Welcome back to Franchise Festival, where we explore and discuss noteworthy franchises from the last several decades of gaming history. Older entries can be found here.

This week we’ll be choosing to learn about Mass Effect.

Background

Bioware was founded in 1995 and quickly became known for their excellent PC role-playing titles, including Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Both of these games were ambitious uses of the Dungeons & Dragons license designed to expand games out of the linear realm and into the more free-form role-playing of the tabletop tradition. Both were characterized by extensive character dialogue options designed to give the player greater control over how he or she reacted to and influenced the game world.

After making a name for itself in the late 1990s, Bioware partnered with LucasArts to develop an RPG set in the Star Wars universe. This game drew fan interest and was released to critical acclaim in 2003 as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It included the dialogue and emphasis on choice that characterized the studio’s earlier games, but offered more impressive polygonal visual design and a grand, interplanetary scale. Though a sequel would be made for Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware opted to strike out on its own with original concepts rather than continuing to stick with licensed titles.

Its first major release was Jade Empire (2005), an RPG published on the Xbox platform. Though the aesthetic, combat and setting were inspired by East Asia, the game’s conversation and morality system were derived entirely from the studio’s earlier work on Knights of the Old Republic. With that first original large-scale project completed, Bioware set to work on an even more ambitious virtual world.

Mass Effect (2007)

Mass Effect was released in 2007 on the Xbox 360 platform to widespread critical and commercial success. Its visual design was inspired primarily by science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, as echoed in the ability of the player to apply a film grain filter to the screen when playing. While cinematic science fiction had proven popular in the early 21st Century, it had largely moved from a grittier aesthetic heavy on practical effects towards a glossier hi-tech presentation; Bioware’s Mass Effect was as much a reaction against this aesthetic as it was an evolution on player-driven choice in video games.

With regard to player choice, Mass Effect rapidly became the standard-bearer. From the outset, players are able to choose a female or male avatar and heavily customize that character’s appearance. The female option, portrayed by voice actress Jennifer Hale, would go on to be particularly popular, but both offer distinct experiences in the studio’s expansive universe. Unique NPC romance options are available to both genders, and avoid a simple progression in favor of influencing AI characters over the course of the narrative through specific dialogue options and participation in a morality system.

The morality system, rather than being designed along the twin poles of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ is instead anchored by ‘paragon’ and ‘renegade.’ Both of these approaches exist within the spectrum of how the player confronts a threat to galactic peace; paragon represents the more high-minded, law-abiding approach to securing peace while renegade represents the popular archetype of a rule-breaking rebel with his or her heart in the right place. Both are oriented towards the greater good, but one has an eye directed towards the justice of the means while the functions along more purely utilitarian lines.

The scale of the game’s conflict could not be more epic. It is set in 2183, when humans have joined a vast array of alien species in interstellar travel and colonization. The Milky Way is governed by a United Nations-esque Citadel Council, which oversees and ensures peace between these space-faring civilizations. Humans have the unhappy distinction of being the most recent members, and consequently face condescension from more venerable species, including the Turians, Asari, and Salarians. The complex history of the galaxy and its peoples is well-established through environmental storytelling, narrative, and background text available when the player takes part in slow-paced but informative planetary exploration sequences. Into this setting steps the player-controlled Commander Shepard, who at the outset is given the distinction of being humanity’s first Spectre agent – Spectre is an intelligence/peacekeeping force backed by the Citadel.

While the simmering conflict between humans and the rest of the galaxy’s species colors its events, the foreground is occupied by the mission to stop Saren, a rogue Spectre agent. This seemingly straightforward goal evolves over the course of the game to reflect a larger-scale threat from galaxy-destroying Reapers. The background of this threat is shaded in by communications left behind by the now-extinct Protheans, a progenitor species that existed before all of the galaxy’s current sentient races and fostered their growth. This has the makings of a hopelessly cliched space opera, but manages to overcome its origins by filling in the details with compelling characters, complex relationships and a believable setting; all of the conflicts feel born of understandable differences rather than contrived storytelling.

In the end, the player is able to defeat Saren and restore peace, though this comes with a cost. The Citadel is damaged and the player has been forced into the position of choosing whether or not to spare the condescending Citadel Council from destruction, along with navigating interpersonal conflicts among his or her crew. In fact, by the conclusion of the game, the player will have chosen one of his or her crew members to sacrifice in an explosion and either killed fan-favorite character Wrex or managed to carefully argue their way out of that character’s violent attack. Each decision is marked by the overwhelming sense that it could lead to lasting consequences, not just in this adventure but in future series entries.

