MASS EFFECT TWO: GIVE GARRUS A HUG

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

FYI Rachni was being honest and looks like they will be allies in ME3 if you saved her

Oh, I know. In my case I just could understand the logic behind Shepard deciding for killing the rachni queen in ME1. The fact that sparing the queen happened to work out in ME2 is awesome, but you can't expect Shepard to have had forward knowledge of the outcome at the time he/she needed to decide.

Here's a new question for everyone to ponder: If you were working for Bioware, what would you want to accomplish for ME3? What kinds of ideas would you attempt to incorporate to improve the game substantially, or what kind of story concepts would you put forward?

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...

</my crappy two cents>

EDIT: Spoiler Text'd everything just in case someone here hasn't beaten ME2.