Characters of Mass Effect always seemed fairly shallow to me. They were all representing their archetype and building upon it, but not enough to really differenciate themselves. Then again, I have finished ME games - well, up to 2, because I was totally turned off by ME3 demo and it's utterly horrible writing, so clearly I liked them. I just don't think they deserve the praise they get - all they do completely right is presentation. Everything is shiny and dramatic, I'd go as far as call ME games the Avengers of videogame world - nothing really to it, it's just fun to sit and look at for a bit. I really believe that videogames can do much more than that tho.

I definately did not like Mass Effect 2. It was too much of a departure in atmosphere, plot, and gameplay from the previous game and contained no small amount of unnecessary retcons. The first one had a very nice Star Trek/Babylon 5 vibe going for it. It had a lot of exploration, clean smooth aesthetics on vehicles, guns, armor, etc. The plot, while not exactly plothole-free was fairly straightforward and engaging. One of my favorite parts about the game was driving around on barren worlds reminiscent of mars or other real-life barren planets looking for stuff (and being absolutely terrified of thresher maws) The characters, while stock Bioware characters, never seemed over the top in any particular way, which I liked because it made them seem more plausible and relatable.

Come Mass Effect 2, pretty much everything I liked about the series got thrown out the window. The game is filled with unnecessary retcons (did the protheans really need to also be the wedge-headed collectors? heatsinks, holographic shields, etc) and unnecessary plot contrivances such as the destruction of the normandy and death of shepard were completely unnecessary and added nothing to the plot, considering Shepard comes back to be the main character anyways and the normandy is rebuilt with mostly the same crew. All of this was to shoehorn the player into working for cerberus (inexplicably retconned into beign some sort of mary sue organization with far more recources at their disposal than hinted at in ME1) and to allow for Bioware to throw in the awful darkside facial scarring mechanic from KOTOR. I found the collectors themselves to be far less interesting enemies than the Geth, which unfortunately get sidelined and retconed into being less alien creatures. Meanwhile Bioware blatently shifted the entire tone of the game to pander to the 'darker and edgier' crowd by throwing in copius amounts of swearing, sexual fanservice like Miranda, and an overabundance of 'badass' characters. Guns and equipment became less streamlined and more like conventional weapons while environemnts became significantly more industrial. The plot itself is significantly poorer than what ME1 offered, with the stakes lowered from fighting off a reaper/geth coalition to mounting an attack on a single space station. The entire plot could easily have been condensed into DLC, but is stretched thin into a full game by padding it out with the umpteen billion characters you need to recruit. Meanwhile, character customization went out the window and there is no longer any way to invest in dialogue upgrades, as renegade/paragon dialogue options are tied exclusively to the renegade/paragon meter. Combat is significantly more gimmicky with class specific ammo abilities, and inexplicable wierd abilities like the charge. Cover is much more important which makes fights much more static and less dynamic. The mako and large exploration maps are completely gone in favor of lots of firefights in enclosed spaces which makes for less variety.

All in all, I can see how some people might prefer ME2 over ME1, but the sequel was a complete 180 on just about everything I liked about the first, so I consider it far inferior to the original, in my humble opinion. ME3 just continued the trend in my opinion, sticking to or enhancing the role of aspects from the secodn that I found so distasteful and introduced a host of other problems as well which are often overlooked in favor of focusing on the issues with the ending exclusively. I hear a lot of people say that the first 95% of the game was the best game of the series, but this just makes me scratch my head, personally.

I liked ME2 and so be it. People need to have different opinions, otherwise the world would be quite boring.

Ok, I have to admit the game wasn't as perfect as some reviews said it was, but neither was ME1, which is also a great game. Bioware did make faults, but was this their own mistake or EA's? I wonder how the game would be if Bioware wasn't a part of EA.

Even ME3 was a good game. The ending (with extended cut) was okay, but not great and had some mistakes. There were some very good parts in the game, though, especially Tuchanka. Best missions in the whole game.

More like it went off the rails, which is a shame.

