The ultimate ending to the Mass Effect trilogy was famously... divisive. Now, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 lead writer Drew Karpyshyn has openly discussed his original plan for the trilogy's conclusion. He also uses the phrase "techno-science magic reasons", which I am 100% a fan of.

Talking to VGS, Karpyshyn details the ending, which he admits wasn't "super fleshed out". The plot would have revolved around Dark Energy: something that was mentioned in Mass Effect 2, but never expanded upon.

"Dark Energy was something that only organics could access because of various techno-science magic reasons we hadn't decided on yet," Karpyshyn said. "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.

"Again it's very vague and not fleshed out, it was something we considered but we ended up going in a different direction."

Karpyshyn left BioWare shortly before the conclusion of Mass Effect 2, with Mac Walters taking over as lead writer for Mass Effect 3. Even so, Karpyshyn defended series' real ending, pointing out that his planned version was just as likely to disappoint.

"I find it funny that fans end up hearing a couple things they like about it and in their minds they add in all the details they specifically want. It's like vapourware - vapourware is always perfect, anytime someone talks about the new greatest game. It's perfect until it comes out. I'm a little weary about going into too much detail because, whatever we came up with, it probably wouldn't be what people want it to be."

If all that "techno-science magic" seems far-fetchced, the ideas got even weirder:

"Some of the ideas were a little bit wacky and a little bit crazy. At one point we thought that maybe Shepard could be an alien but didn't know it. But we then thought that might be a little too close to Revan."

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Traditionally, the IndieGala bundle has focused on some of the lesser known indies, especially when compared to the more famous games that headline the Humble Indie Bundles. That's not quite the case this time around. Sure, you can debate the definition of what does and doesn't constitute an indie studio, but I think everyone would agree that Bioware are well outside of that label. Odd then, that Mass Effect 2 is a beat-the-average reward for the Gala's latest collection.

And it gets weirder. Rather than the bundle-standard charity recipients, proceeds for this round are being shared between Launch Academy - a Vancouver-based startup "incubator" - and the campaign of Matt Toner, the New Democratic Party candidate for Vancouver-False Creek in the upcoming election for the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia.

It all centres around Vancouver - and an effort to support the city's gaming industry. Which almost explains the Mass Effect 2 connection. Bioware may be based in Edmonton, but they did include Vancouver in the trilogy through a multiplayer map. That was Mass Effect 3 though.

It's a strange situation - especially when it's directly funding a politician. Admittedly, he's running on a campaign that centres around the rejuvenation of Vancouver's gaming and tech industries, but that's a single issue out of many, with little indication given by Toner as to where he stands with regards to other debates.

Still, if you're unconcerned with the potentially troubling aspects of the bundle, and just want some cheap games, you can get Mass Effect 2, Shank 2, Shadowgrounds, Kill Fun Yeah, Zombie Driver HD and Gimbal for $5.82 or more. More games are due to be added in the bundle's second week.

Mass Effect 3 uses the Unreal Engine 3. What will a Frostbite 3-powered Mass Effect look like?

We've already seen our first look at DICE's powerful Frostbite 3 engine in yesterday's Battlefield 4 reveal, and it looks like we'll soon see more of its considerable capabilities in other EA-branded franchise titans. A tweet sent out today by BioWare Edmonton and Montreal General Manager Aaryn Flynn reveals the next Mass Effect and Dragon Age 3: Inquisition harnesses the newest version of the engine known for huge landscapes and mega destruction effects in Battlefield.
@yanickrroy @stephentotilo We're using Frostbite 3 for both DA3 and the next Mass Effect. Different games, but same engine fundamentals

— Aaryn Flynn (@AarynFlynn) March 27, 2013
BioWare expressed its Frostbitten intentions for both games last November when it announced a new Mass Effect helmed by the studio's Montreal branch. In a separate tweet also seen today, BioWare Montreal Studio Director Yanick Roy says he was careful to word his original announcement "just to say Frostbite" sans a number. Sneaky.

Details on Next Effect stay scarce for now beyond Roy's previous tidbits: "With the original trilogy now concluded and the switch over to a new engine, we are exploring new directions, both on the gameplay and story fronts. You can still expect the pillars the franchise is known for to be fully intact though, including diverse alien races, a huge galaxy to explore, and of course rich, cinematic storytelling.”

As for Dragon Age 3, it's been in the works for several years and looks to progress beyond the boxy environments of its two predecessors with a "more expansive world, better visuals, more reactivity to player choices, and more customization." It's due out later this year, but we've already collected plenty of our hopes for what to expect in the third dragon-ing.

