A panel celebrating the recently-concluded Mass Effect trilogy produced scant details and vague teases about the future of the series and its creators at PAX East in Boston today.

"We are starting to get ready to develop another Mass Effect game, and it's going to be a new thing," series executive producer Casey Hudson said at a Mass Effect retrospective at PAX East in Boston today. "We want to be able to give fans an opportunity to get back into the world with these things you've come to know and love about the Mass Effect experience but start something fresh and new—a new way for you to explore the whole universe in Mass Effect."

For series fans, even that little bit of info might be a welcome update.

The game will be developed primarily by BioWare's Montreal studio, though Hudson, in the studio's Edmonton headquarters, will serve as the executive producer. As we've previously reported, Commander Shepard will not be returning.

Hudon and the series' lead designer Preston Watamaniuk will mostly be working on a non-Mass Effect project. "We are developing a whole new fictional universe at BioWare for myself and Preston [and other main Mass Effect trilogy creators.] That's kind of our next thing," Husdon said. "We're focusing on building something new the way we did at the very beginning on Mass Effect.

Hudson also seemed big on the planned Mass Effect movie in development at Legendary Pictures. "That hopefully should be seen as a good thing," he said, "Because what we're looking at are, I think, the right things to make sure it's gong to be a great movie. It's not just going to be a movie; it's going to be really special." We've not heard much about the movie lately, so a mention is encouraging.

The image of the Citadel up top is from the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Most of you who played Mass Effect 3 are just too nice. You were paragons. I was a renegade. Most of you played as a male commander Shepard. I played as a female. But just about all of us cured the genophage.

All that and more are detailed in a fascinating batch of Mass Effect 3 stats released by BioWare during the studio's Mass Effect retrospective panel at PAX East.

Take a look at the date. How did your experience compare?

UPDATE: The Mass Effect panel featured five of the series' top designers and the guy who played Kaiden. In a lightning round involving questions Tweeted by fans, they were asked to weigh in on a few things. I Tweeted some of those results:

This is the last time that you'll ever lose someone
after this it's you and your friends
it's you and your friends.

—Stars, "The Last Song Ever Written"

I have a theory about the end of Mass Effect 3.

Not a serious theory, mind you. A crazy theory, the kind even I don't take seriously, but find it fun to think about. Essentially, it's that everything in the Citadel DLC is not preceding the final events of the campaign but that it follows them.

Spoilers follow for Mass Effect 3 and the Citadel DLC.

Mostly, Shepard dies at the end of Mass Effect 3 (with one exception), which isn't problematic for my theory—it's actually essential to it. My theory is that Shepard does die in the final moments of ME3's campaign, and the events of Citadel are a kind of afterlife.

The lyric at the top of this article is from a song by Stars called "The Last Song Ever Written". It's a poetic, beautiful take on death. It's also a comforting take on death, that sees it as a final separation before an eternal joining.

It's purely conjecture on my part, but it was sparked by something in the DLC. On the Silversun Strip, the area of the Citadel in which the DLC occurs, you can speak with a virtual intelligence assistant who points out local features. Strangely, you can ask about an area that is not on the Silversun Strip, and has nothing to do with the DLC events at all. It's a nightclub on the Citadel called Purgatory. You can visit the Purgatory club just like you could before, but none of the DLC content changes anything there. For some odd reason, Shepard can just ask Avina (the virtual intelligence) about Purgatory.

Avina responds strangely. She starts to define what purgatory is - the religious concept, not the nightclub. Shepard interrupts her, and clarifies the inquiry was about the nightclub. Avina responds, even more peculiarly, that there is no record of Purgatory.

This is likely just oversight, or some attempt to allude to Purgatory being a shady establishment. But logically, it is impossible. You can still visit Purgatory even after updating the game with the Citadel DLC. It certainly hasn't shrunk in size; it still has three stories and hundreds of patrons. There's a still a transit system hub right in front of it, in an area where there are no other establishments or features around. The Citadel authorities can't, in all seriousness, not have any record of it.

