Outside of the ending which I felt was out of place in ME3, the overall story is a lot stronger in ME3 than it was in ME2. ME1 is still the best in that regard although obviously the combat/gameplay and camera work doesn't hold up too well.
I concur. I remember starting it: "WTF did they kill the protagonist?" "To indebt the player to the enemy. [facepalm]" "WTF is this cover system BS?" "Oooo, Tali! But why is she being evasive?" "Oh, right, you killed the hero. Genius!" "God these guns suck." I distinctly remember finishing ME2 the first time and being wholly disappointed: "That was really it?" "They had the gall to call this Mass Effect?" "What was the point of any of it!?!" Then it hit me like a freight train: "Filler!" It boggles my mind how ME2 gets so much praise. I don't have much good to say about it other than it's prettier than ME. Doesn't matter how many times I beat it, the same conclusions were reached.
ME2 should have started with Spectre Shepherd scouring the galaxy for allies and hunting down more relics to improve equipment and readiness for the invasion. Midway through, discover the sleeping Prothean which leads to the schematics for the catalyst. Game should end with what was the Arrival DLC. Most of the conflict stems from recruiting galactic allies (which would include other spectres and aliens). ME3 should have been about taking the fight to Reapers to buy time and resources for the Catalyst to finish. Like how it is, the focus should have been on severing the Reapers from their allies (Geth, Cerberus) using information gained from the Grayson experiment.
TL;DR: ME2 was a mistake. ME3 had an incomplete ending that they fixed redeeming the series...despite the pathetic middle. Then they proceeded to drive it off a cliff with Andromeda.
Witcher 3's story is much the same as ME2. A lot of side tracking with little to the core story. The problem is the issues presented in Witcher 3 are even less interesting by a large margin. The game drones on and on. The end result of the story is a bunch of gibberish that is spit out and a few cut scene differences that don't change anything meaningful. You spend the whole game chasing around this girl that the game tells you repeatedly that you care for without giving you any real reasons to have a vested interest in them by the time the journey is up. I'm still unsure of why I should care about Ciri. Anything semi meaningful in The Witcher 2 was brushed aside in the 3rd game. Which kingdom did you back? Literally makes no difference. Whatever decisions you made are flushed down the toilet at the start of Witcher 3. Top it off with underdeveloped combat and constant use of Assassins Creed style "eagle eyes" and nothing stands out as particularly great.
100% concur. Where ME2's core plot length didn't disappoint, Witcher 3's did. If you only did the main quests and nothing else (including all the NPCs forcing you to sideline like finding and healing Uma or prancing off to Skelliga because a thing), there's less than 10 hours of content there. Like ME2, you know what's going to happen a few minutes after you start. There's really not much in the way of plot twists. Witcher 2 and even Witcher had much more solid plots.
And yeah, I was disgusted at how the previous choices imported into Witcher 3 meant utterly nothing. The elf and dwarf uprising should have accounted for something meaningful but, no. They basically got slaughtered so it doesn't matter what you think you did. Witcher 3 basically dismisses everything that happened in Witcher 2 when it felt very important in Witcher 2.
I would have preferred a Witcher 2 like game in place of Witcher 3 with a well developed branching narrative. CD Projekt wanted to copy the Ubisoft formula for AAA game production and with that come all of the negatives.
