Towards the end of ME1 I was starting to warm up to him. Then the game ended, two years passed, and he forgot the lesson from his loyalty mission that the ends don't justify the means.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I
dislike him - unlike some other ME2 party members I could name - but during ME1 he was fifth on my list of preferred squaddies (with only Carth McBlanderson coming in behind him).
I wasn't much of a Garrus fan in ME1. He was okay, but he had a chip on his shoulder about C-Sec and he never really stood out much. But in ME2, he was the goddamn Batman! As Joker said, he finally got that stick out of his ass and started beating bad guys to death with it.
My Shepard started out as an almost pure paragon, but he ended up getting sick of the Council and their rules and started to become a bit more of a renegade. I think that Garrus and I grew together from opposite sides of the spectrum, him learning to be a bit more of a paragon and me being less willing to take crap from people.
I'm hearing rumors that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters basically wrote the ending without even consulting the ME3 writing team true?
From what I saw, the source of that was a disgruntled writer that claims to have written many of the most popular parts of ME2&3 (Mordin and Garrus' dialogue in ME2 and the genophage mission were mentioned). Given how stupid it would be for a writer that's attempting to be anonymous to detail what they wrote, and those scenes just so happened to be fan favourites, it's probably a fake. But it has the veneer of being true because it seems unlikely that ending could have passed peer review from the other writers.
Well guess I won't be playing it then.
At least try ME1, that's on Steam and it's more-or-less a self-contained story. There are fewer main characters, the combat and inventory systems are awkward, and the side-quests usually take place in the same three buildings, but most of the important stuff is there and the main story is regarded as the best of the three.