I asked myself immediately why a reference to the afterlife would be included, and that's when it dawned on me that a way to read Citadel is that Shepard is dead, and this is a kind of anti-purgatory limbo he's stuck in—it just happens to have an awesome apartment, all his friends, a casino and an arcade.

Basically, it's an awesome way to be dead.

But I couldn't think of many other connections. Silver is often used as a metaphor for a link between the spiritual plane and physical plane. Tying that to the setting of the DLC, the Silversun Strip, feels like a stretch. In the DLC you face a clone of Commander Shepard. Witnessing a doppelganger is a typical omen of death, but in my theory Shepard is already dead, so I'm not sure that fits either.

I think I like the idea because it has a finality to it regarding all the things fans said they wanted—Shepard with your squadmates, happy and celebrating. For some that's ruined by knowing it all ends badly, but for me this theory spins that take, and makes it so the time spent on the Citadel with friends is the last image.

This is about death

The original ending of ME3 unintentionally offended people's perceptions about death. It offended them so much that in addition to outright denying that the original ending even happened, fans clamored for a rewrite. And to some extent, they got it.

The Extended Cut DLC from Bioware was a seldom seen response to a fervent disapproval of a game's conclusion, and while the reasons for people's displeasure are diverse and intricate, I think a major (and mostly undiscussed) factor is death and how we perceive it.

Without the EC content, all of the endings were vaguely similar, and generally just vague. For all of the things the EC fails to do, it addresses the vagueness of Shepard's death so that it becomes easier for people to accept. There are still massive storytelling shortcomings even with the EC, but it deals with this one serious failing of the original ending.

With the EC, in the Control ending Shepard essentially becomes deified, overseeing the galaxy, controlling former enemies and aiding allies. In the Synthesis ending, Shepard's essence is joined with everyone in the galaxy, synthetic or organic, and serving as a catalyst for their merger. These are common ideas for death and afterlife (becoming supernatural or your consciousness being absorbed back into nature of the universe).

In the Destroy ending Shepard just dies. No allusion to an afterlife, just a legacy of victory and someone who didn't compromise. It's a harder take on death, but still one that many are able to accept. It seems we're willing to accept death as long as we know that, valiantly, we died ‘for something.'

These clarifications in the EC hardly change the sour taste of a undeniably botched ending, but they were enough for a large portion of fans to at least accept Shepard's end even if they still didn't like it much.

Indoctrination and Aeris

But even despite the EC, some people still don't accept it. Personally I've come to accept the Destroy ending. But even so, I'm still coming up with alternate theories like the one above. Why is that? Why so many mental back flips just to avoid what's clearly in the content?

The Indoctrination Theory is the earliest and most successful of these alternate theories. The Indoctrination Theory (IT) is that the trilogy's antagonists, the Reapers, used their mind control abilities (Indoctrination) to trick Commander Shepard, and the players, into a false choice where every available choice actually leads to defeat, or in the case of the Destroy ending, apparent defeat.

IT supporters claim the only correct option to take is the Destroy ending, because the other two endgame choices spare the Reapers. The theory is essentially proposing the entire end sequence is a hallucination, that it doesn't really happen. And the whole point of it is to trick you into not destroying the Reapers, your stated goal throughout the trilogy. The only way to win is to destroy the Reapers and end the hallucination, even though the actual content in the game doesn't at all show that destroying the Reapers ends any kind of hallucination.

What happens in the case of the Destroy ending is exactly what the player is told will happen. The Reapers are destroyed, along with some collateral damage and arguably some innocent folks. But the amount of reasoning and logic that has gone into IT is staggering. It would need its own post to deconstruct.

This much fervency, this much thought going into a theory aimed at entirely undoing the events clearly shown in a game is a powerful phenomenon among a fandom, but it's not unprecedented.

The death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII also sparked countless theories and speculation that the character wasn't really dead. Theories included that she shouldn't have died based on her wounds, and that players could somehow unlock a different outcome where the character lived.

Huge convoluted theories emerged and people vehemently defended them. Certain combinations of in-game items, specific events triggered, and the level of your party members could somehow save Aeris. In issue three of Kill Screen magazine, Brian Taylor covers the save Aeris phenomenon in great detail (it's some of the best games writing I've ever read) and it's not surprisingly similar to Indoctrination Theory.

