

The lack of a strong personality and charisma in both the Protag, and the companions meant I just never get invested in these people or their fate, maybe strong companions would have given the plot time to grow, and the threat of the fairly generic BBEG whose plan makes very little sense would have been more visceral, but they where flat feeling, and the cut scenes and diag made them see incompetent, so I spent more time asking how the hell they had got the ranks they held, or survived til Ryder came along than I did worrying about the Archie killing them..or transforming them or w/e,  and now the elephant in the room of recent BW titles: the one, the only BBEG (literally the one and only, he showed up in Inquisition, he shows up with some spinners and new paint in Andromeda) we get a pseudo-nietzschean (as understood by edgy college kids [no I don't understand Nietzche, but I KNOW I don't]) ubermensch wannabe spreading a taint while obsessed with the MacGuffin the PC has in their hand/head to unlock the secrets of the Heaven/The Remnant who wastes time piddling about because reasons while the Inquisitor/Pathfinder builds a force and alliances to resist them....yea.   So apart from incompetence and motivation..and big shoulders and a messed up face...and spreading an 'taint' that turns people into their allies what ELSE do they have in common?  That's right: They don't feel threatening, because they are passive, and that should be a weird thing to say, after all don't they both have minions they send out, and plans? Yes BUT, (you knew that was coming) those minions don't actually DO anything, they get to an area, set up the 'plot place' and wait around for stuff to happen, we don't see settlements attacked, except in scripted events, we don't lose anything by ignoring them, they just kinda are.  So given this what should the BBEG do to feel threatening?  Jon Irenicus managed this with scripted events, by turning out to have his fingers in everything, seriously just play BG II to find out, describing why this works is to complicated.  Logain manages it, by the illusion of using his rank and title against you, and his actions during the first battle against the blight, (and indeed in the human noble prologue) he manages to get under your skin and you hate him, Archie never manages that, he feels like a bunch of mustache swirling and evil laughs with a rail gun.