Yes it was.
It was one long in the making --
Mass Effect 2's ending already showing the first signs. It wrestled control away from the player, and made the conclusion about something this series was never about.
Mass Effect is a straight forward wishfullfillment space adventure, it's NOT frikking
Evangelion. It's not about "philosophical" ponderings. The whole organics vs. synthetics BS was at best a sideplot from the Quarians/Geth storyline, but
ME3 suddenly makes that the main focus at the very end... out of nowhere!
That's already bad enough, but it then resorts to taking away the personal involvement we'd been building up for over two games -- making choices, deciding fates, forming allies and relationships -- by reducing all of that to some sort of gameshow 'choose which door' final contest.
Samtemdo8 said:
I blame the fact that people bought the whole interviews and quotes from developers saying that "EVERYTHING YOU DO IN THE ENTIRE TRILOGY WILL AFFECT THE ENDING AND OUTCOME!!!"
People's expectations weren't based on interviews, they were based the previous two games, which granted a lot of freedom in choice. Remember how the ending of
Mass Effect 2 made it possible for you to get everyone killed or to save them, depended on the choices you made throughout the entire game, and every possible variation in between? People were expecting a similar amount of choice in
ME3, were based on your choices you could either get a colossal fuck-up or a mega happy ending, with a proper handful of different outcomes in between.
People weren't asking for the Moon here, they simply wanted more of the same, and Bioware couldn't even deliver
that.