The same hopeful desperation has developed around IT because of all the things we're forced to reckon with through fiction, death is the one we're most sensitive about. For everything the Extended Cut brought to the table it still didn't let us a chance to join our crew one last time. Your crew is what the series was always about. That last chance is worth some mental rewrites.

Citadel is a snapshot, and the pinnacle, of camaraderie and companionship in the Mass Effect series. And in game, the iconic moment of the DLC is when your crew actually snaps a photo of their party, so the memory can last forever. And in my take, that moment does last forever.

It's the last thing Bioware gave us that's related to the story and characters of this trilogy. It's the last thing I'll play, the last time I ever play Mass Effect 3. The endings from the Extended Cut were needed because of how botched the original endings were. Bioware said all along there wouldn't be a major overhaul to the ending through DLC, but I think in some ways they reversed on that in the end.

Citadel is the ending Mass Effect deserved, even if it's not the one it needed when everyone was watching. This is a quieter end for a trilogy that spokes volumes about what could be achieved in storytelling, world building, and characterization through games. It's quiet, and profound, and true. In so many ways, a fitting end.

Jordan Rivas was going to be a journalist when he grew up, but figured out professional journalism makes writing less fun. He writes independently at sortiv.com and concocts tweets @sortiv on Twitter. This article was republished with permission.

If you gave me five, seven or even 10 guesses about who outgoing EA CEO John Riccitiello's favorite character on HBO's acclaimed show The Wire was, I'd have gotten it wrong.

The Wire ran for five seasons. It was a show about class and crime. Its cast was an ensemble of cops, crooks and the everyday working people just trying to get by. Many viewers were drawn to the drug dealers, particularly the complex captains of the trade. If you watched, maybe you identified with the ambitious, icy Marlo, the crafty, ruthless Avon or the suave, educated Stringer Bell.

John Riccitiello's favorite Wire character wasn't any of those guys. Guess number four would have been wrong, too. It wasn't the seemingly invincible outlaw Omar either.

I can't remember why, two or three years ago, I was even asking Riccitiello this question. But one day, through an intermediary in EA public relations, I got an answer.

Wee-Bey.

Wee-Bey?

Who in the world watches The Wire and picks as their favorite the gravel-voiced hitman who rarely gets any screen time?

A day after Riccitiello's simultaneously surprising and unsurprising resignation from the gaming giant he led for seven years, it is not yet clear what the future holds for EA and EA's games. So strange was Riccitiello's tenure, that it's not even clear what EA's recent past truly held.

His standing—his legacy—is nearly as inscrutable to me as his choice of Wire characters. But I did interview the man several times during his tenure. I learned more about him than just his taste in TV. I also played the games that came out during his tenure. I tried squaring the EA I sense he wanted his company to be with the one it seemed to be at any moment we chatted.

I always left my meetings with Riccitiello optimistic for gaming and gamers.

That might strike you as odd, given EA's once and seemingly current rep as a rather cold, mechanical company. Before Riccitiello, EA was gaming's so-called evil empire, after all. They were a gaming factory, a place where Will Wright had to make The Sims on the sly since others in the studio weren't going to get it, where, instead of competing to make the best football game out there, the company made sure that no one other than them was even allowed to make an NFL video game.

But this was the Riccitiello I sat down with in December 2009:

"This industry is ultimately a small group of people with a creative idea that are allowed to express that idea through video game software in a way that is high art or, sometimes high and crass exploitation that can be fun. But it's some combination of those things."

That "crass" bit? If I recall correctly, it was his wink to me regarding some questions I'd asked him about some day-one downloadable content for a game called The Saboteur that made the women in the game's cabaret topless. It was an incentive for people to purchase the game new. It was also one of EA's weirder early experiments in putting online hooks in seemingly offline games, giving players reason to verify their copy of a game with EA's servers and maybe get some new content out of it.

