User blog comment:The Milkman/The Writing of the Ending/@comment-5503561-20120529183511/@comment-4950455-20120530045349

I made a similar argument in another thread, and also noted that the hand-wave solution brings a major difficulty of its own: undercutting player choice. While some (okay, a lot) of our choices might not have had any real consequences except for war assets, they still made a verifiable difference. The only one that was outright overidden was nominating Anderson for Councilor, which was a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme of things. Handwaving solutions to different results of ME3 would undercut player choice in a far more serious fashion then ever before - even with my faith in Bioware at an all-time low, I don't see it happening.

So yeah: ME3 leaves some pretty insurmountable difficulties for a sequel, 'ridiculous MMORPG' or otherwise. Whatever else might have been behind the ending, that wasn't it.

And honestly, I don't see what would be so bad about a Mass Effect MMO set during the 'classic' period of the universe. There could be difficulties integrating it into the timeline, but it would be a good way to keep the universe alive without turning it into a franchise zombie releasing game after game (as has arguably become the case with Halo).