5 Scrapped Video Game Endings That Didn’t Make the Final Cut

Mass Effect’s Dark Energy Ending

Recommended Videos

mass effect 3, scrapped ending

Warning: Hey everyone, obvious spoilers are obvious. We’re going to talk about the ending to some games, including the recently released Shadow of the Tomb Raider in this post. Don’t read the entries if you haven’t finished the games in question and want it kept a surprise.

The original ending for Mass Effect 3 was so controversial –and for some, bad– that Bioware had to go back and add an extended cut. The extended cut gave more details about the impact of your final choice, whether to Destroy, Control, or Synthesize with the Reapers. While even then it still annoyed a lot of people, it was a marked improvement over an ending which literally left everything up to the imagination of the player. The original ending was notoriously mocked for what boiled down to letting people choose what color they wanted their ending to be.

Fans have searched for a better ending to latch onto ever since, such as the excellent fan-created Indoctrination Theory. However, there was supposedly going to be a completely different direction for the ending according to ex-writer for the series Drew Karpyshyn. Karpyshyn left Bioware before the Mass Effect series finished up, and never saw this idea come to fruition.

This is what Karpyshyn told VGS (via Eurogamer):

“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.”

Like Karpyshyn mentions, it’s not exactly fully thought out, but to a lot of fans, it sounded more interesting and grounded in reality than choosing between red, blue or green space magic. There’s a hint that this was the direction they were possibly going in Tali’s Dossier mission from Mass Effect 2 when she talks about the star that is dying way quicker than it should be.


Twinfinite is supported by our audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Learn more
related content
Read Article Top 10 Shortest-Lived Live Service/Online Games of All Time
live service games that failed
Read Article 10 Coolest & Strangest Dragon’s Dogma 2 Character Creations We’ve Seen So Far
10 Coolest & Strangest Dragon's Dogma 2 Character Creations We've Seen So Far
Read Article 9 Shounen Tropes Created By Akira Toriyama
Akira Toriyama black and white on shounen anime background
Related Content
Read Article Top 10 Shortest-Lived Live Service/Online Games of All Time
live service games that failed
Read Article 10 Coolest & Strangest Dragon’s Dogma 2 Character Creations We’ve Seen So Far
10 Coolest & Strangest Dragon's Dogma 2 Character Creations We've Seen So Far
Read Article 9 Shounen Tropes Created By Akira Toriyama
Akira Toriyama black and white on shounen anime background
Author
Ed McGlone
Ed McGlone was with Twinfinite from 2014 to 2022. Playing games since 1991, Ed loved writing about RPGs, MMOs, sports games and shooters.