Talking about Mass Effect 3 With Spoilers

[Solid Snake]

Man I think it would be awesome if Bioware threw an epic twist our way and had the mission to save Earth be the very first mission in the game. Like, Earth is struggling to hold off the Reapers, and then all the sudden the Normandy shows up, with a shitload of allies corresponding roughly with the kinds your Shepard was friendly with throughout ME2, and you're just sent straight into the action, and your entire ME2 cast leads separate Squads in different areas of Earth.

...I actually remember typing a similar message with a similar concept long before that ME3 trailer came out.

Let me see if I can dig it up.

EDIT: From 2/22/2010:

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

I was thinking about my "dream version" of ME3 and I came to the conclusion that I'd enjoy a cold open with Shepard defending a devastated Earth from a reaper attack, and with several alien factions (if you're paragon) or Cerberus (if you're renegade) assisting Shepard in defending other human cities. I'm not sure whether even a relatively brief jaunt on future-Earth would serve the Mass Effect "setting" (even though Earth clearly exists, and it's a clear first choice for a Reaper target assuming they know Shepard's species.) It'd be an intriguing way to immediately thrust the player into heavy-stakes action and a great way to immediately re-introduce tons of supporting characters who survived ME1 and ME2, though not as squadmates: if you played paragon, you could hear radio chatter about Clan Urdnot showing up and defending Beijing while a Geth task force led by Legion defended Cairo and Salarian special task forces were staving off the enemy in Paris while Ashley/Kaiden and Alliance forces were protecting the United Nations building in New York. The payoff of actually seeing the alien races you've helped assisting humanity would be freakin' sweet, and the intensity of listening to the radio chatter from tons of forces battling all throughout the planet we know and love would match the kind of intensity we saw in the microwave scene in MGS4.

And I'd actually prefer if the game skipped ahead and started there, with an initial Reaper invasion of Earth or something as the first target. You'd immediately be confronted with tough choices -- if you have squadmates from ME1 and ME2 who survived the suicide mission, one idea is you'd have to choose via radio communication (as Shepard would be the leader of the entire operation) whether to have some squadmates sacrifice themselves to destroy invading forces. Do you sacrifice their lives to protect cities and nations on Earth, or do you keep as many former squadmates and alien forces alive as possible, while potentially sacrificing Earth's habitability and turning humanity into a spacefaring race separated from a destroyed homeworld, like the Quarians?

(And how many characters survived the suicide mission could influence your available options, too. Entire cities that could be battlegrounds if some characters are kept alive could be sacrificed to the Reaper invasion if those characters were dead. Example: if Wrex survived ME1 he's alive and Clan Urdnot shows up with a Krogan task force to defend Beijing. If not, a Reaper succeeds in destroying Beijing and there's nothing you can do about it, at least one major city on Earth is out of the picture.)

And then you can get the Normandy 3 (Normandy 2 would be destroyed while attacking the invading Reaper at Earth or something) and the game would actually begin...