The biggest problem with Mass Effect's dialogue

I mean most of your posts here on the BSN are "crrriiinngggeee", but we all still laugh at them.

Thanks for the bump! Keep working on that anger!

They shouldn't have used it so heavily, yes. If you'll look at the poll, most people prefer a more serious tone with humour added here and there for levity, not in the majority of conversations.

They need like a baseline focus group filled with a range of people that have everywhere from no sense of humour to a sense of humour about everything and target the middle i guess.

You are aware that humor is something different to different people?

Yes... that is my point. Bioware shot themselves in the foot by infusing the entire game with humour that will be reviled as much as it is revered.

I don't know, I think that, in a round about way, the Citadel DLC might have done more damage to the franchise in the long run than the endings to ME 3 did.

Sure the endings were terrible, and narratively/coherently divorced from what came prior but at least BioWare got the unequivocal and almost universal response that, by and large, the endings sucked.

With the Citadel, they looked at it and the overwhelming "popularity" surrounding it and walked away with the mindset that everything else should try and emulate it. The idea that forced campiness trumps a nuanced story, that constant quips and one-liners spilling out of 2 dimensional cardboard cutouts beats having characters with depth or a story with a consistent sense of urgency; given the main plot hook. Etc.

Even more than that, it seems that the biggest 'lesson' they took away from the Citadel DLC (IMO) was that no one actually wants to see a nuanced science fiction story, or a narrative with a focus on discovering the unknown, of finding those things that are inherently different from us. No, they think that we would all rather have the vague overtones of a sci-fi story, namely space ships and laser guns, as a subdued backdrop to a story about cutting it up with your goofy friends. It was cringe inducing how much more emphasis, and in-game time was devoted to gathering those ingredients for Movie Night over stopping the Archon, or trying to study the Remnant.

In my case, being sentenced to watch any sitcom would be worse than 25 to live. But to be honest, you can avoid most of the cringefest by selecting your replies carefully. It reduces your reply options, which is my problem with the so called light tone they've chosen. And in some cases, such as uninterruptable cinematics, you can't avoid it at all, short of spamming the skip button.

The first ten hours didn't tell you how the final game looked, since it was released to the general public in a buggy state which has been taken care of by patches in the meantime.

"If this goes badly, if I get eaten alive - even if it's hilarious - please destroy the vids." And his little jaunty handwave. Man.