Picking up on a point I made earlier about how Bioware did not make best use of choices made in the previous game, I wanted to highlight two more brilliant opportunities to develop the storyline which were completely overlooked, despite the fact when the come up it looked like the impact could be serious.

Both of these decisions occur in Mass Effect 2, in N7: Lost operative and Arrival. In N7: Lost Operative you find a Cerberus operative and have to recover some encrypted data about Cerberus' operations that is very sensitive in nature and could do some real damage to Cerberus if it fell into the wrong hands. Considering you are effectively at war with Cerberus during Mass Effect 3 WHY was this not picked up? And in Arrival, when you are given the choice of whether or not to warn the Batarian colonists I figured this could have major repercusions in Shepard's efforts to gather allies, but again is barely touched on except for two assignments that involve Batarians on the citadel, and even here that decision doesn't really come into play.

Maybe I should take a break from the game, I feel I just torturing myself over thinking about what could have been.

How would you guys compare it to ME 2? Better than or worse??

To me, it's leagues better than ME2.

For one, the gameplay is much more refined, there's a lot of tactible differences between the classes and strategy comes heavily into play on the higher difficulties, which can rival the strategy needed to overcome ME1 on the higher difficulties as well. Also, story wise it felt much more solid than ME2 as well, it captures the essence of despair of fighting a losing war in good detail. 

Totally agree, and honestly 99% of the experience is one of the best experiences you can gain from a game. It just sucks that 1% end....but hey, positive over negatives! :P

I believe he didn't really get a chance to warn the colonies. 

Indeed. Those last 20 minutes may be a let down from the expectations that the whole trilogy created (even though i'm still convinced we haven't seen all that there's to see about the ending), but the rest of the 44 hours it took me to get there, I loved every single minute of them. 

As for Arrival, Shepard doesn't indeed warn the colonies, even in the Paragorn choice. He tries to do it, but it's both too late for it anyway and the transmission suffers from interference which might have made the transmission not reach the colonies (Alas, paragorn Shepard, when confronted by Balak (if you allow him to escape to save the hostages in Bring Down the Sky DLC on ME1) is tormented by the fact that he did try to warn them but he couldn't, thus he feels responsible for the 300K deaths that the destruction of the Alpha Relay caused).

 I am very disapointed with bioware. i loved me3, but that ending was just awful. 

First of all your descisions don't affect the ending you chose. Then their is no god damn closure, and the negative ending of the game makes the emotional attachment i put into shepard and his squad and the harted i have for the reapers useless. The games makes us feel powerless, while its supposed to make us feel in control of the universe. And their is absolutely no sense of closure, why create interesting characters and have us create emotional bonds with them to not include them in the final mission or in the ending. Me3 isn't just about shepard he's just a medium that the universe used to fight the reapers. Therefore bioware needed to make an ending that will bring closure to him to his squad mates and to the fate of every other individual in the game. Me3 shows concepts such as sacrifice, unity against a common enemy, hope, descision making, love, friendship and all for what a shit ending. 

I don't want shepard to live, i just want to feel as if his efforts and his sacrifice was worth it, i can't imagine him/her having such a glorious death. But instead bioware pull an activision and show us a muscled human being going fighting some bad monsters and then a big explosion occurs. 

I am utterly disgusted, and what makes this even worse are the words of casey hudson:

"I didn’t want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people–debating what the endings mean and what’s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in. That to me is part of what’s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it’s a story that people can talk about after the fact."

I really don't know what to say without insulting the man. It's like if he doesn't know what he developed. Mass effect being forgettable doesn't have to do mostly with its ending, it has to do with the experience and the emotion the games makes you feel, and the characters that you encounter. Never in my life has anything made me so emotional, i feel as if i can relate to most of the characters and feel their pain and their problems. So this man gave us a "call of duty esque" ending so we can remember the game due to the big explosions and dem colors. Do you know how i will remember mass effect 3? THE MOST DISAPOINTING OF MY LIFE! Dragon age 2 wasn't a great game, but it's ending wasn't terrible, you made choices and stood by them(even though you eventually killed the same boss) 

People "debating" about what is going to happen next shows that atitude that bioware has with this franchise, they want to milk it, never giving us closure and keeping this series alive till the multiplayer become's as popular as call of duty then they will just drop the whole rpg aspect of the game and the single player and make it multiplayer only . I'm sure that everyone who finished the game wants to know the situation of their squad mates, and of their friends, they don't want to debate about what is going to happen to organic life without technology.  Also even though the lore is quite extensive  their is no need for interpretation, mass effect gives us choices, so we can have clear endings not explosions with no closure. Their is nothing wrong with the ending being mysterious, but it shoudn't be to an extent that we don't know what god damn happened.Having closure then seeing a teasure about the future of same characters or of the series at the ending isn't bad, but the ending must be good and satisfieng first.

The only thing i will be saying of the story of me3 is how it is disapointing, and i'm also going to say that the lead developer doesn't know or understand what makes his game memorable and great in the first place and that he is not suited to work on such a project.

Edit: oh and having just 6 squad members(with dlc) is a disgrace compared to me2, especially when possibly the most interesting character in the game( that promethean squad mate) comes with god damn 10$ dlc. 

sorry that i didnt put them black boxes for spoilers, but i just dont seem to figure out how to do it.

I think that's why it whent down the path it did, but was hoping for something more inventive rather than  leaving Arrival more or less as a 'filler episode'. Typically came up with my own story for it, in that after Shepard broke Kenson out of the Batarian prison they were pursued by the Batarian navy vessel. Object Rho disabled the vessel (meaning no Batarians could interfere with the station) until they managed to fix the damage and pciked up Shepard's warning and escaped through the Alpha relay before it was destroyed. Thought something like that could have meant the Batarians either contributed to the war effort in Mass Effect 3, or went to war with the alliance by harassing their attempts to stop the Reapers.

Select the amount of text that you want to put spoiler tags, go to the Styles option and select Spoiler. It's easy as that. 

As for the endings per se, it's not as much Call of Duty esque as it is Deus Ex esque. I don't remember a Call of Duty that ends in "pick your ending out of these three choices"

Object Rho couldn't do such a thing, since it basically only broadcasts a signal into Dark Space using a method similar to the QEC's. It only responds to threats locally, by the same methods that a dead reaper ship indoctrinate anyone who enters them. 

And since Shepard and Dr. Kenson escape on a Batarian Shuttle, they couldn't be traced via IFF, so they would effectively be lost to the batarians after gaining some distance from Aratoht.