But they replaced it with something that doesn't even qualify as a boss fight. Three waves of trashmobs. I'd rather have to run around frantically there than have another fight that's identical to what you're doing the whole rest of the game. This is a pretty major overcorrect here. Changing a fast paced, perilous fight to one where you can just take cover and shoot when stuff comes out.
Pretty much all Mass Effect "boss fights" are like that though. The Thorian fight is just running up the same flight of stairs filled with creepers and the odd Shiala clone over and over, the arena for the Horizon Praetorian fight is barely tenable on higher difficulties, Grunt's trail is just waves of mobs and then you fire a cain at the thresher maw, the Reaper Larva fight is notoriously rubbish, hell even the final fight of the whole trilogy is just horde mode. Ironically Andromeda is the only one of the series to even make a serious effort at an actual boss fight, and even then they flubbed it by making them side-missions and damn near identical.
Meh. I'd hardly call the Thorian fight more difficult than the rest of the level, just more of a slog (and if someone in the party has singularity, downright trivial.) Some of the most difficult fights in the whole saga are only difficult because of wonky mechanics, not solid design. That fight on Therum with that last Armature outside the mine is almost always deadly on any difficulty level. Not because it's a cunningly designed boss fight, but because it's terrible level design and really cheesy enemies that can basically one shot you, no matter what you do. To me that's not challenging, it's just aggravating. So yeah, I'd say not being instantly and repeatedly stunlocked on Noveria while forced to fight enemies in a too narrow looped passage where there's no good cover thanks the the stairs, and the pathfinding means there's an equal chance they'll sit at the far ended of the corridor doing nothing, or running right into your midst while you're also trying to contend with snipers, a distinct improvement. Again, this is not difficult, it's just a hassle. It's not fun.
I never had any problems the first couple times I played the games. I had to dig deep, be creative, use different strategies. ANY creativity, ANY different strategies, are more interesting than just making boss fights exactly the same as regular fights. Even if those differences have balance problems. I had a lot of fun the first two times I played the game, had zero fun this time. Even if the difficulty of these fights were due to problems. Having to creatively deal with those problems is fun. Boss fights that are exactly the same as regular encounters are boring. Sometimes the bug is a feature. This is one of those cases. Overbalancing is a big problem in modern games. They think they're making everything fair, really they're making everything the same. Hours and hours of identical gameplay.
Are there any mods that fix the third game and all the issues surrounding the climax yet? There were a few in development.
The mod community is actively working to bring not only improvements to the tools, but also many of the favorite "OG" Trilogy mods to the Legendary Edition. Just last week an updated ending mod was released that build on old ones. Follow that twitter (https://twitter.com/MassEffectMods) handle and check out the existing mods at https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition If I ever get a PC again, I'd immediately begin to mod it, so many awesome fan made quality of life (no mini games, shorter dreams), fan made story extensions and improvements like the Expanded Galaxy Mod, Project Variety, Ending mods etc.
Again that's also an opinion. Shouldn't it be up to every player to decide that and enjoy the game their way?
No, I mean the ending was objectively incomplete as delivered. Whatever one thinks of the creative decisions, they shipped an unfinished product, hence the need for a "free DLC" to fill those holes. The reason they called it a DLC (and why it was free) instead of what it actually was--which is a for the time massive, almost 2gb post launch content patch--is mostly just a desperate attempt to spin what was a catastrophic publicity disaster . . . and maybe a little bit of bookkeeping shenanigans. Even the name of the DLC: "Extended Cut" belies what it actually is. As if it's extra material that was cut for time like in a movie. Which is not how that works; video games don't generally have limited runtimes. Indeed most such games go to great lengths to maximise the amount of time a person will spend playing the game, up to and including artificially padding out content with pointless grind. In games, cut content is typically either because 1) they tried something that didn't work, or 2) they ran out of time/money. As such, that name is clearly an attempt to redirect the narrative and this is a tacit acknowledgment of the underlying issue. So yes, the assertion that there's "nothing wrong" with ME3's ending is indeed factually inaccurate, and no that is not a matter of opinion, but objective fact. Even all that is without taking into account that even the creative decisions made for that final act were a direct result of the same thing that caused it's half-arsed execution in the first place; and that was an arbitrarily truncated development time that gutted the game's content and forced them to engage in narrative triage. Also; you can't have it both ways. A subjective opinion is just that: subjective. You can't have something that subjectively "has nothing wrong with it". It's a nonsense statement. Whether there's something wrong, or something right, those are both objective matters by sheer definition. Words mean things.
I've played it through a couple of times and see no objective fact that something is wrong with the ending.
The vanilla ending was terrible. The patched ending (extended cut? lol) was slightly better, but was still incredibly underwhelming. And that's just from a technical standpoint. Narratively, it was even worse. A case of choose your poison and the realization that all those choices you'd been making across the three games made such an insignificant difference that you wondered what the point had been. 95% of the trilogy is gold. It's arguably my favourite gaming series of all time (with the possible exception of classic-era Final Fantasy), but that last 15 minutes was awful.
The Mako is fine. People just need to learn how to drive a drunk rocket propelled shopping trolley properly. It's all in the hop & turn manoeuvring. Also, stop trying to drive it up vertical slopes and down into jagged rock crevices.
Even with its flaws it might be the one I enjoy the most. I like the big long setpiece missions more than the half hour linear missions of the other games. Mako combat was pretty crappy, but the DLC vehicle in 2 is so much worse. The fact that opinions are inherently subjective doesn't prevent people from objectively debating whether a game has qualities generally agreed upon to be the qualities of a good game, but that's a much longer debate. So I'll just say, ending the trilogy with a big wave that magically completely changes the nature of all creatures in existence was an extremely dumb, anticlimatic way to end it. Which insists that organics and machines an never get along which is *direclty* contradicted by some of the possible story outcomes, and also handwaves that it violates the bodies of trillions of people against their permission.