Mass Effect 2 producer Casey Hudson explains to Game Informer the concept behind "suicide mission." BioWare seems pretty intent on forcing you to live by your decisions, but what's to stop people from just creating a backup save with a memory card or an internal hard drive? Rather than making you start over, it would be interesting to see the rest of the story pan out through the eyes of another while still centering the story around Shepard.

"Dead is dead. Mass Effect 3, as with the rest of the trilogy, is Shepard’s story. If you have a dead Shepard at the end of Mass Effect 2, that saved game won’t import into Mass Effect 3. You can play Mass Effect 3 if you died in Mass Effect 2 of course, but you’ll have to create a new Shepard. Harsh? Yes. But we wouldn’t be serious about the concept of a suicide mission if you couldn’t die and your death didn’t have serious consequences."

ThreeTwoFiveSix via gameinformer.com »