I have the GOTY edition, which comes with all DLCs I believe. I thought it just made it so that you could keep playing after the "end," but perhaps it changed even more than I realize.

There were literally thousands of different combinations and they found a good balance between full fledged decisions (quarian and geth outcome) extensive re-dialogues (life and death of wrex), minor dialogue (Kelly Chambers) and e-mails and military stats.

They essentially did voice work for three games. Putting more work into the game would have been financially insane.

And I liked the military readiness. Not because I wanted to boost it, but to actually show how big the impact was. What was better, what was worse. And you had at the end of the game a nice little "collection" of stories on how it all ended. I haven't played the extended cut yet, but from what I heard they also give better endings to the team members, which makes that a mood point.

My favourite time for RPGs was before BG. So I really like text bubbles. Heck, I played through whole games for only a few page of text at the end.

I can't comment on TW 2, because I never came around to actually play it. To be honest, I consider TW 1 one of the worst RPGs I played in the last couple of years. I really don't get the setting and out of respect for old Fenix here, I will spare you my impression of the series.
Awesome!

I still won't play TW 2 in the near future ;-P.

I really, really, REALLY don't like a lot about TW 1. And most of that is characters, writing and voice acting. Oh god, the voice acting ...

But among those thousands combinations most of them were very minor with limited "binaries" consequences, like I said my issue was not with the amount of possible choices but rather on the lack of real consequences.

Did thing "A" receive e-mail "A", done thing "B" receive e-mail "B" or no e-mail at all and that's all; not exactly very hard to handle. Even most of the big choices were like that : save the council, the old council will not believe you and won't help you, let the council die.... the new council will not believe you and won't help you, save Wrex, meet Wrex again on Tuchanka and get mission from him, kill Wrex, meet Wrex's "clone" brother on Tuchanka and get missions from him, destroy the base get xxxx military points from some salvaged debris, don't destroy the base get xxxx military points (same value IRC) from another salvaged debris, etc...

Even the Geth, Quarian resolution, which I consider among to be among the "well handled" part, only changed some cut-scene and dialogue yes, but gameplay wise it didn't change anything (except of course the availability of some team members), no matter your decisions you will play exactly the same missions and have exactly the same end game outcome.

In W2 some of your choices (granted not many) impacted the actual gameplay, changing not only your "starting" location and where you would spend most of the game, but also which side quest would be available or not, depending of your choices some character would end up either being minor character that you will only see for 30 seconds during a cut scene while a different choice earlier in the game would have caused them to become major character impacting the game main plot.

It wasn't perfect, there was plenty of common/mirror quests and like I said there was not that many "game changing" choices, but IMO it was much better than what Bioware did in ME. I prefer having less choices that "matters" than tons of choices that are mostly cosmetic.

In that case you must listen to SimonG. I learned that he's really into ME franchise, and thanks to him I spent more time reading codex and emails in game.

And it really is worth the time. ME universe is one of the most complex, coherent and consistent one that was ever made in video games.

Just imaging how much time it took to write all these things down, and make this world a logical living being is impressive.

And the choices you made in entire trilogy were addressed brilliantly, even the small ones, like punching the reporter. Saying "the choices weren't reflected in the ending" is short sighted, because your choices were addressed all the time.

In the ending they weren't, because, duh, the things you did in the last hours of the game were much bigger than any single person in your life.

People saying "I don't care about universe, I want to see some blue babies!" (yes, lack of romance closure was one of the most often appearing on Bioware forums) or something like that are rather silly...

Well I for one do not care about the universe and would much rather see blue babies, because I have not seen it in a videgame yet. Saving universe? Like a trillion times.
Right? Let's get support cast and someone who doesn't hate poetry to rewrite that song and we're good to go!

Sadly, Mass Effect was always about saving universe and not about blue babies. ME3 brought it to the next level, where even politics didn't matter because the shit you did was godlike.
I think many people didn't understand the scale. First ME was more personal, second was about your friends and your team, and third one was about EVERYONE. Prioririties change.

Shepard couldn't live after ME3 ending, because he would ruin every party and every story with his "You remember when I saved the universe?" He would loose all his friends, because noone could top his story. Real mood-killer.

And most of it was a bunch of e-mails.

I don't think that peoples expected "everything" to have an impact on the ending... but maybe at least to have "something" to have an impact on the ending. Here playing online for 2 hours have a lot more impact on the outcome that playing all three games.

We will have to disagree on that, for me there is a big difference between causing some accidental deaths, as a side effect of your actions, and willingly causing a global genocide, especially when you have ways of avoiding it.
Except he does in one of them ;)

I don't think it's canon ending.

I don't know why they lowered the score needed to accomplish it though.

By the way, I consider "Destroy" the worst ME3 ending. I always choose control. Well, it's what my Shepard would choose.

Knowing Bioware I am pretty sure it is. Like you said they lowered the score to obtain this ending, but still that's the ending requiring the highest score and that's the most "convenient" ending to use if you want to do sequels.

You could kill Shepard in Me2 but it wasn't canon ending. In most endings he survives.

I hope they won't make sequels with Shepard living, I freaking hope so. There is nothing Shepard could acomplish after doing this, so they better don't screw this up...

See I think the ending of Mass Effect 3 was pretty much perfect. Victory against forces like the reapers should demand tremendous sacrifice, and it would certainly have been easy to do the whole, "a bunch of bit characters and NPCs from past games heroically snuff it while the main character emerges unscathed and lives happily ever after," but I'm glad they didn't; what we got instead was bittersweet and powerful, and Shepard surviving would just fuck it all up.

Again, I like a bunch of E-Mails more than any fancy gameplay changes or "different factions to play". ME is all about the immersion and the experience. And knowing how that one guy ended up after the last time you met him is more important to me than another sword +1.
Dude, I want a screenwriter!

Yes but that was the "you totally screwed up" ending, not the "hardest to obtain" ending.

That's the one I chose too. The green one is too silly for words and my mostly paragon Sheppard would never consider the red one.

But actually I preferred it before the Extended Cut. My Sheppard would have taken control of the Reapers and leave the galaxy with them never to be heard of again... not stay like in the EC.

For what it's worth, all the rumors point at bad internal project management rather than EA being dicks. I.e. the main plot has never been properly planned in advance, and losing the former lead writer after ME2 didn't certainly help. The endings we've got are, apparently, simply the best the new lead writer could come up with at last minute. Again, it's only rumors, but they would explain why the main plot is so inconsistent, and why ME2 felt so disjointed from the rest of the series.

So while I'd very much like to learn who screwed up in there, that's something we'll probably never get to know for sure, and ultimately it doesn't really matter from a consumer point of view.

Bottom line is, Bioware released a rushed product that failed to meet the extremely high expectations (which they themselves pumped up until release, even with use of false advertising). And then, when people obviously started complaining, did they take note of the feedback on how to fix the game? No, they just called it art, gave the finger to everyone who disagreed, and tried to get away with it.

Now, screwing up the with game is something I could accept, but I don't like arrogance and I don't see how this behaviour is defensible. Had it not been for the persistence of the "entitled whiny brats" movement there would haven't been any EC.

Saying that there were no problems with ME3 or the way BW handled it, and that all the mess was caused by a vocal minority is fucking delusional.