They'd have to rewrite major portions of the story starting in ME2 and retcon reapers back to their original intention. There's simply nothing Shepard can do that could ever compare to dealing with the reapers, they're a galaxy-wide extinction event.
I wonder how much they kick themselves for writing themselves into a corner like that. Easiest way out would probably be an alternate universe.
I thought remasters implied minimal changes to the original content.
A remake of Mass Effect would be a great idea to resuscitate some of the original value of the intellectual property, which is why I am absolutely certain beyond all doubt that EA/Bioware will never, ever even considering doing it.
As it is now, they are just going to remind people in vivid detail why they are pissed off at EA/Bioware.
"Rotating crops" is utterly alien to EA's "slash and burn" strategy of buying up studios, forcing them to do dumb things, and then shuttering the ones that don't get the results they want.
More often than not over the last few years "remaster" has meant remake when it comes to video games. Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled were branded as remasters, but they're very much remakes of the original games as opposed. Likewise you've got those "remasters" like Wild Guns Reloaded and The Ninja Warriors Once Again which have completely new characters sprites and backgrounds. Even something like the new Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is a remake given they remade all the maps, buildings, units, and recorded new music for it.
From all the interviews I've seen, Bioware's fuck ups don't sound like they're EA fault. It sounds like EA lets them do what they want. There's an interview one of the doctors did after they left BioWare, and he said EA gave them enough rope to hang themselves.
There's not a lot you can do to *really* be an independent studio when your part of a big Western-style corporation like EA.
Even if EA doesn't mandate multiplayer (ruining level design in the single player campaign in various ways to accommodate system changes) or require people to switch to their company standard Unreal engine rather than building better and more interactive content and systems with the engine they already possess, they'll always allocate resources and give bonuses and promotions based on the rank-and-file below them conforming to the "tone at the top."
This isn't as big a problem (at least not historically) in say Japanese development because usually the top executives have absolutely no fucking idea of any kind at all what video games should be like (Sony, Konami) or are game designers themselves who rose to their position of authority from being the company's best designers (like Dark Souls creator becoming President of FromSoftware, various Nintendo presidents, etc).
Western executives know too little about video games to make one themselves but just enough their opinions and ideas can utterly ruin entire studios and franchises simply because those opinions and ideas exist and the rank-and-file want to satisfy their superiors and get those budgets/promotions/bonuses.
Obviously, EA is going to give a bigger budget to studios who follow the top executives idea of what makes a game commercially successful, and will tolerate lack of success far more if you at least attempted to do things the way the top said it should be done.
Besides, pretty sure doctors are directly contradicted by the fact that EA mandates all studios to have things like DLC, multiplayer (among others) in all EA games.
But sure, I'll grant that Bioware is probably more responsible for their failures internally than EA as a whole is. EA may only be guilty of not actively punishing studios for *not* being more independent as creatives.
