8 Video Game Plot Points The Developers Abandoned

4. Dark Energy (And The Human Reaper) - Mass Effect 2

Wherever you fall on the resolution of the Mass Effect series, it's been readily documented that there was a pretty major shift in the writing between the second and third game.

One of the two lead writers, Drew Karpyshyn, left the franchise, leaving Mac Walters to tie up all the loose ends. This resulted in the writer throwing away a bunch of plot points that were teased in the first two releases and were supposed to take precedent in the third.

The biggest of these was the idea of 'dark energy' being the motivation for the Reapers' extinction event. Originally, biotics being able to wield dark energy was what triggered the Reapers returning, as messing with that part of the natural order could have changed the fabric of time and space itself. This was dropped entirely in the third game, with it being the emergence of A.I., and the war between species and their robotic creations, that was the reason the Reapers reset the galaxy.

That's not the only thing that was dropped though, but the human Reaper, the final boss from ME 2, was similarly swept under the rug. The implication was that the Reaper ships took the form of a harvested species with each new cycle, but when ME3 came around, they all adopted the classic squid style.

Probably for the best, that one.