If there is one thing that a thread like this illustrates, it is the difficulty of producing a game that satisfies everyone, even with only a few dozen people expressing their opinion. In that regard, I have some sympathy for game developers trying to decide where they should spend their resources.
On the other hand, I have been a game nerd since the 1970s, playing tabletop wargames and board & counter strategy games, moving through Chainmail into role-playing games like D&D and Traveller, and always looked to computer gaming as a natural progression of the "serious" gaming scene ( compared to, for example, family board games or card games ). Unfortunately, that progress seems to have stalled for some genres.
I thought both ME1 and DAO/DAA, although flawed like most games, showed some promise; but neither really seemed to be fundamentally much of an advance ( as a game system rather than graphics, etc ) on Neverwinter Nights, Bioware's first 3D RPG. But then along came the second installment in each series, and I realised that Bioware RPGs are probably destined to diverge from my view of what makes a good RPG. I found DA2 to be uninteresting, and thought that ME2 was easily the worst RPG Bioware had ever produced.
So I look at what other people say about the newer Bioware games in threads like this one and wonder why I just don't want to buy them any more. It's probably not that other games don't have flaws; they all do, and I will still buy and play some of them. I think it more likely that Bioware are just following the path to a wider ( less games nerd ) audience that have a different expectation.
Certainly the quality of the underlying game rules of the DA/ME franchises is questionable as they don't seem to be stable across titles, and rarely have any utility outside combat. This may also be why there is no longer much of the mod community that was so strong in NWN, but may not be considered important any more.
I also remember reading ( with astonishment ) when DA2 came out that polls had shown the average session for US gamers was something like 10-20 minutes ( that would certainly make immersing yourself in a character and world a challenge ), but it's possibly also partly to do with a more general audience expecting games to be more like films where they direct the action.
Maybe also the process of producing games has changed. It almost feels like older titles focussed on the overall product first ( story, rules, environment ) which was then filled out with a design, and the newer ones are assembled from what are considered popular design elements, that in the end don't really hang together.
Whatever the reason, I think I am still going to be waiting for a genuinely enjoyable RPG experience for a while yet.
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