BioWare's Mass Effect 3 developers and writers had quite the heavy burden to shoulder, responsible not only making a decent game, but for bringing the trilogy to a proper close by providing a satisfying ending to the trilogy. Unfortunately, by most accounts, they failed on a massive level, so much so that gamers wrote to the FTC, the Better Business Bureau, even accused the developers of false advertising.
In the end, BioWare rounded up a number of the game's voice actors and developers, and hobbled together a brand new ending as a bit of DLC in an attempt to appease the fans. It was definitely a noble move for the studio to undertake, but despite the studio's best efforts, still left fans disappointed. Ultimately, it may have been the best move, all things considered, as recently revealed by one of the series' major writers.
Speaking with Toronto's gaming radio show VGS on AM640, series writer Drew Karpyshyn recently revealed a number of other endings that were being kicked around by the studio, but ultimately abandoned. You can check the main ideas below. And though it may be roughly a year old game, fair warning to those who've yet to play it...potential spoilers lie ahead:
* Shepard was an alien - One of the "wackier" ideas, "At one point we thought that maybe Shepard could be an alien but didn't know it. But we then thought that might be a little too close to [Knights of the Old Republic character] Revan," explained Karpyshyn
* Shepard is transferred into a machine - this idea was also interesting, as it seems to be similar to the idea that 343 had in regards to the Forerunners idea for immortality. "There was some ideas that maybe Shepard gets his essence transferred into some kind of machine, becoming a cyborg and becoming a bridge between synthetics and organics - which is a theme that does play up in the game."
* Dark Energy - Despite not being completely fleshed out, this seems to be the one that Karpyshyn was a major fan of.
"Dark Energy was something that only organics could access because of various techno-science magic reasons we hadn't decided on yet. Maybe using this Dark Energy was having a ripple effect on the space-time continuum. 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 realize 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."
This idea definitely had potential for keeping the series going, most notably, the possibility of Shepard's continued involvement, or even promoting more DLC episodes due to the ripples in time. However, BioWare ended up going in a completely different direction.