Damn, I need to rant about this with company, so thanks in advance for reading. Spoilers ahead.
I have a (bad) habit of replaying these games on a yearly basis. There's mutiple reasons, the most prominent perhaps is the fact that up until the end of the third game, they are so engaging and fun, the stakes are always incredibly high and ultimately, your decisions really shape the world around you. Curing the genophage, saving the geth, destroying the collectors, defeating Sovereign - it's slop, but it's fun slop.
Then you get to Earth by the end of the games and everything starts falling apart. The "beam" between Citadel and Earth is suddenly called "the conduit" by everyone and there is no explanation for it, and it's not like there wasn't the conduit in the first game. At the very end, once the crucible is activated, nobody apart from Shepard knows what the thing does. Still, the fleets are all fleeing, including the Normandy, but nobody knows what's going on. That probably includes the players by that point.
There is so much more in between these examples, but I don't have the beans to go over all of it. It's just a fucking mess.
Let's take a cool roleplay game with a baffling morality system that's about talking and make it a coverbased shooter. Also lets lean into the baffling morality system.
I never played 3 because teenage me was so frustrated at 2.
The only cool class in me2 is vanguard screw cover just charge everything.
I was going to do that anyway.
hey let's add fucking ammo powers and put all your shit on shared cooldown, and change everything that was unique about the combat.
let's get rid of the lift and throw combo like yeeting enemies into narnia isn't the coolest shit ever.
Hell let's add ammo to the game when one of the most unique things about the setting is that you have infinite ammo!
IIRC it was originally pitched as "you have a few heat sinks that you can use to quickly clear overheat when you're surrounded" but then turned into boring normal reloading.