User blog comment:Yanxa/Lack of Character Development/@comment-4950455-20120503203955

Personally, I think you're coming at this from the opposite direction. I felt like the game did do a good job of getting you emotionally invested in your squadmates, without the need for this kind of character development. So what bothered me about the "issues" everyone had was how tacked on they felt.

Take Garrus, for instance. I personally feel he had probably the best character development in ME1 and 2 - unlike Liara, whose about-face I found somewhat abrupt, his transformation from cowboy cop to vigilante seemed pretty natural. By the end of ME2, he's basically conquered his personal demons - and that's where the problem comes in, because apparently some of the writers feel that in order to get you really invested in a character, they need to "solve" some personal crisis. So Garrus gets some issues arbitrarily tacked on that he didn't really need.

And while he was the worst about it, I kind of feel like this was a problem with everyone in ME3. It wasn't so much that they were underdeveloped, as that the "thing" they had to deal with felt arbitrarily slapped on when it wasn't really needed to begin with.