User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-3228423-20120404115742/@comment-3325589-20120405001056

I think I agree with both of you here. On the one hand, I like that the Collectors stayed relatively scary and mysterious throughout the game, and I think fighting them more often would've diluted that. On the other hand, even if you only play through the main story, and ignore most of the loyalty missions (to your serious detriment later on), the game still feels like it's about half sidequests. Play through more thoroughly, and it feels like 80-90% sidequests. It would've been nice to establish a few more connections between the Collectors and the various non-Collector missions, even if the Collectors weren't present in person. Think more things along the lines of Mordin's recruitment mission, in which the Collectors never show up, but were still the brains behind the mission's antagonists.

Also, the Collector Base was easy? I'll grant that the Human Reaper was a disappointingly easy final boss, and the sequence with the valves was only slightly harder than average for any given difficulty, but I found The Long Walk to be one of the hardest sequences in the game, both on normal and hardcore. Not as hard as the battle with @#$%^ Captain Enyala at the end of Miranda's loyalty mission, but definitely in the top five most difficult parts of the game, maybe even top three.