DESCRIPTION

As you may recall, once the crew abductions are supposed to trigger, Shepard all of a sudden has to attend some random, completely unknown mission at an unknown location. This "mission" has no setup, context or connection to the existing story - and it's never brought up again. It's easy to get an impression that the writers couldn't think of a way to implement the crew abductions into the story and naturally start the Suicide Mission.

And they say that the Catalyst was bad...

However, what you don't know, is that this case of poor writing was likely either a developer oversight, a leftover from testing, or a bug. Which one is it? I can only speculate.

What is actually supposed to happen is that the crew abductions trigger the first time you try to start a mission by landing on a planet or a Hub world. The mysterious "mission" that Shepard has to undertake is now whatever mission YOU choose to start.

The result is that the story progression feels much more natural and immersive.

TRIVIA

All of this is fully supported by in-game content, because the programming was already finished, tested and implemeneted by Bioware developers.

All I did was unhook a forced shortcut that prevents the original code from running -- the same code which lets you land on a planet/hub of your choosing before starting the crew abduction sequence. The aforementioned shortcut seems to have been implemeneted late in development for an unknown reason.