The Saboteur was a perfect game to encapsulate Riccitiello's tenure and to highlight the stresses EA faced. The game took too many years to make and was built, expensively out of studios headquartered in Los Angeles (Riccitiello shut them down). It was creatively ambitious, because instead of simply being an open-world clone of Grand Theft Auto or True Crime, it was a game that let the player assume the role of a freedom fighter in occupied France during World War II. It colored its world black, white and red, until the player liberated zones and restored color to the world. By the time it came out it suffered gameplay comparisons to the historical urban adventures of the Assassin's Creeds, but it was still like no other.

The Saboteur was not a game you'd expect from a factory or an evil empire. It was creative and fun. At worst, it was an interesting, refreshing underachiever. It also had no place where EA was going.

What it always seemed Riccitiello was right about was that he was convinced that games were services. He no longer wanted to talk about games as products that you get and are stuck with. I'd talk to top people at Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activision.... you name it. And it was only Riccitiello and Valve's Gabe Newell who talked this way about keeping in touch with customers, about games evolving and adapting.

I thought I knew what was to come. I kept waiting to see Madden cease being a product, to cease being an annual release and to turn into an ever-evolving game. It hasn't happened.

But compare the Mass Effect that came out before that game's studio was part of EA to the third, by which time it was. The first came out, had some downloadable content within a few months, then didn't have more for more than a year. The third game had day-one DLC (that had to be paid for, many gamers grumbled) and then regular releases for a year after, expanding multiplayer and deepening single-player. Battlefield 3 was no single release. It was a year and a half's worth of content: the first game and then piles of DLC. As a gamer, I liked this. I liked my games adapting and growing. And though I get most of my games sent to me by publishers for free, I pay for most DLC and happily plunked down more Microsoft points whenever I wanted to play even more Mass Effect.

When I'd meet with Riccitiello at E3s or in hotel lobbies in New York, I'd always have a litany of things to bug him about. He'd keep talking about taking some of the first-person shooter market away from Call of Duty, but EA's shooters weren't quite doing it. And what of that burst of non-shooter creativity that was Mirror's Edge? Why were the interesting-sounding games like Steven Spielberg's LMNO (North by Northwest with aliens??) being cancelled? Where were the hit games? And why did it seem that talented people were always leaving EA—Will Wright and the Henry Hatsworth guys, to name some?

Riccitiello would take it all in and then tell me what he thought was going right. And in 2010, he told me how he thought EA should and would function, and how different this was from how big companies used to make games:

"I used to buy a whole bunch of titles and play them for three weeks and move on and never look at them again," he said, before switching from what he does to what you or I might do - "Today, firstly everyone goes online" - and then settling on what his developers do - "five years ago, the standard at every game company was when the game goes gold [and is sent to manufacturing], the 60 people on the title or 160 people, depending on the title, all of them [would be done working on that game] except maybe one or two guys who were gonna take a phone call, when you find out there's a video card from some Taiwanese hardware manufacturer you didn't have ideal compatibility with. ... For the most part today, for most games, the entire team remains intact post-ship[ping of the game] for a combination of free and paid [downloadable content], services, server management, code patches, figuring out exactly where people are dying and bunching up in the map, fixing that and improving the experience."

This sounded like a company whose games I'd want to buy. This sounded modern. This sounded like the way games could or should be.

Not that Riccitiello always sounded like a proper prophet. I recall him telling me that Spielberg's Wii game would be gaming's long-selling equivalent of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Hey, points for optimism, right?

His idea that games would be services still seems astute and correct to me. The realization of that in the form of year-long, evolving Mass Effect and Battlefield experiences feels more good than bad. If that's the present and future that Riccitiello built, then I wouldn't be able to regard him as anything other than an overall success.

In the middle of Riccitiello's time at EA, the company ran a small pre-E3 press conference that brought in their top creators. They had Alex Rigopulos, head of the studio that had made Guitar Hero and then jumped to make Rock Band for EA. They had Gabe Newell, there to talk about The Orange Box. Under Riccitiello, EA had the good taste to put Criterion on the Need for Speed series and to convince the leaders of Infinity Ward and creators of Call of Duty to make their next game for them.

Riccitiello loved to talk about how EA was getting its games' review scores up. He'd tell me and anyone else who would listen that quality would sell.

