

In its first month on the market, Mass Effect 3 doubled the U.S. But for BioWare, the storied RPG developer that launched the trilogy in 2007 and concluded it in 2012, the first impression produced by the franchise’s big finish wasn’t bad at all.

Those opening lines set the desperate tone maintained for much of the final installment of the Mass Effect trilogy, in which an existential threat foretold in the first two games endangers all life in the universe. Karpyshyn recently left BioWare to finish a trilogy of books, Children of Fire.“How bad is it?” one military man asks another in the first few seconds of Mass Effect 3. That's the nature of the beast with collaborative works, and in the end it makes the final product stronger." Some things I liked ended up getting cut, some stuff I wasn't sure of worked its way in. "Mass Effect was the creation of a huge team, with contributions coming in from many people at many stages of the project. "I don't like to say 'here's what we originally were thinking', because it gives a false and very distorted impression of the process," he wrote on his blog. Karpyshyn says that the plan was very vague they knew they wanted to focus on key themes like organics versus synthetics, the Reapers, and the Mass Relays, but beyond that they did not go into detail because they knew the game would evolve and change. The ending for Mass Effect 3 that Karpyshyn came up with, which was one of several, required the player to decide whether they would sacrifice the entire human race to create a Human Reaper, or take a chance that humanity could come up with an alternative. Humanity in Mass Effect is supposedly unique because of its genetic diversity and represented the universe's best chance at stopping Dark Energy's spread." "The real reason for the Human Reaper was supposed to be the Reapers saving throw because they had run out of time. "The Reapers as a whole were 'nations' of people who had fused together in the most horrific way possible to help find a way to stop the spread of the Dark Energy," Karpyshyn said. "The real reason for the Human Reaper was supposed to be the Reapers saving throw because they had run out of time" The story went that the goal of the Reapers was to find a way to stop the spread of Dark Energy, which is why every 50,000 years they would turn an entire species into Reapers to slow its spread. One of the possible endings concerned the spread of Dark Energy, a force used in mass effect fields and biotic powers that could ultimately destroy everything. In an interview with Eurogamer, Karpyshyn talks about some of the possible endings that BioWare had considered for Mass Effect 3.

He also worked on BioWare's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which clashed with the development of Mass Effect 3, meaning he could not work on the final instalment of the Mass Effect series. Karpyshyn was a part of BioWare for 12 years where he was the lead writer on Mass Effect 1 and 2, Knights of the Old Republic, and did work on Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. Mass Effect 3's ending could have been very different to what was actually published, according to former BioWare writer, Drew Karpyshyn.
