What's Wrong With Mass Effect 2?
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Nearly all stories have a few holes in them. Even Tolkien, one of the greatest storytellers of the last century, had a few gaps in his story that have nagged people over the years. But this ... this is a legion of yawning plot holes, and this is only a partial list. Sure, you can go back and manually patch up some of the story with some heavy use of "Fanon," but that's not the same as having a well-made story in the first place.
Mass Effect 2 is NOT a horrible game, it's just far short of the usual BioWare standards. It says a lot about the quality of BioWare that their worst story in a decade is better than most other games out there.
Is this a trend? Some people are worried that EA is pressuring BioWare to dumb the game down for the shooter crowd, but I don't think a change in storytelling is a deliberate move on the part of BioWare. I think this is the natural result of trying to do too much, too fast. They used to do just one game at a time, now they have two franchises going, while they are also working on The Old Republic. That game will (according to rumors) have a full "single player"-style story for every class in the game, which is like trying to write a dozen games at once. I think the usual BioWare writers are working on TOR, which is why Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 have seem like such a departure from what we've come to expect from this company. They were probably written by junior writers who needed a bit more practice before they could author something as ambitious as a multi-title story arc. (The way game credits work, it's very hard to judge who actually did the writing. Pretty much anyone who attends a meeting can end up with his or her name in the credits.)
