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

Mass Effect’s Dark Energy 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.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Users of the Tomb Raider forums uncovered something very unusual about Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It turns out that players who finished the game’s unpatched version on hardware disconnected from the internet received a completely different ending –one the developers never intended anyone to see.

This ending, which is no longer present in the game, shows Lara sitting at her desk writing something down before looking at a letter on her desk. Who wrote said letter? Jacqueline Natla. While we don’t get to find out what the letter says, it’s important to note that this is the first mention of the famed Tomb Raider villain since the series’ 2013 reboot.

Furthermore, there’s also a camera pan that gives players a glimpse of Lara’s iconic dual pistols, another Tomb Raider mainstay we haven’t seen in this series reboot. This might have been a hint to the series’ future, but now that it’s removed, there’s really no saying what’s next.

Prey 2

The Prey reboot didn’t take off in the way that Arkane Studios and Bethesda would have hoped, both critically and commercially. As a result, any hopes for a sequel to emerge seem pretty unlikely at this point.

However, that didn’t stop former developers on the game from sharing what could have been for the sequel. According to Chris Bratt of Eurogamer who spoke to these ex-devs, the plan was to tie all of the games together through the ending for Prey 2.

The main character Killian was set to end up stranded on a planet known as Exodus and run into the original hero, Tommy. Together, they would deduce that there are hundreds of dead clones of Killian and that it’s a result of the player’s actions. In other words, they figure out that they are in a simulation AKA game of sorts, and every time they die, they respawn, their former consciousness is moved into the new one., and the journey starts all over again.

We were going to see Killian experience a normal life, and when he dies of old age, he is respawned back at Exodus.

This scenario would have definitely made for a trippy ending, that’s for sure.

Halo 2

When longtime composer for Bungie, Marty O’Donnell, was let go a few years back, he didn’t waste any time spilling some tea about his former employers. Namely, he told IGN what the original plans for Halo 2’s ending were. It wasn’t originally supposed to have its famous cliffhanger ending. The ending that both infuriated and hyped up the fan base for the final game in the original trilogy, Halo 3.

Originally, instead of leaving it as a cliffhanger where Master Chief vows to finish the fight, it sounds like you were actually originally supposed to finish that fight right then and there in the ending. Here’s what O’Donnell told IGN:

Destiny

The first Destiny game had so much in place from the get-go to be a great game. It had excellent gunplay, lots of cooperative and competitive game modes, and lots of pretty worlds to explore. What it really lacked though was a cohesive story and lore (in-game anyway) that players could latch onto. It was the missing glue that would have helped bring everything together from the start, rather than waiting a year or two to finally work up to that point.

However, it is widely known thanks to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier that Destiny had an extremely tumultuous development history, especially in regards to its story and ending. Apparently, the whole plot was thrown out within the final year, and the new team that took over that aspect of the game had to try and piece something together quickly before the game was set for release. According to Schreier, Bungie members were split on whether the original plot was too confusing, while some really liked it and thought it was powerful. Everything was boiled down to a two-hour “supercut.”

“Bungie ditched everything Joe Staten and his team had written, reworking “Destiny’s” entire structure as they scrapped plot threads, overhauled characters, and rewrote most of the dialogue.” via Kotaku

The rest is history. While Destiny 2 has certainly improved the storytelling of the Destiny franchise, it’s still somewhat messy. Bungie had to leave a lot of lore back behind in Destiny 1, such as the Darkness, and the Stranger, in order to bring the overarching plot back to a place where they felt comfortable continuing it in Destiny 2.