Is the Citadel DLC the culprit?

Never got an opportunity t play Citadel, 'cause BioWARE Origin DLC prices suck & is not included into the PC trilogy, so... can't judge. Loved Andromeda, though, so I probably would have enjoyed Citadel. But it would not have had my favorite companions anyway, since the ME3 cast is very meh....

They misunderstood what made the Citadel DLC special I think. Citadel earned it's one liners and call backs and self aware humor after three games of build up.

MEA tried to give us that same tone and feeling sans any sort of build up. It didn't help that the cast of characters is easily BioWare's worst. There's not much incentive to enjoy silly moments with the crew when ALL of the moments are silly.

I don't believe so.
Citadel's greatest strenghts were the interactions with your crew, and I'm pretty sure they know that. Andromeda is lacking on that front, so they couldn't have used Citadel as role model.

The problem Andromeda had was that the writers weren't apparently given enough time to, you know, "make it work".

I felt Liam's loyalty mission was the only real instance in the game where there was a serious "Citadel" tone, especially with the Star Wars joke references. The entire game is decidedly more lighthearted throughout in comparison to any of the original games, but Citadel's real problem is the tonal dissonance in comparison to ME3's apocalyptic vibe.

For this to really work as an explanation, though, we'll need to have a principle which explains why ME:A's tonal shift needed to be "earned" in the first place. Other IPs do this sort of thing all the time, and it often works. Sometime it doesn't; Stargate: Universe, for instance, which moved in the opposite direction from ME:A. I'd argue that this is because the Stargate IP is limited in a way that, say,  Star Trek and Marvel-based stuff are not.  Maybe that's true for ME too. I don't know.

Agreed.

Oh and wasn't the team responsible for MEA the ones who did the DLC for ME3?

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Actually I'm pretty sure that Citadels DLC positive reception was at least one of the reasons why we got MEA's immature atmosphere. I always thought that Citadel DLC was overrated. For me it seemed more like cheesy fan fiction than a DLC. Sadly I'm in an overwhelming minority in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong I am all for a game with a "happier atmosphere" (ME 3 was to depressing for my tastes) but there's a big difference between happy and childlish.

The majority of MEA writers totally missed the ball and wrote shitty ass lines, and like mentioned before, Citadel had years of build up, and it was one of the most satisfying pieces of content I have ever played from Bioware, MEA wasn't that.

More., because ME3 itself was so dark and depressing, a lighter DLC was a welcome change.

But that doesn't mean we want an entire game built around it.  Bioware has developed an unfortunate habit of swinging wildly between extremes.

Alright, can I just say that I've never bought into the idea that MEA was a lighthearted game. I mean, seriously, I feel like the developers just said the game was lighthearted and everyone decided to agree with them. MEA is a game where the main antagonists are genocidal monsters, with no redeeming values, that have potentially converted hundreds of other species and plan to same to the angarians and Initiative races. They plan to do this by murdering anyone who resists and throwing everyone else into literal concentration camps where people are forced into back-breaking slavery until they are "exalted" into soulless Kett clones that will precede to fight against their own people. The Kett are basically Reapers but instead of being inspired by Lovecraft their every real world evil from Nazism, Communism, Religious zealotry, to colonialism, all rolled into one race. For fuck's sake we get to see the corpses of dissected salarians on the Archeon's ship. How the fuck is that a lighthearted adventure? Because Liam makes a stupid joke every once in a while and had a fun loyalty mission? And don't even get me started on how the threat of starvation, power loss, and anarchy on the Nexus is quickly handwaved once the Hyperion shows up. MEA's premise is horrifying and yet for some reason the narrative and writing rarely captures that and instead distracts itself with bland subquests and characters. It's just so tonely off that it almost gives me a headache.

The Citadel DLC could be argued to have the same problem but to me it felt like the writers knew that DLC was basically non-canon and just decided to have fun with an evil clone plot that made no sense.

Regardless, I wish MEA was genuinely lighthearted. Completely remove the Kett and just make this a game about a crew of space explorers in a new galaxy discovering new worlds and civilizations in the final frontier. Or actually admit that Space Nazis are not a joke or Saturday morning cartoon villains and make this the dark game that it truly is. MEA tries to do both and a consequence fails at both.

That's my opinion anyway.