The last hurrah for Mass Effect's memorable cast and crew wrapped up earlier this month with Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC, but the legacy of Commander Shepard lives on with the critical decisions, dialogue choices, and punched reporters everyone experienced in the trilogy. BioWare now has an infographic tallying up the cumumlative player stats for Mass Effect 3, and it shows a surprising rift in Paragon/Renegade alignments and popular squadmates.

Also, if by some infinitesimal live-under-a-rock chance you haven't yet completed Mass Effect 3, please note the abundance of spoilers in the image and text below.

Players clocked in 88.3 million hours worldwide on the single-player campaign, and although FemShep quickly became a fan favorite thanks to voice actress Jennifer Hale's excellent delivery, over 80 percent of players chose ManShep. Being the galaxy's Boy Scout evidently won over kicking diplomacy to the curb, as nearly 65 percent of players preferred Paragon outcomes, and a whopping 92 percent cured the genophage for the krogan remnant.

Speaking of genophage cures, almost four percent of you insanely chose to shoot Mordin during the climactic moments of the Tuchanka mission. "Very model of a scientist salarian," my foot.

The rocking robot hivemind of the geth earned more favor than the quarians when players chose to save one race over the another from total annihilation during the Rannoch mission. 37 percent of players preferred to save the lampheads as opposed to 27 percent for the bemasked nomads, but the more favorable outcome—saving both—followed right behind at 36 percent.

On the multiplayer side, squads of player peacekeepers outdid themselves with massacring enemy forces to the tune of 10.7 billion slain overall. Hear that creaking noise? That's Harbinger nodding his cyber-bug/crab-head-thing in admiration.

Have a look at the rest of the single-player stats below, which goes over favored squad members, classes, and popular achievements.

It's interesting when a topic as lively as female characters in games includes gender-sensitive publishers concerned with mainstream appeal, but it's also nice to hear about those who have no trouble writing a heroine. In an EA blog post, Mass Effect 3 writer Ann Lemay says the inclusion of the female turian Nyreen Kandros as a major character in the RPG's Omega DLC "was never an issue."

Originally, Nyreen existed as a blander asari mercenary unrelated to Shepard and Aria's quest to retake the lawless space station. Lemay saw a chance to expand the character's role as a balance to Aria's fiery temperament, so the cool-headed turian was the eventual result and the first appearance of a female member of the reptilian species in the entire trilogy.

"And it was never an issue," Lemay says. "Which is just as it should have been. The creation of Nyreen Kandros was an incredibly positive experience."

Granted, the smoothness of the decision-making process probably partially arose from fan demand to see a female turian, but Lemay thinks the rest of the industry shouldn't make such a big deal of the issue and just move forward.

"Creating diverse and engaging female characters—or any character that isn't both white and male—shouldn't be such an issue," she explains. "If we can move beyond the resistance to such characters in our games, both as non-player characters and as main protagonists, I honestly believe that we’ll end up with richer narratives and a broader audience, and the industry ends up with a bigger and more interesting playground.

"It’s a win-win all around."

When EA spoke of a future business strategy where "all of our games" include the dreaded m-word, reactions weren't exactly positive. CFO Blake Jorgensen shared that original statement during the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week, but he's now used another conference—the Wedbush Transformational Technology conference—to redact that statement. As Gamasutra reports, Jorgensen says he meant microtransactions will figure into all mobile games instead of EA's entire lineup.

"I made a statement in the conference along the lines of, 'We'll have microtransactions in our games,' and the community read that to be 'all games,' and that's really not true," he explains. "All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of our mobile games are going to a world where its play-for-free."

Jorgensen uses a different term for paid content on the PC and console platforms: extensions. "You're going to see extensions off of products like Battlefield Premium which are simply not microtransactions," he says. "They are premium services, or additional add-on products or downloads that we're doing. It's essentially an extension of the gameplay that allows someone to take a game that they might have played for a thousand hours and play it for two thousand hours. We want to ensure that consumers are getting value."

Though there is some difference between types of paid content, it seems like Jorgensen is mostly just side-stepping the phrase "microtransactions." Whether calling them microtransactions, extensions, or micro-extend-actions, EA (and, arguably, most other big publishers) will continue using whatever works to leverage the popularity of its games and sell additional content.

But enough of my yakking. What do you think?

It's actually ending, isn't it? Sniff. Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC releases tomorrow, and it's the last offering from BioWare starring Shepard and his galactic gaggle of friends. A launch trailer is up, showcasing the camaraderie shared between the current and former Normandy crew over a glass of grog while they relax in a private Citadel bar. Miraculously, nothing explodes for nearly 30 seconds, when a group of mysterious and militant party-crashers arrives guns blazing.

