What is the biggest thing that needs to be improved from ME2 to ME3 and what should be thrown out?

Any kind of AI variation that necessitates a change in tactics would be nice. Tactical control over allies would be nice (like in Dragon Age) and would allow them to teach more skills to each character because you would keeping up with less during the action. But it doesn't matter, the game sold well and they really don't have any reason to change anything. People like boom headshots behind boxes and the illusion of consequence lost in the vacuum of space.

Origin stories.  This time you can play as either an asari, turian or human character because the Illusive Dude implanted explosives in your body.  We should see our Shepard explode in the next game's intro.

I like playing as shepard, especially because we already made his origin story.  I feel like a few less squad members would allow you to feel a connection to them.  I ended up just playing with 3 or 4 total members and just rotating those because they were easy to level up and help my character.  It just can be annoying to level up all the random characters, but I guess that's what auto leveling is for.

Huh, this is a good topic.  Thing is, is from Mass Effect 1- Mass Effect 2, I wouldn't have thought to do half of the stuff that they did. 
  
Shit, I'm having a hard time here.  ME2 was a near-perfect game.
For ME3?  I'd say add more items, as in customization stuff (and I wouldn't mind some variation in armor, yeah sure you could get it as DLC, but the Blood Dragon armor for example had that huge fucking helmet on all the time.  I want to see my Shepard's face.) 
I loved the shooting in ME2 vs. ME1, but I'd say it's still not 100% there. 
I'd like for ME3 to be longer, and a bit more epic (if that's possible), as it's the end of a trilogy. 
Should be able to custom color guns the way you can your armor.

Mining minerals for weapons. There just doesn't seem to be that many guns. I had to download a few of them through the cerberus network. I also don't want to spend all day mining minerals, it should be faster. Everything else is okay.

• Better framerate.  
• Better AI.
• Better level design.
• Better combat mechanics (blindfire, for example, would be really nice).
• More and better weapons and armor.
• Better planet interaction system (the probe mining was better than the Mako, but it still sucked, and I'm really not feeling the hovership).
• Larger areas to explore (nothing in Mass Effect 2 even came close to the first game's Citadel).
• Real consequences for the choices you've made in previous games, rather than a couple of e-mails saying "Hi, I'm a guy you can't remember because the first game was released almost three years ago and my sidequest took like five minutes. Thanks for helping me out. Bye!"

Revise the paragon / renegade stuff.
Option to hide the helmet like they did it in the first game.
 
The AI was top on hardcore and insanity but on normal imho a lil' bit too easy.

" @dies0rn: You could take your helmet off in ME2. "

-No dumb hacking games, I've played the game 4times, 3 out of the 4 times I used a trainer with a bypass hacking minigame..bypasser. MAKE THEM BETTER, or get rid of them, connect the dots is not my idea of hacking.  
 
-If you are going to have it that the only place to change your armor and equipment is on the ship, DON'T MAKE THE SHIP LEAVE THE PLANET everytime you want to change something. Again I installed a custom .ini file for my game where I can change my armor anywhere I want (or give myself NPC armor like Miranda's) because of this.  You have to go through 5 loadings to access the equipment screen, and when you are done, you are greeted with more loading when you want to go back to the planet/station. I get that UE3 is all about streaming and not keeping unecessary things in memory, but you don't have to go through 5 loadings to access gear. Keep the ship in dock if you just want to change gear within it, or complete mini quests (the cook, engineers, doctor chewbacwas). ME1 did this, why did they change it in ME2?
 
-Don't eradicate loot and loadout completely. Bioware is an RPG maker, please don't compete with GeOW and other boring TPS.. keep at least SOME RPG elements. More gear and armor FFS. 
 
-Rewards for being "Middle of the Road" Shep. In ME2, if you are 100% Paragon, this means you are gullible, stupid, and get taken advantage of, based on the various events and dialogs that take place. If you are 100% Renegade, you are a complete dick and you don't match the core character, you are supposed to be a hero and save the galaxy blahblahblah, if I'm going to play a Sith, there will be SWTOR for that. How about rewarding the people who balance those two traits thus mirroring who Shep is supposed to be really. For example I only am renegade towards those who blatantly want me dead (like the krogans in the mordin mission) etc.  
 
