Rumours of Mass Effect Trilogy Trilogy Remaster: What would you like to see?

I disagree. If the consequences to your choices are, at best, lackluster, inadequate at worst, people won't care how "impressive" your end result is. Evidently. Call it "fan entitlement", if you want, I call it "lack of fan support in future titles" as has been proven multiple times since. Nobody has faith in Bioware anymore.

Agreed.

Agreed. But ideally, we progressed in terms of production value and hardware, exactly for the reason to scale those choices up, in terms of presentation. Not to scale back.

My guess is that until we have a holodeck where Data wants a proper adversary and the computer creates a fully sentient Prof. Moriarty by itself in response, the trade-off between production values and permutation variety will not go away.

This is true. Comparing a text based RPG to a cinematic one is totally unfair. The Mass Effect trilogy, amongst AAA rpgs that span multiple games, is basically unrivalled in terms of the level of choice and consequence. That doesn't speak too much of it's quality mind, just that it's the only series that's ever attempted anything close, and likely the last, because it's such a monumental undertaking with very little rewards, and lots of risk. 

It is interesting actually how the Witcher games never get any stick for ignoring the decisions players made in Witcher 2 going into Witcher 3. Heck, at least characters like Thane and Grunt got cool moments in Mass Effect 3 - my man Iorveth got totally shunted.  

Alpha Protocol came out around the time of DA2, had a smaller budget than ME3, and had more/better choices and consequences than ME3.

Mostly, not entirely. Just like TLJ is a bad movie, but it only really shits the bed, once it kills Luke Skywalker. But even keeping Luke alive, would not have made it a good movie. It's still the worst movie in the franchise.

True. The possibility of a continuation or an open ending would alleviate a lot of the complaints. There's always next time and that would allow for a "next time", unlike the ending we got.

Not quite. I don't agree that it's dumb. I'd argue its masterfully executed, from exposition, to dialogue, to cinematography, the character vignettes, the missions, everything. ME2 makes sure that every concession you made going from ME1 to ME2 was worth the sacrifice. It is an absolute marvel. Individually. ME would be much smaller a franchise, had ME2 not existed, the way it did. ME3 is where it turns really dumb. Butchering characters, dumb dialogue, plot contrivances and character benchings. ME3 starts terribly (we fight or we die), plateaus with Mars, peaks at Tuchanka, dives off a cliff with Rannoch, no pun intended Talimancers, has some individual brights spots, are largely pertaining to ME2 crew members, but never recovers and on top of that, it then Amber Turds the endings. There is maybe 2 worthwhile concessions in the entire game and everything else is "why couldn't we get more of this" which is usually ME2 crew stuff, "instead of this" which is entirely lackluster Cerberus plots that contribute nothing to the story, but Bioware needed them to pad their game and distract from the fact that the Reapers are extras in their own game.

So no, I don't agree how you equate ME2 and ME3, in terms of content.

Oh, absolutely. TLJ doesn't escape the fact that it's a bad movie regardless. But you can forgive and forget a bad Star Wars movie, especially coming off from a very good one, like Rogue One. But it did Luke so dirty, it just killed the franchise.

That's ... praise. A testament on how good of a job it did to subset every sacrifice it required from its audience, in terms of gameplay and narrative, to deliver a game experience that, as I said before, individually, you can't fault it. As I've also said before, nobody put a gun to Bioware's head to make the ME3 that we got. If something wasn't resolved in ME2? Make an ME3 that does. It's going to sell. The franchise is still healthy after ME2, in fact at the height of its popularity. You've got both the potential and the authority on the franchise to do so. They chose not to. Which means that the ME3 we got, regardless of what ME2 did, is the game Bioware would make, at the time, regardless and shifting the blame to what ME2 didn't do, doesn't fix ME3's problems.

As much as I hate these movies, I don’t think it’s fair to really level all of the biggest issues on just the second film. I would even go so far as to say that TLJ was more like the injury that put the franchise in the hospital, but ROS the pillow that suffocated it in its hospital bed

I think Abrams and Kennedy are worse than Johnson by an order of magnitude, and deserve much more of the ire than he does. They didn’t have to give Johnson a blank check. They could have shut down any of the bad decisions, but they didn’t. 

The point I was making is that for all the silly things that take away from the logic of the story, people would forgive it if it ended on a satisfying note. People will at least settle for emotional satisfaction if they can’t get airtight logic. If ME3’s ending made people happy (which shouldn’t be confused with an actual happy ending) the warts would not be such a prevailing issue.