I just remembered another half-truth Bioware kept saying pre-release...

I seem to remember that during the backlash after multiplayer was announced, Casey Hudson and others explicitly stressed that multiplayer was designed by a separate team/studio. Yet the multiplayer maps are also the N7 assignment maps. As far I can think of, there are only three possible explanations for this.

1. The single player team looked at the multiplayer team's work and said, "hey, we can take these maps and add some missions to the single player." But if that was the case, then that means that the single player team originally had no side quests in the game except for the Citadel fetch quests. This seems unreasonable, although given the fact that Casey Hudson actually thought the ending to the game was what we wanted, maybe not so unreasonable now.

2. The single player team planned to have those maps double as side missions, but didn't work on them. I guess this is reasonable, although again, why would they limit their work on side quests to the multiplayer maps? Mass Effect 3 is quite light on side quests: both previous games had far more assignments (at least meaningful ones).

3. The single player team designed the maps, while the multiplayer team designed everything else. I'm sure that those maps were primarily intended for multiplayer, so if this is the case then the single player team DID spend resources and time doing stuff primarily for multiplayer, even if they did toss them into the single player as well.

For the record, I don't consider missions like Grissom Academy or Samara's mission side quests. Those are far too plot relevant IMO. If loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2 aren't considered side quests, then I don't understand why those missions should be considered as such.

None of these options is very appealing to me. There were plenty of non-plot-relevant assignments in Mass Effects 1 and 2 that I loved doing. Not the case with Mass Effect 3. For me at least, this is another example of Bioware spouting half-truths pre-release, along with the stuff about how you don't need multiplayer to get the best ending and how the endings are wildly different.