Mass Effect '5' speculation (Official Thread)

1) Too much baggage.  The galaxy (Milky Way or Andromeda) is a big place with untold billions of individuals in it.  There's no need to keep recycling the same characters over and over again.  Just tell a new story with new characters.

2) Doesn't matter.  At least it's a break from that abomination that is the Crucible, Catalyst, and RGB.  Seriously, I'd take "it was all a dream" over that drek.

Well Iakus, with those 2 options, I prefer an Unique "canon" ending that has a good flow into a Post Reaper Mass Effect game.

I could live with that, but I'd prefer not to.

ME2, ME3, DA2, DAI, MEA all to various extents 'decanonizes' previous games and I don't think anyone can convince me otherwise.

All sorts of factors get merged into something 'workable' for a 10s (or 100+) of hours game world and plot to happen.

As I've explained before, I'm perfectly fine with some sort of future Milky Way that, one way or another, results in a still-pretty-wrecked (but explained differently, and maybe with another setting-separation of a different war, even if that war is related to the Reaper War) galaxy that we can explore. Have enough elements that reset factors, while still calling out to the trilogy, and maybe tie the Andromeda arc in, and we have something, in my opinion!

But I don't think Bioware actually needs to exclusively canonize Destroy. In fact I think those who totally insist on it, 'lack imagination' (to pull a phrase from past-Bioware rep). I even think we don't need a particularly ruined galaxy as we might imagine an at least more damaging Destroy. Just with enough stuff that hampers it from reaching the highest potentials of Destroy, Control, or even Synthesis.

Bioware does this anyway.
Dragon Age: We save Ferelden and its (or can be) on the up-and-up based on our choices? Lets have you start at a bad time of Ferelden then flee it to reach the Free Marches. We help parts of Kirkwall? Lets take you away from there so we don't face the immediate aftermath of that mess. We stabilize southern Thedas in various ways? Nah, lets distance you from that by taking the Inquisitor north, new protagonist focus on the North, so if/when we return to the South it'll not have to reflect those DAI decisions so much.
And Mass Effect: 'Savior of the Citadel' as your character peak? Nah lets disgrace you, to whatever extent, enough that you can explore the underbelly of the galaxy and won't be exactly too famous and revered. Put together a crew that might beat the Reapers? Nah lets split most of you up and have most of the already inadequate preparations be moot, at least until you can bring it all together as 'EMS'. Saved the galaxy and became a Legend? Oh look, a different galaxy tee hee.

They can do it again and make a Milky Way setting that's basically alien enough from ME3 that its mostly a different place, but similar enough that it has continuity and triggers nostalgia.

Not saying they will.

TLDR No don't worry about a post-Synthesis future sheesh. Too many worry too much.



EDIT: Here's the thing. The Catalyst was made (by the game designers) as something that felt untrustworthy for a reason. Whatever ending we get in ME3 is indeed that, the ending. But we're faced with the ending with an aura - argue its an optional aura, I don't care - of uncertainty around many elements of this ending. How does the Crucible truly or fully work? How did we get to see the Catalyst? What's its damn story? Why is everything said with such certainty - from the Reaper 'God' no less, and should we fully trust that? Can Shepard do the correct thing for the long run, or is he just the organic that is the best known one that can choose the most right decision for the effed up final decision of the war? Does a supposed 'solution' fix anything beyond its specific purposes (whether of the Alliance, or the galaxies' people, or including the Reapers), or might it actually, no matter what, make some things worse?
What I mean by this is that I think too many assume a bright (or only bright-ish, its ME3 after all) ending for a Bioware game to be the be-all. I'd have thought that ME2-ME3 and especially the DA series would be enough evidence of otherwise. There's always a problem to happen that we could have a game to deal with. There's always complications if the writers want these complications. There's always, like it or not, 'new lore' that recontextualizes previous material. Shepard saved the galaxy, woo. But all we know, with the tone of it all, is that he saved a vision of the future where humanity, organics, Earth can survive instead of only being Reaped by typical method. There's more room to write with that, than I think many think. I don't think anyone should assume 'Destroy = no AI, nothing Reaper anywhere', or 'Control = giant Shreaper guiding/controlling the galaxy' or 'Synthesis = we all merged, organic and synthetic'. These are things that definitely happened in some context, but come on, we have spaces of years, decades, centuries, and all sorts of different possible perspectives, predictable or surprising, that Bioware could decide to make something new enough happen in.
And yes, among the most basic perspectives would be a survivor of the Reaper War traveling and surviving through the ruins of the post-War. I doubt something at least so exclusive as only that would be the case though, as I'm pretty sure Bioware still wants to make a NEW game, not one that only hangs onto the past games.

Though agree with this 100%, I don't see how we're actually get around RGB.

What I get out of your post is that the devs could just leave us with a wrecked galaxy and not explain how it happened. Sure, Shepard could be dead under any circumstances but whether or not Reapers remain (Control) or if everyone is partly synthetic (Synthesis) can't be written around. If we're talking about getting around the past (like DA) by moving to a different area, that's what BioWare did. That was sticking with their MO if you're saying it's modeled after DA. We covered the whole MW. There's no going back. There isn't a little section tucked away that was unaffected. (I did throw out an idea that maybe there were areas of the MW that didn't have relays and were therefore unaffected by RGB.)

Disagree all of that could easily be written around.  Game mechanics wise what is the difference between common place cybernetics and partly synthetic through synthesis?  About 3 lines of dialogue. Control, Shepard once he felt the situation was stabilized flew into dark space hopefully never to be seen again. If the time jump after the war is just 1 year, yeah its hard but if its 20+ its pretty easy to say we stopped glowing green after a few years, but our synthetic modifications remained vs after the war with the number of debilitating injuries cyberware became more common place advancements in cybernetics eventually made it so virtually everyone had some level of cybernetic modification ust out of convenience.  Mechanically the world is the same, just flavor text difference in a few lines of dialogue depending on your import.

I'm not sure what the point of this is. It's not like having all the choices resolve into the same indeterminate mush actually preserves those choices.

There is only one option: the next game will feature both galaxies like DAI had Fereleden and Orlais. We can fast travel between them. Bottom line: it'll be big. By the time we visit the MW in this next game, all endings are easily explained away.

Also it'd be cool if each galaxy kept it's map music. So two themes, one for Andromeda and the old familiar map music for when we visit the Milky Way.

The main baddies? The Kett and the Yahg perhaps.