Regardless though, how are they going to account for our neopolitan ice cream ending of ME3? Those are 3 very different settings.
Everything I can see points to them choosing a canon ending, and that ending being Destroy. This is what the majority of fans had been hoping for and notably the reapers live in both "synthesis" and "control" endings, but not "destroy". Liara is walking up a dead reaper, there's a dead reaper in the background, there's destroyed relay/ citadel debris everywhere. The mass relays are destroyed in every ending (except control, but that's debatable) as the Citadel itself is essentially the controller of them all.
I don’t really understand people’s beef with the end of ME3. I mean, it wasn’t good, but it did let us decide the entire fate of lifeforms in the galaxy. That’s hardly a “your decisions don’t matter” moment like everyone complains about. I chose to make everyone a hybrid — is ME5 going to reflect that??
On release it was objectively garbage, honestly. With the free extended cut DLC released a couple of months later, it becomes a matter of whether or not you accept the plot (personal taste). Prior to that DLC it's just a frantic mess laden with inconsistencies and little to no exposition/ explanation, with the scenes to follow not well done enough to compensate.
That said, I still can't stand the ending even with the extended cut DLC. It made me feel slightly better about it, but only because it added things that should have been there in the first place (i.e. hints at the fate of our squadmates).
They had set a precedent with how Mass Effect 2's suicide mission played out based on recruitment choices, loyalty missions, whether or not you took ship upgrades, and then your choices in the final mission itself requiring you to actually know your squadmate's strengths and weaknesses. Something akin to that is what people went into the end of ME3 expecting, with the outcome varying based on the choices you had made throughout the trilogy. Some of this came to fruition in Priority: Tuchanka (probably the best part of the game) or Priority: Rannoch. This kind of thing adds appeal to replayability because if you get a bad ending or squadmates die in ME2, you can do another playthrough or make different choices to experience another outcome.
If we specifically examine Priority: Rannoch, there are various key factors leading up to what choices you can make and whether or not they will be successful, saving both the Quarian and the Geth, committing genocide, or Tali sacrificing herself.
This kind of thing goes back to Mass Effect 1, where Wrex can attempt to kill you if he doesn't trust you (based on either his loyalty or your persuasiveness).
The end of the trilogy
should have been (IMO) a culmination of all of those things, but based on decisions you'd made throughout the trilogy that the developers consistently said would matter in the end. The whole trilogy was marketed that way. Mass Effect 3 itself was marketed by the developers that way
specifically with regard to the ending. And the ending that they put out doesn't reflect that at all (some devs even spoke out about how it was changed due to rushed development at the time). I completely understand that they may have bitten off more than they could chew, and that it was a colossal undertaking.
What we got in the end was a "twist" that was way too far removed from the spirit of the story leading up to it. The implications of the three choices are obviously huge, but in practice they're meaningless because you're picking one of three colours (or the very short extended cut option that tells you you're shit for not picking one of them) regardless of any choice you made throughout the three games it took you to get there.
In spite of how much I hate the ending, the OG Trilogy is still one of my favourite stories of all time. It just deserved a far better ending than it got.
