... and sometimes you whish you had more than option A and B to choose from.
For example, in the first trilogy, you had a lot of choice A or choice B situations, with at least one bad consequence for each choice, but for a lot of them, if some conditions were fulfilled prior to the moment you have to take the decision, you could either manage to get both A and B, or to at least nullify the bad consequences of one of the two choices. Most of the time it was a Paragon/Renegade check, or a loyalty mission you had to have done (like with Wrex in ME1 or the Geth/Quarian conflict in ME3). There were a lot of parameters involved, and you knew spending time doing side quests/loyalty missions would be rewarding later on.
I understand ME:A is the first game of the new trilogy (?), so there aren't many things you could have done before the events to increase your chances of getting better outcomes. But I was a bit disappointed that, I think, ALL the decisions you have to make are either "Choice A with given consequences", or "Choice B with given consequences", period. Correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't noticed any advantage to completing the loyalty missions (apart from the rank 6 skills) in ME:A. And the only moment where it seems some of your choices mattered is the final mission when you go on (actual) Meridian, but still, it's not handled very well. For example, in my first playthrough, I spoke ONCE to Sloane Kelly, for the main quest, and then never went back to Kadara (yeah I kinda rushed the main storyline). And she still came to help me as if we were good old pals. Even worst, there were some people telling me "We're here to help you, Ryder!" even though I had no idea who they were. I had to go check on the wiki, and I think there is at least one I had never spoken to (sorry though for not remembering who it was...). The only major thing in the whole game that is really affected by the missions you did or did not earlier is Captain Dunn's fate. And that's it.
Coming back to what I was saying before. To me it's ok that sometimes you have to take a very difficult decision, like the Kaidan/Ashley thing in ME1, where you had no other choice but to let one of them die. It's part of what makes Mass Effect great. But please sometimes Ryder could just fight 5 more minutes and kill 10 more ennemies (after killing more than a hundred) to be able to save one more group of people, or maybe he/she could just ask the 4 squadmates that are having tea in the Tempest to actually be useful and do something for once. Maybe something similar to the end of ME2, but with no character death involved (I read somewhere the developers don't want to make squadmates die), just potential success/failure. This is something I would have loved to have during Priority Ops, especially the Moshae rescue and the Archon's ship attack. For example you could send your other squadmates to distract the ennemy, hack something, rescue some people... And depending on weather or not you chose the most competent ones to do it and/or completed their respective loyalty missions, they would either succeed or fail.
Several times I felt really stuck and limited by the low amount of possibilites there is, and was like "Come on, Ryder, you could just do that/have done that and problem solved...". Even though I know this is very unlikely, I would really love to see a patch that increases the amount of possibilites and outcomes during the main missions.
