"Hmmm… does it seem like I’m stalling on the whole ME3 thing? Okay, fine – let’s talk ME3. Of course, I haven’t played the game so I can’t really talk about my impressions of it. I’ve posted several rants of my own about people chiming in on things they haven’t actually read, watched or played, so it would be hypocritical of me to start spouting off now. But I know there’s a lot of controversy around the ending of the game, and don’t mind commenting on that."

...

"Of course, some of you are also pinging me to find out what the “original” ending of the series was when we started planning out the trilogy. Sorry, but that’s not something I’m even going to attempt to answer. The collaborative creative process is incredibly complicated, and the story and ideas are constantly evolving as you go forward. Yes, we had a plan, but it was very vague. We knew we wanted to focus on some key themes and bring in certain key elements: organics vs synthetics; the Reapers; the Mass Relays. Beyond that, we didn’t go into detail because we knew it would change radically as the game continued to evolve.

A good example of this is Cerberus. When we wrote ME1, Cerberus was basically a throw-away group of pro-human radicals: a name we dropped for some side missions to play the role of villain. We didn’t even have a concept of who was running them, and we didn’t think they were that important. Obviously by the time of my Ascension novel and ME2, that had changed radically. The Illusive Man and Cerberus became central to the story and themes – that never would have happened if we had nailed everything down and refused to make changes to the story.

So 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. Mass Effect was the creation of a huge team, with contributions coming in from many people at many stages of the project. Some things I liked ended up getting cut, some stuff I wasn’t sure of worked its way in. That’s the nature of the beast with collaborative works, and I think in the end it makes the final product stronger. But talking about the changes after the fact feels like I’m sitting on my throne and proclaiming, “That’s not what I would have done!” It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and say “I would do this or that”, but it’s very different when you’re part of the process, working with multiple ideas, trying to piece it all together and still hit your deadlines. Anyone who wasn’t part of the ME3 team is an outsider – even me – and whatever they say about the creation of the game is just unsubstantiated speculation."