User blog comment:Ygrain/The ending: there MUST be something more to it/@comment-4950455-20120617091727

Frankly, I would have nothing more to say on this subject - It's just wild optimism, though I'm glad you're at least not treating it as the gospel truth - but there was one thing I wanted to address:

As it has been stated a thousand times, the ending is so stupid that one would have to presume that Casey Hudson must have had a sudden IQ and storytelling skills drop overnight by at least 100 points. If the rumors floating around true - and while we'll probably never know for sure, I think they're at least believable - it's not so much that anyone's IQ dropped. It's that the entire ending was done in isolation by two guys. There aren't a lot of people out there who are genuinely great storytellers in isolation - feedback and criticism is almost always necessary, and their absence can be more dangerous to a work then just about anything else (this was, for instance, a very likely culprit in the failure of the Star Wars prequels).

Even accounting for the evidence that the game was somewhat rushed, a sudden across-the-board drop in Bioware's writing ability doesn't sound likely, true - but an assumption by Walters and Hudson that they alone could write a great ending without any of that meddlesome "feedback" thing? Again, we'll never know for sure, but it's happened before, it'll happen again, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised if it was what happened this time.