>>718276840
Mass Effect 2 has its detractors but it really was such a Trojan Horse of a game in that it had the approval of a ton of BioWare and Mass Effect fans despite being a very non-BioWarean kind of game with all its actually normalized shooter gameplay, but it was so cool how it got mixed with some of the BioWare stuff like the RPG quest design and interactive dialogue.
ME2 definitely still won people over because in 2010 it felt like it was pioneering along with every other game as one of those "RPGs can now have realistic looking faces and fully voiced, animated dialogue, that's interactive" and that was a huge factor on top of it being its own Sci Fi World for me.
Then DA2 showed up and I immediately saw comments on GameTrailers videos saying "this looks like a casual game" and when I saw ME3 showcased at E3 the next year where it was all "Omg. COMBAT. Epic. WARRR" I also felt like the Gears of War style was taking over and that there was clearly a lot of corporate thinking taking over their decision-making.
When I finally got ME3 I also felt that. Just in the first hour there's a feeling, unlike 2 even, that there were a lot of "suits" involved with the game, giving BioWare bad advice. The dialogue is dumbed down quite a lot IMO, to a sort of "Stupid Summer Action Movie" level, and later on, even the good parts of it are still riddled with a sense of "trying to be so huge and epic" that it becomes overbearing to itself.
Every single mission in ME3 is just some sort of "Either everybody in the world dies, or you save them all!" even a quest on the Citadel is like "Omg, the whole species's planet was lost because you missed a Paragon Interrupt" like, it was just off-kilter.
You could tell someone at EA was like "Bigger. More exciting" and BioWare's creatives were just kowtowing to that primitive understanding of their franchise. Same with DA2, but where the team had less "power" with EA's corporate heads.