The aforementioned bar doubles as an extra hangout spot for Shepard and his love interest to relax and recharge as well as a hub for mini-games and a newly explorable section of the Citadel. And though the trilogy's endings will forever bear the brunt of vitriol, it's touching to see the cast's entirety one final time.

Thanks for the memories, Commander.

We've heard from Crytek on the stacked odds next-gen consoles face against PCs in the ongoing struggle for graphics glory, but BioWare has some thoughts on how money factors into whatever dances across your screen. In an interview with OXM, Art Director Neil Thompson believes the next graphics tier will represent "a big leap" for studios, but any such progression "won't be as obvious" due to already ballooned budgets.

"People will do things in a cleverer fashion—and I have to be careful here as there are non-disclosure agreements involved; I think they'll be better prepared, shall we say—but we can't see a ten-fold team increase again as the budgets would just be ridiculous. You'd have to sell 20-30 million copies before you broke even," Thompson explains.

Though Thompson's comments deal more with the generational differences between consoles instead of PCs, his stance on developers staying economically aware as they push their games' visuals further seems pretty universal. It's a far cry from the consumer side of the issue, as gamers can achieve comparable visual quality with a setup costing as little as $600.

"I think the main thing is that the industry doesn't get itself into a corner where it becomes economically nonviable to make a game," Thompson continues. "The last technology iteration caught folks by surprise, especially with the number of people you needed and the skillset jump that was required to do the work that people expected. In the last generation, the perception was that it was going to be a ten times improvement over the previous generation."

Check out the rest of OXM's interview for more of Thompson's words on BioWare's art direction and life at the studio.

Player-directed love stories are typically accomplished with "romance options." The options are characters, and in the mechanic's simplest form, if you do and say the right things to an eligible character, he, she, or Asari will fall in love, bed, or both. But can love—and more importantly, good storytelling—blossom from dialog options and cutscene trysts?

In this week's Face Off debate, Tyler says love is a bad game, arguing that writer-driven affection is preferable to mechanizing intimacy. Across the debate hall, T.J. cherishes the player-driven relationships that motivated him to save universes. Read more opinions on the next page, and argue your side in the comments. It's what the internet is for!

Tyler: "Alright team, we designed an interesting, complex character, but something’s missing. What’s that you say, every libidinous teenager? Wouldn't it be neat if players could manipulate the character's variables with the goal of fulfilling their carnal fantasies? Yes! Instead of a character, we’ll make a doll that comes to bed and says 'I love you' when you squeeze it."

T.J: OK, I’m going to refrain from derailing this whole thing with an anti-neo-Victorian rant on how our society is irrationally afraid of sex, and make my case this way: relationships are a core part of being human, and just about any story about humans. Adding player romance to a game makes it feel more real and complete as an experience. Thinking about it from a gamist “manipulating variables” perspective is missing the point. And it’s kinda gross.

Tyler: What’s gross is connecting with Liara in Mass Effect, and then getting her in bed by skipping down an obvious, color-coded path. I’m not against portrayals of sex and relationships, especially not with blue monogender aliens, but achieving intimacy shouldn't be about choosing the right dialog options.

I liked bonding with Liara, but when we reached that inevitable moment of passion, our interaction went from engaging character development to an erotic fanfic on Tumblr.

T.J: And you would know what erotic Tumblr fanfic sounds like.

Tyler: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Fanfics on Angelfire pairing off Mulder and Evangelion. I watched scenes of glitter and Spock near—alright, I'll go ahead and lose this reference like tears in rain.

T.J: Please do.

Tyler: I'm an explorer, what can I say? Anyway, what I was saying is that alluding to romance would have been more effective than making it a binary goal, a hedonistic achievement. The latter cheapens the character and ultimately lets us down.

T.J: Well-done romance in games goes far beyond simple hedonism. To use another example from the same franchise: romancing Tali created one of the most emotionally striking moments in Mass Effect 3, and it had nothing to do with sex. I wanted to help her rebuild her home. I wanted to settle down there with her, and give her the life her people had dreamed of for so long.

Would I have wanted that even if she hadn’t been my character’s romantic partner? Maybe. But the impact would have been far, far less... impactful.

Tyler: I can’t believe you brought that up, you insensitive boor! Don’t you know what happened to me and her? It didn’t have to be like that, Tali...

T.J: I don’t care how things went in the Tyler is Shepard timeline, which is clearly the darkest timeline. And I think you just proved my point.

Tyler: Jerk. Well, you’re right that giving players more motivation than “save the universe because, like, you’re on the front of the box and stuff” is part of what makes Mass Effect great, and building a romantic relationship is an effective way to design that motivation. But is presenting a stable of romantic candidates the best way to go about that? I don’t think so. It makes my “relationship” the result of deliberate calculation, which ruins it for me.