Sure enough, Mass Effect was designed to be larger than a single game. Though the central conflict of the first title is resolved by the time the credits roll, the danger of the Reapers has been exposed and left a hook for an even more dangerous foe to challenge the Milky Way’s fragile peace. The fact that a single Reaper, Sovereign, was defeated only by the accumulated strength of the galaxy’s assembled resources suggested a nigh-insurmountable enemy.  This struggle would prove to be the basis for the remainder of the original Mass Effect trilogy’s narrative.

The gameplay consisted of three types of sequence – dialogue, exploration and battle. Dialogue sequences tend to occur outside of areas in which the player can encounter enemies, and are quieter spaces where the player can interact with non-hostile NPCs to learn more about the world or take on sidequests. These sidequests shade in the game’s background and also grant new resources or offer unique player choices. Exploration sequences occur when the player uses a menu to choose a planet to land on. The player and up to two AI-controlled squadmates drop onto a planet’s surface and navigate around an extraordinarily massive planetary surface using the loosely controlled Mako vehicle; these sequences contributed to a sense of scale, but came under scrutiny for their challenging controls and would be abandoned in later games. Once the player had navigated to a structure or geographical feature, he or she would depart the Mako with the chosen squadmates and would typically engage in a battle sequence. Battle sequences played out through a combination of third-person cover-based gun-play mechanics and radial menu-driven biotic skills; these skills are functionally magic, and permit the player to alter the environment and physics in unique ways to disrupt and destroy opponents.

Unsurprisingly, the game was a resounding success. Some humorously misguided controversy aside – a Fox News program described it as pornographic and it was banned in Singapore for depicting sex between a human and alien – it was hailed as a milestone in game design, presenting the long form detail of a science fiction novel in an interactive environment. At the same time, its visuals were regarded as a gritty corrective to decades of slick science fiction. Luckily, the best was yet to come.

Mass Effect 2 (2010)

Mass Effect 2 is a direct continuation of the plot from its predecessor, but this iterative structure necessitated some significant changes early in the game. In particular, since the protagonist is the same Commander Shepard, game balance hinges on this character being set back to a position of weakness. That upheaval takes the form of an attack by this game’s new enemy – a heretofore unseen alien species called the Collectors; they strike Commander Shepard’s vessel, the Normandy, in the opening moments of the game. Though the playable characters of the first game survive, along with the ship’s captain (Joker), Shepard is apparently killed rescuing his crew as the Normandy and the vast majority of its crew are torn apart by a powerful Collector vessel.

This disturbing opening sequence effectively sets the tone for a significantly darker game. From the opening to the conclusion, Mass Effect 2 is infused with a grim atmosphere that functions as a stark rebuke against the first title’s optimism. After his/her death aboard the Normandy, Commander Shepard is rebuilt by a rogue, xenophobic human terrorist group called Cerberus. The first game had peripherally featured Cerberus personnel as enemies, characterized as an opponent to human progress and responsible for violent acts carried out against non-human species. The second game features Cerberus as the group responsible for saving Shepard and providing him a new ship and crew to pursue the series overarching goal of stopping a Reaper invasion.

The greater moral ambiguity is echoed in new dialogue mechanisms. While Mass Effect had foregrounded a robust conversation wheel system that allowed the player to shape his or her character’s morality, Mass Effect 2 introduces interrupt actions. These are triggered on console versions of the game by pressing the right trigger for actions geared towards Paragon morality and the left trigger for actions oriented towards the Renegade outlook; the former might include stopping a teammate from killing his nemesis, while the latter might include punching out a guard rather than trying to talk him out of conflict. These added flavor to the game’s primary means of meaningful interaction – dialogue – while also highlighting the fact that the galaxy is a more dangerous, startling place than it might have appeared in Mass Effect.

In keeping with its expansion in tone, Mass Effect 2 also dramatically expanded the playable character roster. The first game had featured Garrus, a gallant Turian gunslinger; Tali, a quirky Quarian mechanic; Wrex, a violent Krogan mercenary; Kaidan, a bland Human marine; Liara, an intellectual Asari researcher; and Ashley, a xenophobic Human soldier. Only two of these characters, Garrus and Tali, return in playable roles for the second game. In addition to those two, the player recruits Miranda and Jacob, Human Cerberus operatives; Grunt, a genetically engineered “perfect” Krogan; Jack, a disturbed Human biotic; Mordin, a Salarian scientist; Thane, a Drell assasin; Samara, an Asari law enforcement officer; and Legion, a robotic Geth soldier. Downloadable content expanded the roster further to include cut character Zaeed, more or less a human big game hunter; and Kasumi, an enigmatic human thief.

