8 Alternate Endings In Famous Video Games You Won't Believe Got Cut
8. The Reapers Are The 'Good Guys' - Mass Effect 3
Call it EA meddling, Bioware infighting, a combination of the two or something else entirely, Mass Effect 3 didn't conclude in a manner anywhere close to what the majority demanded. Immediately after release and to this day, it remains one of the most fascinating tales of hype, expectation and reality setting in thereafter, resulting in writer Drew Karpyshyn (who you can think for Mass Effect 1, 2 and a trio of novels) spilling the beans on how the ending was originally supposed to go down.
Keep in mind he's discussing the version of the ending in a fairly rough state (Karpyshyn would leave Bioware for a time after ME 2, only to return for Mass Effect Andromeda), but I guarantee it still sounds better than the Starchild madness we received instead. The 'Dark Energy' he refers to comes from it being mentioned in Mass Effect 2, only to be forgotten about entirely in the shipped version of ME 3.
"Dark Energy was something that only organics could access because of various techno-science magic reasons we hadn't decided on yet" [...] "Maybe using this Dark Energy was having a ripple effect on the space-time continuum."Maybe the Reapers kept wiping out organic life because organics keep evolving to the state where they would use biotics and dark energy, and that caused an entropic effect that would hasten the end of the universe. Being immortal beings, that's something they wouldn't want to see.
"Then we thought, let's take it to the next level. Maybe the Reapers are looking at a way to stop this. Maybe there's an inevitable descent into the opposite of the Big Bang (the Big Crunch) and the Reapers realise that the only way they can stop it is by using biotics, but since they can't use biotics they have to keep rebuilding society - as they try and find the perfect group to use biotics for this purpose. The Asari were close, but they weren't quite right, the Protheans were close as well.
Going off this version of events, it almost paints the Reapers as the good guys, trying to fight an inevitable destruction caused by the now intergalactic-travelling human race. It's very Matrix, and very... well, Mass Effect, considering how the original game was entirely about mankind's place in the cosmos.