Mass Effect without Reapers is like...well lets use a TV analogy.
Breaking Bad was an incredible show with extremely good and compelling writing. Better Call Saul, which is a spin off show that will be coming out some time this year....won't be as good.
Spin off franchising of characters and ideas into new territory rarely works out. Its like how Happy Days spawned Joni and Chachi but that show had to turn more or less into a soap opera to even be viable and it wasn't Happy Days or anywhere near as successful and we're talking about a show that only had to compete in a three network environment in its day.
So back to Mass Effect. Have you ever read the associated Mass Effect novels? If you have you might have a passing interest in Paul Grayson and Gillian Grayson but...do they have the same kind of impact as Jon/Jane Shepard and the associated characters that came along with the ME trilogy? Not really.
The Reapers were a key plot point, the lynch pin of everything that developed externally of that one driving mission which basically defined who Shepard was and defined Shepard's every interaction and side plot that was explored within the trilogy going to the very end.
A ME galaxy without the Reapers needs some new driving impetus to define a new set of characters with and once you've actually gone into the deus ex machina zone of averting a force powerful enough to extinguish entire galaxies....what can you actually top that with?
It would be unkind of me to say that I feel that Mass Effect 4 is more or less just a cash grab thats yet another attempt by EA/BioWare (and mostly EA) to create annual or bi-annual franchises out of its most popular properties and their actual concern for the experience is not as critically important as the potential profits from whatever experience they put in a box and put the brand name on...but it is also an unfortunate case how the gaming "business" works....business exists to make money, not to make ridiculously complex toys and give them away for free, so its nearly a necessary evil..its just an evil that EA does rather badly.
Had they maintained the integrity of the trilogy with its finalization in ME3, there might have been a chance for ME4 with Reapers or without them, but the integrity is dubious and debatable depending on who you talk to, so the intellectual property itself is already tarnished, much like the Dragon Age property was tarnished by Dragon Age 2 (but in my honest opinion DA2 didn't do its own franchise quite as much injury as ME3 did to Mass Effect). So it has to overcome that, or its simply just banking on drone buying of the product simply because of the name on it and not because the content is actually superior or at parity with its previous namesake titles.
So effectively, they can't do ME4 without Reapers or some kind of Reaper-like menace because without it, it kinda heads into Battlefield territory...the story is nebulous and secondary to the point and is almost meaningless as a feature as compared to simply trying to push out a modern military shooter that can assert its market dominance over a console generation....which is really the only point of Battlefield at this point, its not so much a game as it is a 100 million dollar dick waving contest with Bobby Kotick.
Breaking Bad was an incredible show with extremely good and compelling writing. Better Call Saul, which is a spin off show that will be coming out some time this year....won't be as good.
Spin off franchising of characters and ideas into new territory rarely works out. Its like how Happy Days spawned Joni and Chachi but that show had to turn more or less into a soap opera to even be viable and it wasn't Happy Days or anywhere near as successful and we're talking about a show that only had to compete in a three network environment in its day.
So back to Mass Effect. Have you ever read the associated Mass Effect novels? If you have you might have a passing interest in Paul Grayson and Gillian Grayson but...do they have the same kind of impact as Jon/Jane Shepard and the associated characters that came along with the ME trilogy? Not really.
The Reapers were a key plot point, the lynch pin of everything that developed externally of that one driving mission which basically defined who Shepard was and defined Shepard's every interaction and side plot that was explored within the trilogy going to the very end.
A ME galaxy without the Reapers needs some new driving impetus to define a new set of characters with and once you've actually gone into the deus ex machina zone of averting a force powerful enough to extinguish entire galaxies....what can you actually top that with?
It would be unkind of me to say that I feel that Mass Effect 4 is more or less just a cash grab thats yet another attempt by EA/BioWare (and mostly EA) to create annual or bi-annual franchises out of its most popular properties and their actual concern for the experience is not as critically important as the potential profits from whatever experience they put in a box and put the brand name on...but it is also an unfortunate case how the gaming "business" works....business exists to make money, not to make ridiculously complex toys and give them away for free, so its nearly a necessary evil..its just an evil that EA does rather badly.
Had they maintained the integrity of the trilogy with its finalization in ME3, there might have been a chance for ME4 with Reapers or without them, but the integrity is dubious and debatable depending on who you talk to, so the intellectual property itself is already tarnished, much like the Dragon Age property was tarnished by Dragon Age 2 (but in my honest opinion DA2 didn't do its own franchise quite as much injury as ME3 did to Mass Effect). So it has to overcome that, or its simply just banking on drone buying of the product simply because of the name on it and not because the content is actually superior or at parity with its previous namesake titles.
So effectively, they can't do ME4 without Reapers or some kind of Reaper-like menace because without it, it kinda heads into Battlefield territory...the story is nebulous and secondary to the point and is almost meaningless as a feature as compared to simply trying to push out a modern military shooter that can assert its market dominance over a console generation....which is really the only point of Battlefield at this point, its not so much a game as it is a 100 million dollar dick waving contest with Bobby Kotick.