User blog comment:James12708/Possibility of a Mass Effect 4/@comment-4022378-20120829112644

How could a post-ME3 Mass Effect 4 even be possible? With every player having radically different endings it would be almost impossible to establish a new world in which to set up the new story-line and characters. Yeah sure, everybody had somewhat different endings to ME1 & ME2 but in the end they were all essentially the same, Sovereign & Saren are killed and defeated, the Collectors defeated and the human reaper killed, the only differences are slight by any margin....that being that some have surviving squad members and other don't, while others have different love interests or maybe none at all but in the end the galaxy and world at large was virtually in the same state as everybody else s play-through. The races all still existed and the Citadel still there and the Normandy & Shepherd, etc. But with ME3s radically different & vast amount of possible endings it makes it almost impossible to have one concrete canonical world in which to have the plot set in. Think about it...How can the game present 3 different galaxies for every player? Some would have to start the galaxy with all synthetics gone & reapers gone. Some would start out with everybody merged with synthetics and a whole new DNA...which would make for an extremely different universe....I mean people could download data to their minds ala the Matrix, the wars with the Geth and Reapers would cease and all would be allies. Then you have control in which everybody remains the same as before just with Reapers as the vanguard of our protection. You might still have geth-quarian hostilities, etc. But those are just the 3 main differences in possible universe settings. Place on top of those 3 possibilities that some people had the Quarians wiped out by the Geth, some have the Krogan cured while others didn't, some had Tuchanka bombed by Cerberus agents setting off the Turian bomb and wether or not you had Wrex or Wreave in charge you would have a massive shit-storm on your horizon. Some would have new enlightened futures for the Krogan, some would have a dismal Krogan future. Some would have enlightened futures for the Krogan while also having them be partially synthetic via synthesis. Depending on war assets some people could have had the Crucible misfire and end up killing a lot of people if they had too low an amount of war assets. Think about all of these possibilities and variables. I am not good at Mathematics whatsoever. My only strengths are in Ancient History & Philosophy. So I cannot calculate or even try to attempt the feat of calculating the exact amount of how many different scenarios you could possibly create out of all of these variables....though I am sure it is an incredibly large amount. How could Bio-ware possibly find a way to merge everybody's galaxy's into one canonical ME universe that is grounded in everybody's experiences with the game? I suppose they could put in variations to account for everybody's different endings but I feel that would be so much work and take up so much space & memory that it is altogether unlikely to try in the first place. The only way I feel that they could make another ME game is if they make a prequel game or one set during the trilogy but playing as other characters with different story-lines....perhaps intercepting with Shepherd here and there. It would be cool to play as Aria and show how she became the boss of Omega and rose to the top. That way you could do lots of bad-ass action & story twists and turns & still run into Commander Shepherd. Or perhaps a prequel in the vein of fighting in the First Contact war or playing as Anderson himself or maybe even Kai Leng. Or another cool idea I've thought of is playing as a mercenary like Zaeed or playing as Zaeed himself, or as some kind of bounty hunter or criminal esque character dealing in red sand and the seedy underbelly of Omega, Illium or Citadel politics. Or hey even a C-Sec officer fighting the criminals. Who knows the possibilities are wide open. However I still would deeply, deeply love to see a post-ME3 Mass Effect game that shows the galaxy after the Reaper war....I mean everybody would love to see how their galaxy turns out in the future but I feel as if it would be far too complex to achieve. Maybe on the next-generation consoles this could be achieved? Hmm....What do ye think?