A little weird that I missed this at the time, but it happens.
I’m personally hoping for something just a touch less ZOMG THE END TIMES ARE HERE. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the trilogy was emotionally rough in that regard. I don’t want to end up feeling bad about putting this character through a nightmare-inducing, psychological-trauma engendering, brutally scarring, sheer personal Hell. It was bad enough that I did it to Shepard.
I still do not know how I feel about this one. They have been pretty mum on story details (from what I have seen) which is all to the good, as finding out what the story is about is one of the fun parts of any Bioware game.
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By the same token, it also leaves you in the “Hey, it’s Mass Effect- without Shepherd and the gang.” The other characters were a lot of what made Mass Effect great, and they spent 3 games developing the relationships, not only with Shepherd (and hence the player) but also the relationships between the characters. Should still be fun to see what they do.
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On, the menace thing. One of the best things they did in the first mass effect was establish the threat as credible. Indeed, they may have established TOO credible a threat, and that kind of hampered their ability to resolve the situation without getting a bit wacky (Mass Effect 3 ending.) They need to walk a fine line, but I hope they do not do the episodic feel with future Mass Effects as they did with Dragon Age. Mass Effect should be epic, not episodic.