The game was garbage and one of the key examples used to show the decline of gaming in general. You liked it, great!! A guilty pleasure, but don't try and fool yourself that there is quality in that title.
Presumably you have a huge list of PC games that all of this doesn't apply to just as much, lending creedence to your claim that this is a console problem?
The only games I can remember having played in a long time that weren't ostentisbly "on rails" as much as the mass effect games were has been some of Jeff Vogel's various projects, and even then just the better ones.
D:OS does even better than Mass 3 in the sub choice area. There are many decisions you make in the game that result in a completely different outcome. Now, you can argue that the consequence to the overall story isn't changed, that I still have yet to determine. That said, D:OS was marketed as a spiritual successor to Ultima VII and it did a excellent job living up to that.
Mass effect 3 prided itself on being a story driven decision making game with all the consequences and benefits of such decisions. Heck, it even has a good/evil system that was supposed to layer an additional effect of play. The original game did a fair job of trying to hold to this. It actually attempted to be what it marketed itself as. Mass 3 was just a gimmick action game.
Now, if they would have marketed it as just an action game with some minor RPG components, I doubt I would have much of a problem. Even Dragon Age 2 if marketed as just an "action game" would have been fine. Thing is, they took games that had a specific RPG direction and simply turned them into action games with gimmick RPG features. It is much like they did with Fallout 3, destroying a PC RPG franchise by turning it into an action game.
The point is, on-rails is a very important objection to a game that was designed against that very premise. So another game that doesn't make that its main focus being on-rails isn't as detrimental as a game like Mass 3 which was centered completely around it as its sub genre.
