Any news on ME4?

I agree and I think it would be the same with BioWare picking an ending for ME3.  The majority will pretty much shrug their shoulders and move on, the few would rage and claim they speak for "everyone on the planet" and never stop.  I just don't think BioWare wants to go through that again.

If it hadn't been over Mass Effect, I'd likely have had a chuckle. I was worried for the IP, mostly. I didn't want that to be the ME legacy.

Sad but true.

I wouldn't say I've seen anyone demanding it. Most fans with whom I've interacted adamantly oppose a canonized ending. Those of us who wanted such wanted it so that the Milky Way would still be viable after 2186 CE. It seems that BioWare thought advancing the timeline 634+ years might do the trick. (I'm sure the goal was mostly to shift to Andromeda for a time and weigh options while telling new stories. The lengthy FTL travel time was simply a bonus.)

The near future setting was a lot of the appeal for me. The MET took place only 170 years from now. It loses some charm if it's 1000 years in the future. I imagine insane tech for sci-fi set that far in the future; not mass effect tech.

I'm not sure if you read my post correctly. I can't really tell. I was in favor of a canon ending and a Milky Way sequel. I'd have liked to have seen another game in the MW in the neighborhood of 2210 CE. That gives the galaxy a couple of decades to rebuild after the Reaper War. They'd still not be truly recovered, but things would have long since returned to "life as usual" in the important ways. "Technological stagnation" under these circumstances wouldn't be odd.

Sci-Fi is all over the place. I don't follow goofy settings like Warhammer precisely because I can't take them seriously. I do like Star Wars, but it's equally ridiculous. It would be hard for me to swallow a setting in which our present Earth society advanced chronologically 1000 years but had so little technological advancement to show for it. I know the Asari, Salarians, Turians, etc... are very stagnant. Maybe that's their thing, though. Humans are on a meteoric rise in the setting. We don't stand pat. Having already introduced a fun, reasonably "believable" near future setting in ME, I'd hate to see the "same old shit in 3100 CE". The galactic community did nothing for 1000 years after overcoming the Reapers? (Particularly if Synthesis were the canon ending would stagnation be unacceptable.) It would be very hard to take seriously.

There's a pretty cool pen and paper RPG setting called Numenera**. It's set on Earth 1 Billion years in the future. Not only is the planet habitable, but there are humans living on it. The peoples of the setting don't realize that the former is astonishing. They do know that the latter is strange. The world is covered in the technological detritus of many super advanced civilizations that have come and gone. These civilizations mastered dimensional technologies, intergalactic travel, produced insane nanotech, reshaped worlds, uplifted stars and any other number of crazy things. (Naturally, it's all as good as magic to the peoples of the setting. The understanding of their brightest is like a film of dust on the scales.) Anyway, getting to the point, the creators emphasize that words like "guns", "cars", "robots", or anything that equates to our world shouldn't even be used. If you want to approximate such things, at least find a different way to say it and reskin it in order to drive home the alien nature of advanced tech.

While the setting is in many ways medieval science fantasy, a great effort is made to emphasize strange, inexplicable experiences due to incomprehensible tech. Advancing our timeline 1000 years should result in some bizarre, unpredictable changes. Since ME is our world +170 years, I think they should try to keep the timeline more tight than MEA seems to suggest of their plan. I know others will feel differently about this. Most won't give it this much thought. ME has been progressively stripped of its sci-fi ever since the Lazarus Project. I hate to see even the illusion I have in my mind dashed by unnecessary timeline jumps or whatever else. Let me pretend it's still sci-fi (ish).



** There is a video game, Torment: Tides of Numenera,  based upon this setting. I'm not so sure it accurately conveys the true feel of the setting, but it does seem to convey the weirdness. They forced some features into the game, like "the tides", that simply don't work well outside of the video game.

It is still viable post 2186, if people download and watch the EC. Civilization did eventually rebuild itself and continue on. Except, they weren't going to tell any more stories after that.

Even in the original ending, civilization wasn't destroyed (bar the low EMS destroy ending which kills everyone), it was simply cut off from each other. People could still use FTL to get home or travel to other places.

The differences were addressed in the Extended Cut. Whether that was up to people expectations is another thing. I guess it wasn't.

People forget that Mass Effect, at least the first three games, were designed as a trilogy. There wasn't going to be a fourth game just for the aftermath. The Extended Cut shows the aftermath of the war. Like an epilogue in a book, it's a small section at the end of it. Epilogues are either left out entirely, or they are a short section at the end to wrap things up.

They chose not to make an ending to ME3 canon, because they wanted to keep your choices relevant. You essentially get to decide how your final decision of the trilogy plays out, without the developers telling you which one is correct. In a game about player choice, I see that as a good thing.

You can suggest to them that they should pick a canon ending, but they can always say no.

They actually left the galaxy before the Reapers left. Secondly, when ME3 was released, they also said that any future games would take place before (Andromeda) or during ME3, but not afterwards. This part is true today.

Having choices relevant means having ALL choices relevant, right?

In ME1, the player gets the option, choice, to recruit Garrus or not. If he isn't recruited in ME1, taken to Sur'Kesh, and Kirrahe happened to survive ME1, both know each other by name. How is that possible? Did Bioware ignore my choice? Yes. If they can ignore that choice, regardless of how insignificant, then they can ignore any choice they want.

In a thread, back in 2013, someone posted a tweet from Mike Gamble saying Bioware respects players choice. I replied to that post by saying that Gamble may want to play the game to make sure what he's tweeting is correct.

The ending doesn't make all your choices irrelevant. Angry fans believed their choices were made irrelevant.

Maybe they knew each other off screen. Not everything is said in dialogue form you know.

Are you suggesting Mike Gamble is lying to you? If you are, then it's kind of hard to take things you say seriously. I'm sure he has played the game. He's the producer, who oversees all the departments and such. I'm sure he's checked their work, which means actually playing the game.

He is at it again -putting words in the mouths of others.
He must be trolling.
Ignore him.
Apparently he only reads what is right in front of him and doesn't expand his field of view of reading.
Also note -I think his sole purpose is to be a troll -who else uses the X-Files Smoking man as their avatar but a troll?

Only that it's what the #MeToo movement goes by in the 22nd Century.

(Seriously Shepard, did you think HR wasn't noticing how often you hit on your co-workers?)

Garrus was the lead investigator over whether Saren was involved in the attack on Eden Prime, so one would imagine then that Garrus' name was included in some kind of STG dossier containing information related to Saren's recent activities. That could be how Kirrahe knew who Garrus was, even if the two had never met on Virmire.

From the news broadcasts in ME2, it was public knowledge that Shepard rescued an STG team on Virmire. If Kirrahe's name had been reported as the leader of the rescued team, that could be one way that Garrus could have learned of it. Garrus was slightly obsessed with the Saren case, so even if he wasn't recruited in ME1, I can picture him as having followed Shepard's progress in tracking Saren down.

Admittedly both of these are slight stretches to justify this oversight, as it does seem more likely that Bioware dropped the continuity ball in ME3. Things like this tend to happen in sequels when the worldstates begin to diverge too far from the baseline.

DA has similar continuity snarls. For instance, if we kill Wynne in DAO, how do we then reconcile that in DAI, Cole references the events of the Asunder novel in which Wynne played a huge role? Even if we handwave another mage as taking her place in the novel, why would they recruit Wynne's son? It also doesn't explain why does Cole specifically alludes to Wynne saving Evangeline at the cost of her own life.