-Better loading screens. They outsourced whatever you see in the loading screens (the Tron/Blade Runner looking stuff) to another company to make em, even though some are cool, others make no sense. Also; a loading video for the Normandy elevator that takes 2 seconds to load through the normandy levels? I guess this is because the 360 takes 10-15seconds to load. Also did you know that even if the ME2 levels have finished loading into memory, it still waits for the loading video to finish even though its ready :P (another thing I got rid of in the .ini)
 
-Fix the collisions and map navmesh FFS. I had to restart some 30min missions because I rubbed a wall the wrong way and shot up above the map, out of collision. UE3 has some good navmesh editors, use em.  
 
-Fix the team AI and add better enemy AI behaviors, Dodging, Flanking, (they already got Rushing down since ME1 :P). 
 
-Random space encounters. I hate JRPGs (alot) but I like random encounters. Break up the A------------>B mission structure by adding random events. Have the normandy get intercepted by space pirates or some shit, and you have to man the guns and fight them, or have the normandy encounter a fleet of Geth destroyers. Or have random encounters on planets. 

Not fighting some random ass final boss just to shoot something big and scary.

" Rewards for being "Middle of the Road" Shep. In ME2, if you are 100% Paragon, this means you are gullible, stupid, and get taken advantage of, based on the various events and dialogs that take place. If you are 100% Renegade, you are a complete dick and you don't match the core character, you are supposed to be a hero and save the galaxy blahblahblah, if I'm going to play a Sith, there will be SWTOR for that. How about rewarding the people who balance those two traits thus mirroring who Shep is supposed to be really. For example I only am renegade towards those who blatantly want me dead (like the krogans in the mordin mission) etc.  "

" @Icemael said:

" @dies0rn: You could take your helmet off in ME2. "

I am not talking about taking it off. In the first game you could hide your helmet. I like the stats and the look of the helmets in combat situations but I don't want to see them in dialog ( I consider it as rude if  you leave your hat on indoors and that damn helmet is even worse :D) "

" @warxsnake said:

" Rewards for being "Middle of the Road" Shep. In ME2, if you are 100% Paragon, this means you are gullible, stupid, and get taken advantage of, based on the various events and dialogs that take place. If you are 100% Renegade, you are a complete dick and you don't match the core character, you are supposed to be a hero and save the galaxy blahblahblah, if I'm going to play a Sith, there will be SWTOR for that. How about rewarding the people who balance those two traits thus mirroring who Shep is supposed to be really. For example I only am renegade towards those who blatantly want me dead (like the krogans in the mordin mission) etc.  "

What do you mean by "rewards"?  How were the purely Paragon or purely Renegade rewarded in the game as opposed to the Neutral? "

" @dies0rn said:

" @Icemael said:

" @dies0rn: You could take your helmet off in ME2. "

I am not talking about taking it off. In the first game you could hide your helmet. I like the stats and the look of the helmets in combat situations but I don't want to see them in dialog ( I consider it as rude if  you leave your hat on indoors and that damn helmet is even worse :D) "

In that case, they should just have the visor automatically open in dialogue situations. For Shepard to straight-up take off the helmet whenever she's talking would just be weird. "

"In that case, they should just have the visor automatically open in dialogue situations. For Shepard to straight-up take off the helmet whenever she's talking would just be weird. "

" Accessing important dialog and thus changing the course of the story in some cases.  "

" @warxsnake said:

" Accessing important dialog and thus changing the course of the story in some cases.  "

There weren't that many dialogue options that required tons of Renegade or Paragon points for you to choose.  If you were playing Neutral (I did), many of the Renegade/Paragon choices could be chosen anyways and if you can't choose one, that's because that action would obviously not befit the Shepard you chose to play.  It's not really a reward; it's just another way to do things because your Shepard is that way.  Normally, in that case, the options that are not limited to the Paragon/Renegade points would be the ones that alternate the story based on the Neutral Shepard. "