The vast array of characters could easily make the game feel bloated, but Bioware instead used its roster as the very basis of the game’s structure. Rather than pursuing a specific goal in a similar manner to the first game, the player is tasked in the second game with directing his or her efforts towards resolving the crew’s outstanding personal conflicts. At times, these take the forms of introductions to the broader universe of Mass Effect – Grunt learns and teaches the player about Krogan culture, while Mordin offers a window into the genophage, a biological weapon developed by scientists (including Mordin) to prevent live births among the violent Krogan population. Samara acts as a window into the complexities of the extremely long-lived (and painfully fan-servicy) Asari culture, and Legion opens the possibility that AI, formerly established as inherently dangerous in Mass Effect’s universe, might actually be as complex in morality as biological life forms.

These vignettes function to move the narrative from one oriented around humanity’s entrance onto the galactic stage towards one oriented around the wide variety of life scattered throughout the Milky Way. This would be a key element of the middle chapter’s role in the Mass Effect trilogy, as it effectively establishes the stakes of the third game’s full-scale Reaper invasion. The main plot is surprisingly simple – Shepard is attempting to stop the aforementioned Collectors from kidnapping entire colonies of humans from around the galaxy – but this gives room for the side missions and character quests to take center stage.

With regard to gameplay, Bioware made several massive changes. Vehicular planetary exploration is entirely omitted, aside from a handful of downloadable content missions; this was done in response to criticism of Mass Effect‘s Mako sections as bland and mechanically obtuse. Planetary exploration instead functions as a menu-based minigame, wherein the player scans a the image of a planet and can select points of interest from a list; he or she can also probe said planets for resources which are used to purchase ship upgrade and new weapons. More importantly, the combat of the game underwent a major revision – ammunition has been introduced, replacing the original game’s self-charging weapons, but fewer weapons are available. Like the expanded character roster, this could conceivably be a drawback, but instead has the virtue of getting the player to really get familiar with and enjoy different weapons rather than simply sticking to what he or she knows.

The most important aspect of the game, at least as far as securing its place in players’ collective memory, is the narrative climax. The Suicide Mission is exactly as it sounds – Shepard leads his or her squad into an uncharted area of space to defeat the Collectors and it is unlikely that Shepard or the squad will return; no other vessel has traveled there and survived, and the odds are heavily stacked against the protagonists. In fact, the player’s success in this mission hinges largely upon the degree to which he or she has gotten to know the game’s squad-mates and how much time has been spent improving the Normandy’s capabilities through resource gathering. Characters are more likely to survive the final mission if their character-specific sidequests have been completed; additionally, knowing a character’s personality and aptitude is crucial when deciding who will take on which role in the Suicide Mission. The game does not offer a countdown timer, but waiting to embark on the game’s final quest after Shepard’s crew has been kidnapped will actually result in their deaths aboard the Collectors’ vessel. This blends the game’s narrative and mechanics in such a skillful way that the player is unlikely to notice it upon his or her first time through.

Surprisingly, it is actually possible to lose Shepard and the entire crew, or any combination thereof, on the Suicide Mission. Mass Effect 2 had adapted to the player’s choices in Mass Effect, and Mass Effect 3 would do the same. In fact, each game was built with the possibility that a player could conceivably pick up the new installment without having played the preceding one(s). Default choices from preceding games exist; if no Mass Effect save data exists when starting up Mass Effect 2, Wrex will have been killed during the events of the first game, for example. That being said, the series chief contribution to the medium was demonstrating that it was possible, if challenging, to carry a narrative across three successive titles and incorporate player choices from one entry to the next.

After its initial release, Mass Effect 2 was supported through extensive downloadable content. Mass Effect had been published around the time that this trend was just beginning in console games, but Mass Effect 2 was released during a flourishing of DLC on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. Some of this added material appears to reflect cut content – according to a long-form Noah Caldwell-Gervais video essay that was very helpful in compiling this article, Zaeed’s greater amount of dialogue in early areas and reduced dialogue later in the narrative suggest that he was cut from the main game somewhere along the way. Other DLC actually took on an ambitious role in expanding the Mass Effect‘s universe – Lair of the Shadow Broker reintroduces Liara T’Soni and functions as a microcosm of the second game’s thematic darkness, as the impressionable intellectual from the first game becomes a morally compromised trader of secrets. The final DLC, Arrival, would prove pivotal in bridging the conclusion of Mass Effect 2 with the opening events of Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect 3 (2012)

Bioware sought to present a compelling, iterative narrative throughout its Mass Effect trilogy, but the gaming environment had shifted throughout the publication cycle of these games. Player choice had become a touted feature in numerous games. Expansive worlds with deep lore had begun to proliferate. No longer could a studio expect to release a game and have it lauded for its adaptive narrative and impressive environments alone. Bioware reacted to this cultural shift by focusing more on the gameplay elements of Mass Effect 3, along with a new multiplayer mode, a decision that would have significant consequences on the game’s reception and legacy.

