Even then though, the Mass Effect series is still limping along. It's nowhere near as big as it was, in between 3 killing all goodwill and BioWare's talent going down the shitter, but it's still alive if only just barely, what with the attempted soft reboot of Andromeda and announcement of a new game.
Mass Effect 3 fucking up the ending should have been an object lesson.
You can fellate the first two games all you want. I for one think the first one is good and the second one is really good. Even the opening of the third one isn't all bad. But you cannot replay them without knowing that all that awaits you is that you get to choose the colour of the explosion at the end, and that all your companions' character development is shat on more often than not, and that everyone's sacrifice and hard work and effort can be overwritten by a pointless ternary choice.
Worse still, they jettisoned the most compelling plot point from the second game. You know when you go and pick up Tali on Haestrom she says she's doing some research into how certain suns are becoming red giants prematurely? Well, it was going to be, I heard, that the side effects of using mass effect technology was to give off loads of dark energy which accumulates in the cores of stars over time and makes them age faster, and this was going to be the real reason behind the Reapers existing in the first place, because without bombing the entire galaxy back to the Stone Age every so often it risks bringing about the heat death of the universe prematurely.
But, nah, you get to pick the colour of the explosion. And humans are speshul after all.
(Then again, they kinda stole a load of stuff from Star Control and Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters in the first place. All-female race of nude psychics? Check. Warlike avian race that you have to gain the trust of by appealing to their sense of honour? Check. Self-destructive pachyderm people who keep blowing themselves up? Check. Insectoid race whose entire hat is being evil for its own sake? Check. Crazy prepared race of physically weak but deeply cunning little critters? Check. Skittery and fundamentally untrustworthy scientist race? Eldritch beings that you have to make a pact with to get the best ending but which are probably only treating it as an alliance of convenience and will likely come after you next? Check. The answers to all of those could just as easily be Asari, Turian, Krogan, Rachni, Volus, Salarian, and Leviathan as it could be Syreen, Yehat, Thraddash, Ilwrath, Spathi, Umgah, and Orz.)