" Origin stories.  This time you can play as either an asari, turian or human character because the Illusive Dude implanted explosives in your body.  We should see our Shepard explode in the next game's intro. "

" Well for example, breaking up the fight between Miranda and Jack; does that really require Shep to be Space Jesus? My first playthrough I could not access that and I was playing middle of the road but apparently slightly more renegade. I forgot what happens at this point, it was long ago, I think you lose loyalty with the character you dont side with, I could be wrong, but I remember being kinda pissed I couldnt access that dialog option. "

• Travel to the other Ward arms.
• More of those great non-shooty quests (like Samara and Thane's loyalty mission, the first part of Tali's loyalty mission)
• Fix the load screens (they still continue to play even if the area has been loaded) 
• Squad AI (something like Republic Commando's AI maybe?)
• Ditch the "fuel", it's an unnecessary hurdle
• Show me the gun stats, why do they need to hide it?
• Some economy system (what are all those crew members doing around the ship? How about an extranet black market or trading stuff with the merc groups?)
• Toned-down randomly-generated equipment (I don't mean they-all-sound-the same ME1, more like Borderlands where every gun has a different stat and feel)
• Take Alpha Protocol's email conversation system (Why can't I reply? EDI blocking outbound mail? And where do all these people get Shepard's email?)
• Less squad members, but deeper backstories/chatter. Garrus ain't gonna be calibrating guns forever.
• More "towns". Doesn't have to be big, can be a space station, get a couple of side quests there, a merchant, etc. KOTOR had one.
• For the PC version: bring back the shortcut keys!  
• I thought Renegade was about the at-all-costs ends-justify-the-means guy and not an utterly sadist evil jerk?
• Would be nice: port it to Unreal Engine 3.5, crowd generation and semi-environment destruction are nice.

I agree with some paragon/renegade revisions.  I feel like you could be the biggest asshole possible and even if you got the max renegade ranking, you would walk around the citadel like a hero.  I guess a game that does this well is fable 2, how the population hates you when you are a bad person and they want your autograph when you are good... just adds some emergence.  With the chat options, I felt like you could be restricted by being too paragon/renegade.  Yea I understand it can unlock some options, but you can be a good person and save the children or whatever, but when someone insults you, you should be able to insult them back without getting paragon taking away.
 
One other thing I would change is the loading zones on the ship.  I thought the Normandy was awesome and I liked the trophies up in the captain's cabin, but I never would go up to it because I didn't want to watch some elevator loading screen for 30 seconds just to go to a single room on the ship.

I found Mass Effect 1 to be a perfect game for me, and I found Mass Effect 2 to also be a perfect game for me. I know that whatever Bioware does with Mass Effect 3 I will love it so I'm just anticipating that.

• Less squad members, but deeper backstories/chatter. Garrus ain't gonna be calibrating guns forever.
• More "towns". Doesn't have to be big, can be a space station, get a couple of side quests there, a merchant, etc. KOTOR had one.

More outdoor missions.  There was far too much time spent in corridors and only Jacob's mission had a good outdoor water, rocks and grass thing going on.
 
Walking through the ship should be seamless.  We've seen from so many games that masses of landscape can be cleverly streamed, apply that to the ship.  I don't mind loading so much when in missions.
 
Homosexual relationships allowed.  I wanted the chance to bum Jacob or lez up Miranda just for laughs.  Maybe Bioware are too scared.  Of course that would mean shipmates would have to be receptive, but don't tell me Mordin's not interested in experimenting.  He'd have to brush his teeth, though.
 
Have moments of fun panic.  The combat in ME2 was almost as much of a rigmorole as the hacking games.  When you see a huge fekking robot you should have excited fear but it turns out that there's next to no cabaret.  Mass Effect 2 is good but completely dry and often very dull.  Give me some excitement.