Mass Effect 3 executive producer, Casey Hudson, admitted that while BioWare values players and critics' feedback, they don't really follow it when designing their games.
Problem is, fans don't really welcome new game mechanics and features but they also don't like repetition and lack of innovation.
"Anytime you introduce something new it's controversial. Because fans will say, 'Well, we never asked for that', you know, 'We want you to keep doing exactly the other things that we've liked before,'" Hudson explained. However, if you didn't do that, those very same fans accuse you of "doing the same thing all the time."
Hudson then gave an example from Mass Effect development. "A great example was the new characters that we added for Mass Effect 2," he said. "When we started publicly introducing these new characters that would join your team in that game, it was tremendously controversial because people didn't want these new characters that they didn't know; they wanted us to recreate the experience of Mass Effect 1 with those characters."
"Now we're having a similar challenge with Mass Effect 3, where characters that we're introducing are seen as controversial because people only want their Mass Effect 2 characters, characters which, previously, were kind of met with resentment because we were adding them in the first place."
Another example is the elevators. Elevators were introduced to the original Mass Effect in order to cover load times. "One of the top complaints for Mass Effect 1 is people didn't like how slow the elevators were, and they wanted to get rid of the elevators. But with Mass Effect 2 -- because we had load screens -- they wanted us to bring back the elevators," says Hudson.