It seems clear to me that ending was pretty intentional. Now maybe with more time peer review wouldn't have been bypassed but equally there seems to have been a jaded approach which led to a let's burn down the universe so I wouldn't put anything past anyone.
I do think Mac and especially Casey got too egotistical about it and that's part of the issue but have you considered that perhaps they locked out peer review because they had no time to evaluate? Usually, peer-reviewing involves iterating on the script, re-recordings of VO, re-scripting of animations etc. and it says clearly in Keighley's Final Hours docu that "they made revisions right up until the end of production". They had to fart something out.
Casey is seeing a bigger picture and is probably more in the loop about what the high higher ups' demands are at the time and maybe they simply had to crunch to develop the final parts of production and he went with the most possible and ambitious seeming idea with too little time to think, and Mac probably didn't understand it enough either, so we got a bunch of ****. Recently I've been playing the games again after a long hiatus and it's clearer to me now that Mac isn't really a bad writer per se. He was unproven as the sole lead and fumbled a lot but ME3 still turned out to be a more mature depiction in a lot of ways, and it's hard to say it's all Mac's or Casey's fault when previously they had shown more competence. Casey was arguably misguided a lot of the way. He also made a number out of Shepard's death in ME2 pre-release as if it was a mystery whether he would be the protagonist or not.
Sure, if Drew had been on board it would've probably had a safer landing, but ultimately with where I currently stand, I don't see ME3's ending fiasco as a result of pure idiocy, but rather strictly developmental issues hampering creativity and time-constraints bringing forth stupidity in the writing at the most important moment of the story-making. Don't forget endings are some of the hardest parts to write, let alone at the end of a trilogy... which makes it all the more damning they effed it up so completely, I know.
I've been playing since day 1, put it away for a while, recently started a new game. Feels a lot easier now and there are lots of little changes that seem to add up. Maybe its becoz I'm playing as an F.E.M?
Exalted plains is still weird though.
I don't know what it is, but Exalted Plains has kind of a nausea-effect on me. I think it's the BGM or something. It's really weird.
BioWare should make a plan where they want to take the series to. Creating stuff as they go won't work. Idk how they thought the endings of ME3 were good idea. I like them but at the end I think they effectively killed the Milky Way as a setting for future installment*. So I hope they learned this lection, not everything should be about teh Chosen one saving the world/galaxy with no plan beforehand.
Also the writers and devs (or whatever) should coordinate their work, we read one thing in the codex and we see the same thing playing out differently in a cutscene. Also, many people don't like ME3 because of the ending not the other 99% of it, in my experience, so I guess that is about it. Make a longterm vision for ME BW. There always will be people who will hate stuff for the sake of hating.
*We may visit it and see how our previous choices affect the galaxy but that is about it.
That will never work with the way they make games, especially not now. I believe their decision to make things up as they go is due to the nature of game-development. Clearly much of ME3's story is written around the game-design limitations it has, and that's something that will constantly change along with game-industry's standards and the restraints caused by what technology they have to work with. It does not make sense to make a trilogy planned out in detail only to find out the second game can't be made because the plot dictates a gameplay-structure that's totally out of date or unpopular or demanding the game to shift in genre or something. You can see with ME1, 2 and 3 how they tried to cater to wider crowds. The desire to be more action-focused began already when they chose TPS in ME1 which was slowly becoming popular and finally cemented as the new hot thing when Gears landed. ME3 is really heavily written around its game-design, believe me. A lot of people's gripes with Cerberus's role is because of design-limitations but the symptom of it is in the plot and storytelling so that's what people blame first.
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