I didnt hate Mass Effect 2, but i really disliked the direction they took it. Much like yourself i absolutely LOVED the first game and its depth. Yes the Inv. Screen was a little bit of a chore, but you IMPROVE it, not take it completely out. They turned a great Sci-fi RPG into a Sci-fi third person cover shooter rpg. Either way, its WAAAAAY to late to bitch about all this now. Bioware have completely been absorbed by the cancer that is EA and i really wouldnt expect much greatness from them anymore. Dragon Age 2 completely destroyed whatever confidence i had left in the company. Have they even admitted that game to be a complete and utter pile of shit yet? I know they stopped supporting it with DLC.

The combat mechanics in ME2 are a big improvement over ME1, but I don't think much else is.

ME2 = "Uh, well, we can't really think of anything right now, so let's just have a bunch of short stories about characters." The fact that these characters were more or less sidelined in ME3 just seems to reaffirm that notion that they couldn't really think of anything else to advance the trilogy.

Also, I think that they killed off Shepard for publicity and/or game mechanics reasons. It was a mistake from the players' perspective, or at least it was from mine. You don't need to kill me off so that I can reset my talent tree. Shepard's death was trivialized in ME2. The protagonist in the story gets killed, but it's no biggie.

Infidelity and loyalty? Bioware is going to pull that after what they did to the protagonist? Shepard getting killed should be a BIG deal, but it isn't.

No, they want their cake and to eat it too. You can't kill the protagonist and treat the death as if it's just a trivial matter, more or less, throughout the rest of the game, and then expect the player to care about Infidelity or loyalties. I know I didn't.

ME2 was fun for me to play for a bit, and I enjoyed it, but I don't think the story and plot, or lack there of, can hold a candle to ME1.

No. Just no.

Planet scanning is an abomination, and whoever came up with the idea of replacing the fantastic Mako sequences (which brought the universe to life, and really made you feel like the galaxy was a big place), with that stupid, pointless, tedious, IQ-lowering, crappy mini-game, deserves to be trampled to death by ducks.

They had an excellent game mechanic, which had some flaws in its execution. They could have chosen to address those flaws and make it truly fantastic. Instead, they chose to remove it completely, and replace it with something much worse, but which didn't require much work to do. The thing about the Mako was that it required lots of content. The planet scanning didn't.

They saved some money, the game and the players suffered.

DID I JUST READ WHAT I READ?

I'd rather scan planets for 10 years instead of driving Mako for another 10 minutes.

Then I assume you'd also rather play nothing but Minesweeper for 10 years than something a little more complicated and challenging?

Was the Mako perfect? No, I said as much. The worst thing about it was that the height maps were, well, too high.

However, the Mako brought a sense of exploration, and had quite varied gameplay. Planet scanning was just a chore, and one you had to do a shitload of, if you wanted all those juicy upgrades.

The Mako sequences made you feel like you were actually doing something worthwile, while the planet scanning made you feel like the designers of the Normandy couldn't be assed to write the less than 100 lines of code if would take to make the process both automatic and give a much higher yield, because surely the captain has nothing better to do that moving a cursor manually over every square inch of every planet the ship comes across.

Not really. It was rather going from point A to B, because there wasn't anything interesting on the entire planet other than those few points marked on the map.

And yeah, ship commander has nothing better to do than collecting broken piece of garbage manually when he can just send a probe...

From what I've read, EAoware have lauded the "critics'" reviews concerning Mass Funk 3, but I can't hardly find anything where they referenced the reviews regarding Dragon Dung II. :D

Which is always better than that horrible, horrible drone minigame. You know, mako minigame pretty much worked as follows, at least as I understood it: Ship's sensors found points of interest and a landing party was dispached to check them out, which actually makes sense. Captain wanted to be part of it? Well don't judge Shepard, she's/he's the curious sort :-P So yeah, you actually got a sense of some space exploration and ... come on, it really makes sense that mostly the planets were empty. What would you expect, casinos and rollercoasters? With hookers and blackjack, perhaps? :D

Well, I remember EA admitting that DA II didn't meet their expectations in terms of reception and sales numbers, with the news about the cancellation of DLC development coming some time after that.

And Bioware...well, they said that there wouldn't be a DA II Complete Edition with all DLC included, since retailer interest in such a product was apparently less than enthusiastic.

I do agree with that as far as resource points marking is concerned, but when you detect something actually interesting and know that the planet's conditions are fine for a crew to land, why not send a small team? I mean really, they will most likely inspect the locations much more troughoutly than a drone, since they'll know what to look for and how to react - well unless the drone's controlled by an AI. Which it can't, obviously.