More likely that we're heading back to the Milky Way?

Would be the worst possible idea in the history of video games. Andromeda has a lot of potential and pretending the majority of ME fans hated it, is the most absurd statement I have read this week. And remember Trump is the American President, I read a lot of absurd statements these days.

It's certainly true that the scale would be smaller, but smaller does not mean less important.

To me, that's the charm of a post-ME3 game. There is no Reaper harvest, no ancient dominion that threatens to doom the galaxy. The sky's the limit on what the current cycle can do with their new-found freedom and piles of Reaper tech. One can really dig into the cultural and societal nuances relating to the different species and how they approach a galaxy with no Reaper threat. We get hints of it especially in ME2, when we visit places like Omega and Illium, but only a little bit. There's so much that we don't know about the galaxy that the OT takes place in, even after 3 games. It's a shame that the ME3 endings and Bioware's handling of the endings is preventing them from doing more with a wonderful setting filled with fascinating people and places. There's so much that's been left fallow in order to go to Andromeda.

No slight to the new galaxy, but I think the old one still has plenty to offer.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were on the board of directors and that this thread is hinged upon the commercial viability of our ideas.

Why do we have to be so stuffy and serious on a fan forum for a video game series?

I saw narrative issues being raised, not commercial ones. So I pointed out that hey, I'm a person who likes the narrative implications of a post-Reaper galaxy! I wanted to say something nice and positive, which wasn't off-topic. Why the condescension? Why the gloom?

The part I've never quite followed is how this argument moves from "different" to "wrong." I don't see what "wrong" means in this context.

Sure, I've been wanting a retcon.  I never pretended otherwise.

But notice I'm not asking for a retcon that I personally would like here.  Just a retcon that could not be achieved through the events of ME3 as they played out.  

How about an attempt at a Low EMS Control that ended up being more akin to a Low EMS destroy?  The galaxy has been plunged into a dark age with no relays.  There are a few Reapers that managed to survive the blast, under the control of a deranged Shepard AI who's been holed up somewhere for centuries planning...something.
 
How about an ending where Shepard died at the beam run, but Bailey managed to make his way to the decision chamber and triggered a completely unexpected function.

Hell, how about a retcon where the Crucible never existed, but some other mysterious alien tech was used to defeat the Reapers, making the galaxy better or worse for it?

Plenty of games have gone this route in the past.  

One of your big complaints was the moral unacceptability of the final choices. Of the three options here, #1 may or may not solve that, depending on presentation; I think it would be hard to avoid solving your problems with this approach.. 2 and 3 certainly do avoid that.

I'm also not really clear on what problem you're trying to openly solve with this retcon. Let's stipulate that you're not trying to make your problems go away, though that may be a happy accident. So what are you trying to do? Can't be the Crucible itself since that stays in two of the three. Can't be space magic since all of them run on that.

If the "canonized" ending is something that would be impossible to achieve through ME3, then that whole problem is rendered irrelevant because we would not be playing my Shepard (or rather, my Shepard's legacy) any more than we would be playing anyone else's Shepard.

What I am trying to do is find a way to bring Mass Effect back into the Milky Way without having to deal with RGB.  Or any other wildly divergent choices made in ME3 for that matter.

Because whether you love or hate the endings (yes, I hate the endings), they are a major stumbling block going forward in any future stories set in the Milky Way.  

I don't think I'm being very clear and that's on me.

What I hope BioWare would do is declare Andromeda non-canonical musings red sand using people stranded on that planet Jacob's father landed on.  Then just continue the series set in a world state where Shepard chose High-EMS Destroy as the ending setting.

Sadly, the Geth/Quarian civilization could never be, since the geth are dead in the One True Ending™. 

OK, this is clearer. You're not against ME:A being more of the same; that's what you want. The problem is ME:A being more of the same in Andromeda.

Yep. You're making your problem go away. I'm not calling this out as a problem with the approach itself, mind. It's conceptually impossible, again, for any plan to not favor somebody. For instance, canonizing high-EMS Destroy, as others have proposed in the thread, would do a big favor for IT believers (except for the Choose Wisely splinter group). And it's only natural that you're pushing a solution that just happens, coincidentally, to make one of your big problems go away. (The fact that your proposed plan is a personal benefit for you and a personal loss for me is true, but irrelevant; it's just an inevitable consequence of the several zero-sum games we're in WRT RPG design.)


I'm still unclear what problem this is actually solving. I think we're conceptualizing the divergence problem differently. I see the problem as not being able to play in the same universe as our Shepards, and a retcon and a canon ending are exactly the same in that respect. Either way, not my Shepard's universe, and now we're paying the retcon costs too.

It'd help if someone who's really opposed to a canon ending could get into the specifics of the problem. My understanding of this issue is entirely theoretical. AS far as I'm concerned, RPG choices shouldn't last any longer than our playing time with the character who made them.