What difference does my choice of significant combat loss make?

Question

I've not played Mass Effect 1 or 2, and during character creation in Mass Effect 3 I'm asked to choose what experience of combat loss I have. This makes little sense to me, I don't know who the people mentioned are. What difference does it make to the game?

Asked by fredley

Answer

Several decisions made during Mass Effect 1 and 2 have outcomes that affect the story in Mass Effect 3 -- in particular, it's entirely possible to finish Mass Effect 2 while losing almost your entire crew, including your party members.

This Mass Effect Wiki page contains a complete summary - or at least, we think it's mostly complete.

The "combat loss" it's alluding to is a shorthand way of asking whether you want a fabricated ME1/ME2 backstory where none, some, most or all of your crew survived.

It'll still assume suboptimal outcomes for various side missions and/or DLC that you never played, though; the only way to get those is to play through ME1 and ME2 yourself and complete them.

Answered by Shadur

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