>>96404565
>ME also suffered from being a series where all the writing was done by the seat of their pants (see rewriting the entire dark matter motivation for the reapers or the complete throwing out of the cooldown system) and so didn't have the grounding for a full TTRPG in the same way.
there was more thought put into the world building in the first game. Enough that there could have been a WEG star wars like development where a game publisher ends up establishing a lot of the setting to fill splatbooks.
You're absolutely right that 2 and 3s writing is much more rushed and just there to meet a deadline even if it's not very good