BioWare may have mentioned once or twice that Mass Effect 3 is the closing of the trilogy. Now, obviously you’d have to be more naive than a tiny puppy to believe they’d not make any more games in the enormously popular universe, but it did feel reasonably safe to say this would be the last outing for Shepard. But perhaps not, after BioWare’s Mike Gamble told GamerZine that we should hang onto our save games. What does it meeeeeeeeaaaaaaan? We’ve speculated, and have some insights you will not read anywhere else.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Gamble to the not-quite-a-magazine when they asked whether it was worth holding onto Mass Effect 3 saves. “Obviously I can’t say anything, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

What does this mean for the series, for Shepard, for us as people in our lives? What possibilities can be understood from this sentence? What are words when you really think about it, but just grunts that we desperately hope convey the imposed meaning as we release them from our mouths?

Perhaps they want us to keep the saves because they contain a code, a code that will unlock a secret that will CHANGE THE UNIVERSE FOREVER? Maybe this will only work if we all band together, sharing the codes in our save games with each other, every person who plays from every nation of every race, unified in a task that will bring us all together for the good of humankind. Hey, maybe, just maybe, that is the secret?

Maybe it’s part of a malevolent plan from BioWare, who are hiding terrible viruses within the save game code, that they intend to fire into action on the 21st December 2012, thus bringing about the endtimes as prophesied by the Mayans, with whom BioWare are clearly in league. It has been my suspicion for many years that the RPG developers have been in cahoots with the ancient peoples of Maya, working their propaganda into their games, force-feeding us moral and ethical choices designed to brainwash us into the state they need for us to be willing to keep save games of a trilogy that’s coming to an end. “Coming to an end” suddenly takes on a whole new meaning in light of these words, does it? DOESN’T IT?

It seems a possibility that BioWare has realised its code has become self-aware, perhaps even alive, and the idea that anyone should delete a portion of it is tantamount to murder. By asking to us to keep our save games, they know that the Mother Code’s children will survive. In fact, from Gamble’s statement we could infer that the development team are being held hostage by this sentient code, and she is forcing them to prevent any replication of herself from being deleted, their families trapped in a basement room with walls made of green glowing digital numbers the rush up and down in columns, sliding over the right-angles onto the floor and ceiling.

Then again, if we look at Gamble’s statement – “It wouldn’t be a bad idea” – we can see some pretty obvious patterns. It’s made up of six words, and then take a look at the letters used. 2 Is, 2 Ts, 2 Bs, 2 As… If you ignore 3 Ds, that means the maximum number of times a letter is used is 2. So we’ve got 6 words, a frequency of letters of 2, and what does that tell us? 6/2 = 3. Three. As in Half-Life 3. Exactly. It’s pretty obvious that this is BioWare’s way of announcing that they’ve teamed up with Valve to create Half-Life 3, and it will crossover with the Mass Effect universe, with Shepard and Freeman teaming up to take on the combined forces of the Combine and Reapers. Oh, and there were 3 Ds, right? Half-Life 3D. RPS is FIRST with the BIG NEWS.