In Half-Life 2, however, I don’t even talk, but the subtle tenderness between Gordon and Alyx is a one way ticket to motivation city.

Gordon doesn't have words, never mind dialog options.

T.J: You have a point with Alyx, but I think in a game like Mass Effect, where so much about the protagonist, as a person, is determined by the player, you should be able to choose who they are romantically interested in. And you need a few, varied options to make that a possibility. There is a place for doing it the Half-Life way, but I feel more personal attachment in games that do it the BioWare way.

Tyler: I’ll respond to that, but first we have to stop dancing around the real problem and just say it: I don't want to reinforce negative gamer stereotypes, but trying to ignore every opportunity to make an immature joke about “reaching the story’s climax” or “doing it BioWare style” is just killing me.

T.J: Based on Dragon Age, I don’t know that I ever want to “do it BioWare style.” But that just further illustrates my point that the sex scene is not the reward.

Tyler: Anything raunchy, salacious, or simply involving the letter “x” will motivate some, but I’ll give you that developers aren’t required to justify their intentions or gauge player maturity.

My real problem is that interactive storytelling is still clumsy. It’s getting better, and some decisions work, like whether or not to do space violence here, or save a space colony there, but building a relationship with tacky dialog wheel winks and nudges feels crude. I’d rather romantic intentions stay ambiguous or writer-dictated until there’s a game sophisticated enough to make it feel natural. Right now they just feel like dating sims.

T.J: It’s all a matter of perspective. Sure, the tech isn't there yet to simulate the depth and nuance of a real-life romance in a player-directed system, but you could say that about a lot of things: the way the space rifles work, the way the space villagers react to your presence. Games inherently require abstraction. And personally, I’m willing to deal with the level of abstraction we see in game romances right now for what it adds to my personalized narrative. Which, at times, is quite a lot.

Tyler: Nuh uh, games should be just like real life ...would be a terribly dumb rebuttal. Alright, so your point about abstraction is a good one, but I still think author-driven romance is superior. Put one of those little black boxes in front of your TV and play Ico. That was an expression of affection, if not quite the same kind as we've been talking about.

The point is, wooing characters who are programmed to be wooed just makes me feel weird. Unless, of course, I’m using “wooing” to mean "shooting up a floor full of suit-wearing dudes like that scene from 1992 John Woo film Hard Boiled". I’m totally cool with that kind of Wooing.

T.J: The only thing that could make that better is getting the girl at the end.

Follow Tyler and T.J. on Twitter to see day-to-day debates as they happen, and jump to the next page for opinions from the community...




@pcgamer They can hinder when it's forced or poorly written, but the best relationships can really enhance the experience.

— Eric Watson (@RogueWatson) February 13, 2013
@pcgamer They can be too heavy handed, clumsy and unnatural. Though romance is often just that, stories about it shouldn't be.

— Modred189 V (@Modred189) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer They feel forced and are ultimately unnecessary. I'd much prefer a well scripted single romance path that I could chose to follow.

— Garviel Loken (@SeventyTwo_) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer Mass Effect romance is no better or worse than what it wants to be: Captain Kirk and a Green Alien Chick/Ensign going at it.

— Jacob Dieffenbach (@dieffenbachj) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer if done right, they add a nice nuance.ME did it decently, but can be expanded upon without hindering the main story.

— Chris K. (@ChuckLezPC) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer If it feels like part of the story then fine. If it's an afterthought for content/controversy/publicity then it feels gimmicky

— Roman (@romanwlltt) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer brilliant. They make me care for characters. I like Garrus' bromance too

— Alex Filipowski (@AlexFiliUK) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer yes definitely. That's part of the reason why I love the Dragon Age series so much. Romance with certain char. Really brings you in

— Nick Ellsworth (@NE4Guinness) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer If I wanted to play a Japanese dating simulation... well, I don't, so there you go.

— HerpsMcDerps (@LoneCommandline) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer It forces emotional character interaction as you will invariably show favouritism. More emotion = more immersion

— AEON|Dante (@nzaeon) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer Three ME games (well, still a bit left of the third), and I have yet to even find any of the romance options. Art imitating life.

— Frode Hauge (@frodehauge) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer Depends on whether its tactfully done. A Nick Spark's story would murder an otherwise immersive game like ME.

— Andrew (@Drewoid13) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer They can allow for greater immersion and more dynamic stories.They shouldn't be the main focus but they should be in RPG's for sure

— Denholm (@DenholmFraser) February 12, 2013
@pcgamer The problem is that the romance is essentially between two puppets. I'm not sure you can replicate proper romance in games.

— Michael (@AchillesSC2) February 12, 2013