Who cares though, doesn't come up in the next game. At the end of ME2, you're given the opportunity to save or destroy the collector base. This is pants-on-head retarded, and this would have been a perfect opportunity to show consequences of your actions. You're ostensibly in charge of the citadel, and the humans won't even help the humans. This can be done with a common path of events / ideas and a lot of side stuff. But then, if you killed the council / went with human council option they won't even see you. Were not asking for entire story segments exclusive to one path or another, thats unrealistic BUT its ok to ask that you as the player are influencing the world a little. 'Haha, sucks to be you, shouldn't have colonized a dangerous area'. The council you saved isn't interested in helping you.

Within the first two hours of ME2 the ending of ME1 has been made irrelevant. The real issue is that the major, galaxy shaping changes are trivialized like the above are. this person is fine.' It's a bit crappy but you can't expect everything to pay off or come back to you. Less acceptable but still understandable given resource constraints is the number of quests that were just ignored or resolved in an e-mail. That is just a continuity nod, a shoutout to fans of the previous games.

Small changes like a chance encounter in a bar with somebody you saved in a past game is acceptable, because you make many such decisions and you didn't have much of a reason to think it would be important in the long run. There is a sliding scale ranging from real life, where changes of the magnitude you regularly make would mean that you would need to make four whole games just to cover the wild historical divergences, and Mass Effect 2/3, where the consequences from previous games are almost totally trivialized. Nobody is talking about 'fully expressing' player choice, an impossible task. I may or may not have been rereading some chapters of the manga Sanctuary. Getting into fan-fiction material here, if I wasn't already, but I would have it star a set of male and female twins/clones (easily linking a Collector's arc, if not a larger Cerberus one, and a fun way to deal with Shep/FemShep distinction) where one is positioned in higher society and the other is a member of the underworld and they are two halves of a single goal as the player plays both equally. Having the game/series end with the Citadel getting massacred and the world that was built throughout the game(s) (years in terms of setting) would be a nice way to end without also having to deal with the mess directly after it. If necessary, you could even have the crazier/climatic moments occur when Shepard is out of commission (the beginnings of ME2/3) so no one asks 'where's Shepard?'. I think a good idea (one that is both safe/easy, yet would have some novelty to it) for a Mass Effect sequel(s?) would be one set only on the Citadel (with no decrease in the amount of content/areas) for the most part that spans the time between ME1 and ME3.

Neogaf mac walters