Going to the Milky Way in Sequels

I'll add "butchering the lore and ignoring simple logic for drama or for desired but not naturally arising themes"

DAI did this, too (see Krem and the Qun), but in this case it's more "lore contortion" - you see how they had to give things a not really plausible twist but at least there aren't any outright contradictions, and at least they made an efffort. I can respect that. In ME3 it appears they didn't put any thought at all into it.

Regarding MEA, things will be a little easier since they leave a large body of lore behind as irrelevant, but the attitude matters. Writing with "I don't care about what I wrote yesterday" will inevitably screw things up. 
 

Interesting. I've read just the synopsis thus far but it's close to my original ideas when I just rejected the "art", if you recall, just with the Crucible added since we knew about it. Great minds think alike.

More recently though, there's been the argument that if the Reapers started really losing, they'd just go scorched earth and start dropping asteroids on our worlds. We know they're capable of writing off species and not harvesting them and their mandate would be stop the rise of synthetics first, preserve second. The reason conventional warfare can't be done isn't just their more advanced capabilities it's also their overall lack of weaknesses and dependencies vs our many ones. They can only be stopped by their complete destruction, we can be stopped by so many things.

Still, your scenario has many things I like. I'll read the rest of it and we can take it to PM (or make a new thread in ME3 story and lore) if you're interested in discussing it.

True. But unlike the naysayers on here, I don't think Andromeda is being written with "I don't care about yesterday". In fact, if that were true, they would've just done a sequel in the Milky Way and ignored the ending or conflated the choices together, or even broke their rules and declared a canon ("we will not set canon" was also put in writing, if I recall). Ironic that what they ask for requires the very thing they accuse the devs of.

But while "I don't care what I wrote" isn't the best policy, a level of "I don't want to be chained to what I wrote" is healthy and acceptable I think. Writers are allowed to want to go in different directions and do different things. We should still expect consistency, of course. Simply turning around and contradicting themselves is bad form. But leaving it intact and inventing new ways to go off in a different direction is perfectly fine. Now I won't necessarily attribute some noble new artistic vision for Andromeda, just as I didn't for the endings. The fact is they want to make a new Mass Effect game because they and EA want money and it's still a powerful recognizable brand. But that doesn't exclude wanting to do something new and cool with it (even if that "new" thing is just going back to their roots) and the most important thing is they're going about it the right way. It's not ignoring or discarding the trilogy, quite the opposite. It's letting it stand and going off a few doors down to build the next project. Continuity is maintained, nothing major is retconned.

And people who whine about "but I want to still be in the Milky Way and see how things turned out" get no sympathy from me because they sound awfully close to the "closure" people in the spring of 2012 who only wanted to see pretty pictures of their waifus, so they turned on the rest of us who wanted more and accepted the EC thus dooming any chance at real change. Not everything needs to be spelled out for you. We won, people are rebuilding. Go ahead and imagine what that is (your EC even gives you some jumping off points with the slideshows), I guarantee you what you come up with will be more satisfying for you than what Bioware could do, even if you gave them a decade and a billion dollars.

Well they've started in the right direction at least, with the preservation of continuity and an in-universe reason for the type of reset we're seeing. Of course there are still many things that can go wrong. We'll have to wait and see if they steer clear of pitfalls they've fallen into in the past.