The high points of the Mass Effect trilogy were never about shooting aliens in the face or exploring the galaxy, though those parts were important too. The high points of the series (and indeed, all BioWare titles) have been the difficult choices you have to make throughout your journey. Some choices you make will make you sigh with relief when everything turns out for the better (or as good as it can get anyway). Others leave you with regret. Sometimes there's no right answer, and you end up feeling like a bad person no matter what you do. With entire species hanging in the balance, it's important that you make the right decision. No pressure or anything. It could be said that most if not all of these tough choices are ultimately meaningless, and that may not be too far from the truth. Making hard-hitting choices with a palpable impact on the plot isn't really something most games can do. If every choice resulted in a Butterfly Effect split in the narrative, coding for that game would be a nightmare. The unfortunate reality of game development right now means all of your choices exist in a self-contained bubble, with the main plot remaining largely intact. This means that whilst you can deviate slightly at several point in the plot, you will return to a fixed series of events to arrive at the same conclusion as everyone else, with slightly different flavours at the end. Maybe it was all for nothing. Maybe everything you do is meaningless. Cheer up! Just because the universe doesn't care about the difficult and heartbreaking decisions you had to make doesn't mean they were meaningless to you! Whether or not you're satisfied with how much of an affect your choices had on the story, we can probably all agree that there were certainly some tough choices to make that tugged on our heartstrings a little more than we felt comfortable with. They may not have changed the galaxy, but these decisions can affect you as a player, at least in the moment.