He'd talk about having "lively debates" with the creators of Mirror's Edge about a possible sequel. And he'd admit that "cooler graphics" weren't what Command & Conquer needed. He killed a bad game at the last minute rather than wasting gamers' time with it.

His plans sounded awesome. And then there were the results.

EA's FIFA games unseated Konami's Pro Evolution as the best things in soccer/football.

But, in basketball, EA kept stumbling.

In even years, Need For Speeds were amazing. In odd years, they were not.

EA's biggest rival appeared to be Activision. EA and Riccitiello seemed desperately to want to displace Activision's success. An alternating annual release of Battlefield/Medal of Honor might take out Call of Duty. Star Wars: The Old Republic would out-wow World of Warcraft. Regarding the former, Riccitiello figured out the formula, perhaps based on what FIFA had accomplished: don't make just one terrific game, make two terrific shooters in a row. Well, Battlefield 3 in 2011 was, in terms of multiplayer, regarded as very good. Last year's Medal of Honor? A disaster. And as SW:TOR stumbled and switched from a subscription model to free-to-play, Activision took a left turn, picked the brain of one of their old hands and cooked up Skylanders, a juggernaut for which EA has no answer.

Activision played it safe, though. EA has been the more fun company to watch. EA chucked the James Bond license; Activision picked it up to make some bad licensed games. EA instead dove into making cell phone games and Facebook games, trying games on any platform they could think of. Activision stuck mostly to consoles, to licenses and to shooters.

EA tried to make games with the best big studios in America. They hooked up with Gears of War creators Epic for Bulletstorm, Tim Schafer's Activision-rejected crew to rescue Brutal Legend, and former Sony-only Insomniac for the upcoming Fuse. On Facebook they battled with Zynga, which kept hiring away their producers and developers. On mobile, EA tried some wilder stuff, bought Chillingo and worked with some of their indies. The Simpsons: Tapped Out was a hit, but more headlines went to the EA-published iterations of Flight Control and Real Racing, games that seemed designed to frustrate players enough to make them keep putting quarters in the machine, as it were. (It's no wonder that this audio snippet has become emblematic of what some gamers disliked about Riccitiello's tenure.)

The overall impression I got from all this was that John Riccitiello's EA would try everything and that there was a logical argument for any piece of it. Of course they should be big on cell phones, big on tablets, big on Facebook, big on consoles, big on handhelds. Big everywhere. Who but them was going to be big in sports, in shooters, in role-playing games, in sci-fi, fantasy and racing? How could a company really pull all of this off? Under Riccitiello, they clearly tried like hell to do all of it. Maybe that's why it's unsurprising that they didn't seem to do any of it best of all. They were excellent at being good, not so good at being excellent.

Riccitiello's resignation comes at a bad time for EA. The company comes off a bummer of a year that saw Old Republic failing to catch fire and Medal of Honor collapse. More urgently, the new SimCity's launch debacle has undermined EA's chances of convincing anyone that it's ready to lead the way in games as services. The company's PC-download Origin service, while improving, is still a far cry from the quality of Valve's dominant, competing Steam.

The financial analyst Michael Pachter noted the odd timing in an e-mail he sent to investors this morning. He titled his note "Tackled at the 1-yard line" and built an argument that Riccitiello, who managed to keep EA profitable most of the time and invested heavily in the future, was painfully close to getting it all right.

In our view, Mr. Riccitiello's greatest achievement was in recognizing that the industry EA competes in was transitioning to digital, and in positioning the company to participate in mobile, social, casual, and PC downloads, while building a subscription MMO business and dramatically expanding the company's premium downloadable content. EA didn't hit many home runs during his tenure, but in an environment that saw bankruptcies of Midway Games, Atari and THQ, EA managed to gain market share and hit many solid singles.

We are perhaps most disappointed that Mr. Riccitiello's resignation comes when the company appears to be on the right track and about to capitalize on both the transition to digital and the emergence of next generation consoles. EA may have more work to do, but we believe that Mr. Riccitiello had the company on the right course, and believe that EA is better positioned to grow earnings than any

On Twitter, people, Kotaku staff included, snarked about the resignation in light of EA's current rep and business practices.

For example:

Share: