This weekend at Spike TV’s Video Game Awards, we were treated to the first proper trailer for Mass Effect 3. The first two editions of the Mass Effect franchise have been critically acclaimed, award-winning games so the expectations are massive for the (supposedly) final installment in Commander Sheppard’s battle against the Reapers. Let’s piece together all the clues that have been dropped or accidentally leaked so far.

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t played the first two games yet, I’ll be digging through some plot points.)

Speculation about the game started when this video was released that teased a new BioWare game.

Clues were very quickly discovered and deciphered that pointed people toward believing that this would be a Mass Effect game. Early speculation was that this would be some sort of spin-off that wouldn’t directly involve Commander Sheppard.

EA’s online store gave away the main plot of the story in this description of the game:

Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.

Well, we know that the Reapers want to end all advanced life in the galaxy so I would assume that missions would not be limited to Earth. If that was the case, I would have expected that as part of a non-Sheppard ME game. So we can assume that like EA’s description of ME2 specifically noted how the end goal of that game was to take the fight to the enemy, they have given away the final battle of this game.

Anyway, you’re probably looking for this. Here’s the teaser trailer that was shown at Spike TV’s Video Game Awards.

So we have London invaded by the Reapers. The Alliance Marine in Big Ben sniped something but it isn’t clear what. It looked humanoid so it might have been a Husk. It’s definitely not a Collector and more than likely not a Geth. It could be something completely new to the franchise, though.

It seems that, like ME2, you’ll have to do some cross-galaxy travel to rally a team around you to stop the Reapers. I guess it’s a sure-fire way around the myriad of possibilities of what could happen to your crew at the end of ME2. However, the rallying of civilizations hasn’t exactly been fleshed out yet. It could be as simple as clearing out Geth/Collector/other enemy forces from a planetary capital to win over support of a species. I’d hope it wouldn’t be as simple as that because this game can’t end as simply as Sheppard saving the day no matter how the game was played. I think that there has to be multiple endings in ME3 like there was in ME2. Everything from a perfect ending (Sheppard saves the galaxy and live happily ever after with this game’s romantic interest) to a halfway decent finish (the Reapers are destroyed but Sheppard dies and the Earth is destroyed) to a complete catastrophe (the Reapers win and wipe out all life in the galaxy). Hell, every mission should have a different outcome based on how you play it. That would really make this game more mind blowing than we all expect it to be.

Above I mentioned that this supposedly was Sheppard’s last game. In an interview with Kotaku, BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk said that the Mass Effect series won’t end with ME3. With BioWare continuing their perpetually saving games, I would guess that any future ME games would take your decisions from the first three games into account. I’d ask how they would continue to produce games inside the universe they’ve created despite exhausting the main story of Sheppard but Halo has taught us that it’s nearly impossible to milk a good franchise dry.

As for the release date of the game, we know that it’ll drop at some point during “Holiday 2011.” EA execs had previously suggested that something big from the ME franchise could be released in the first quarter of 2011. The turnaround between the first game and Mass Effect 2 was about 26 months (based on the XBox release dates). Granted, damn well near everything was overhauled from the first to second games and BioWare seems to have gotten the formula about right in Mass Effect 2. The turnaround time now clocks in at something in the 21 to 23 month range (with October to December for the range).

So between Dead Space 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Uncharted 3 and now Mass Effect 3, it looks like 2011 is a good year to be a gamer.