Agreed.

>Plotline wise, we've got the entire Cerberus thing painfully
>destroying the illusion of choice, and the Council becoming even
>dumber than the original game is just plain infuriating.

The former becomes even more of a joke when you get to ME3 and they shell out to you this quick explanation that the whole thing was (in Bioware's minds) a cunning plan: The Illusive Man rebuilt the Normandy and put together the least-xenophobic crew he could find, all with the intent of having Shepard be the poster boy for Cerberus while the rank-and-file are the futuristic Waffen-SS. And that the plan fell apart because Shepard is just that charismatic and awesome that the crew all fell in behind you and against Cerberus. This was supposed to explain why Cerberus went from "We're just looking out for humanity!" in ME2 to "Genocide is just our hobby, galactic domination is our occupation" in ME3.

And the whole business with the Council was about making Shepard look like the "Only Sane Man" of the series, else Bioware might have had to come up with a more intelligent reason to explain why the Citadel Races didn't throw their support behind dealing with the threat of the Reapers.

>And Liara the
>cold-blooded information broker still makes no sense. Also the Virmire
>Survivor being a massive ass.

Again, all this only gets more ridiculous when you get to ME3 and you get told that the former lost most of her semi-criminal empire due to Cerberus, and the latter kicks themself for not jumping at your offer. It's like Bioware took notes from Marvel on the process of performing a bad retcon.

>Gameplay, even with world-building extensions like Omega and Illium,
>reducing all the missions to cover based straight paths honestly made
>it feel a lot smaller to me. And if they wanted an ammo system, they
>needed to make it work a lot better. Way too much running out of ammo
>in the middle of a fight for no damn reason.

I've mentioned this before, but the whole "heat clip" business was originally supposed to be part of a "hybrid" system that they thought was oh-so-clever. The whole thing would run like this: When you held down the trigger, the clip would quickly empty and then be ejected. But when you held fire for a few seconds, the clip would automatically regenerate. Ammo would even regenerate without a clip, but it was just be slower to do so. They dropped it around the time they realized testers were exploiting the system by hunkering down while their guns reloaded, killing the whole "fast-paced action" they'd be going for.

>And the Hammerhead is the worst vehicle in all the Mass Effect games,
>coming in well behind Lair of the Shadow Brokers taxi.

Another one of those "Let's try to address fan complaints!" moves that just showed that Bioware didn't understand the reason for the complaints. I'm still a proud member of the Mako Mountain Climbing Team to this day and think so many of the problems with it are what have already been covered: It was not a fan of abuse in combat and so you had to play cautiously to succeed with it. I know a lot of my combat turned into gunnery duels, which is why I hated that Bioware shoehorned such sections into every mission. But the Hammerhead was not the answer to that problem and I'm glad Bioware got that message. Now if they can just put a gun back on the Nomad, I'd love it all the more.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject