User blog comment:Legionwrex/Did the Leviathan DLC really add a new twist to the endings?/@comment-2022867-20120905042635

I just finished my playthrough with Leviathan and the Extended cut installed, and I thought of the same thing. With me being one who likes happy endings (seriously, if you want a realistic bitter-sweet ending, watch a movie. I play to escape reality.) I wish to elaborate on your ideas.

I agree with your descriptions of the scenarios given by the ending choices, except if Shepard were to live in destroy, and be able-bodied(I'll get to this later) I would have to have it be as a DLC, and not ME4, to align with the "Shepard's trilogy" ideology. If they want to make it so he can't come back afterwards, blow off an arm or leg off him/her and make up some space-magic excuse that it can be reconstructed. Something like his cybernetics fried in the Reaper-disabling pulse and they're interfering or something like that, so Shep has to settle down on LI's world/Earth in a wheelchair.

Better yet just have his crew come back with the repaired Normandy and pick him up with arm/leg already needing amputated. Shep could still be good and dead if the war assets weren't high enough to facilitate a quick repair of the Normandy, and he eventually expires.

Then ME4 begins with an attack from the Leviathans, where new character's first mission is to track down Shepard or surviving crew member to learn more of the Leviathans.

To facilitate the dev's to only need to produce one storyline, the destroy would be taken as canon, since as you desribed, in Control the Shepard-controlled Reapers would just rush in and overwhelm the Leviathans. Don't give me the excuse the leviathans are more powerful. Yes, they dropped a Sovereign-class reaper in the drink, but if they were that powerful they wouldn't of been harvested and hiding in the first place. Synthesis would outright prevent hostilities in the first place as you described.

Don't forget Bioware already did this in ME2 if Shepard died at the end of the collector base, that Shepard's story was considered done and over right there.