User blog comment:The Milkman/The Next Effect/@comment-86.111.88.50-20121127130800

There's absolutely no difficulty from a writer's point of view to account every outcome of the original Mass Effect Trilogy. If the next installment in the series takes place after the Reapers, the player ending choices MUST be devalued, otherwise it's an avalance of possible futures, more and more with next each installment - beyond the limits of what is possible to produce. So if it is a sequel it needs to wipe the slate clean to a certain extent. And i wouldn't look it as a devaluation of player choices - they're hugely mattered at the time they were made. But the trilogy is closed, sealed. I would love to see the sequel taking place few centuries after the Reaper War - there's so many possibilities to make it an absolutely different and complete storyline, but work many characters of the original trilogy into it. Galaxy just needs a major problem and some sort of event of tremendous magnitude to rationally cover Shepard's final decision and make it, at the present, less relevant. There's no way around this. I don't believe that prequel or different storyline during the time of Reaper threat are good enough options to continue the franchise, since it is already very well covered and there's no room for something big and galaxy-defining for player to achieve. The story will happen in the future and the Shepard choices will be devalued to a certain extent if it's not too distant future or almost completely if we are talking about millenia or even more after the Crucible fired. And there will be small, not storyline defining, cameos and reminders of the original trilogy depending on what path you took. I, for example, would implement Shepard's storyline-non-critical cameo appearance as an old, crippled\handicapped human (if EMS was high enough for him to survive Destroy ending) saything something like "that's what you get for saving the galaxy, kid" to the new hero, to make the player reflect how cruel the galaxy actually is. There's ton and a half of other plot options to consider as well. But no, no developer in the world will go for four entirely different gameplays and plots just to make player feel that what he did last time out still matters.