The shooting mechanics have been thoroughly refined and expanded. More weapons are available, but all play very differently and offer a satisfying experience. Cover is more reliable and the game suffers from far less glitching scenery or characters than had existed in preceding entries. Consequently, the game is much more linear and features more exhilarating setpieces than what had come before.

The core narrative of Mass Effect 3 is a defense by the organic species against the Reaper invasion. The opening of the game, which relies on players’ familiarity with Mass Effect 2‘s Arrival DLC for full comprehension, depicts the initial stage of the Reaper attack from Earth, where Shepard is under house arrest. He escapes, along with other familiar faces, and sets about hastily building a coalition of the series’ species and constructing an ancient weapon – the Crucible – to fight the apparently insurmountable odds. It had taken the full strength of the galaxy’s civilizations to defeat a single Reaper in Mass Effect, so staving off tens of thousands of Reapers could only be done through the use of this deus ex machina.

With regard to the player’s journey, he or she gets to finally visit the home planets of the Turians and Asari, discussed but never visually depicted in earlier games. Unfortunately, the nature of the plot means that there is a constant tension hanging over every moment of Mass Effect 3. Virtually every location is visited during or shortly before the Reaper assault. This lends the entire game an air of urgency, for better and for worse. Bioware had been planning the structure of the story since the beginning, happily, so they had spent much of Mass Effect 2 exploring the galaxy’s cultures during peacetime; such an approach would be impossible with the narrative constraints of Mass Effect 3, though the profound sense of stakes in Mass Effect 3 would be similarly impossible without getting personally invested in these people and places during Mass Effect 2. The final two games in the trilogy are a pair which relies on the first title for context but ceases to function entirely without its two constituent parts.

Unfortunately, the game’s narrower focus has major consequences on the player’s experience. While slimmed-down narrative complexity would become apparent by the end of the game’s action-blockbuster storytelling, the most immediately noticeable alteration is the reduction of the squad-mate cast down to six: Liara, Tali and Garrus reappear from earlier titles, along with Ashley or Kaidan (depending on which one survived the events of Mass Effect); in addition to the returning cast, the Normandy’s AI takes on the role of a corporeal squad-mate, EDI, while a new human marine named James joins the crew as well. All major characters from the earlier games appear throughout the plot, but only these six join Shepard in his journey.

More problematic than the reduced character roster, however, is the less successful implementation of the series’ sense of choice and consequence. Major decisions from earlier games – like whether the player spared the apparently dangerous Rachni species, or whether the player handed the Collector base over to Cerberus at the conclusion of Mass Effect 2 – prove entirely inconsequential to the series’ conclusion. Perhaps this was a cynical choice, as a variety of standard enemy types were needed for the game’s greater emphasis on action and multiplayer, or perhaps it was a necessity born of offering more major choices than the development team could reasonably accommodate. Whatever the cause, players were very disappointed with the fact that a series built on choice had seemingly betrayed its own identity.

The most significant source of controversy and criticism was, unsurprisingly, the ending of Mass Effect 3. Three lengthy campaigns over a period of five years had led up to a final decision, but the actual consequences of that decision were largely cosmetic. The player is offered an opportunity to choose synthesis of organic and artificial life, control of the Reapers, or destruction of the Reapers and all other machines (including the Mass Relays that permit intergalactic travel). This decision comes with little buildup and the portion of the game following the decision changed little based on the player’s choice – the primary difference was the color of a wave that emanates out from the Crucible. Major questions had been left unanswered and numerous fans felt that they’d invested their time and money into a trilogy that hadn’t stuck the landing. A later patch included a lengthier epilogue and a fourth option during the game’s climax, but this was not enough to seriously alter the game’s legacy.

Downloadable content, which had by 2012 become a core part of games’ marketing strategies, was simultaneously a cause of and reaction to controversy surrounding Mass Effect 3. One of the best pieces of DLC, the addition of a Prothean squad-mate named Javik, was the most contentious. While this character contributed heavily to resolving lingering questions about the galaxy’s history, it was discovered that he was originally part of the game and was simply locked behind a paywall; players felt that the sixty dollars they paid had purchased an incomplete game. Less controversial were two later additions to the game: Leviathan introduces the species that created the Reapers and sheds quite a bit of light on Reaper history and motivation, while Citadel offers a lighthearted low-stakes adventure which brings closure to Shepard’s various personal relationships. In contrast to the base game’s mixed reception, Citadel is considered one of the best pieces of game DLC released in the 2010s.

Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017)

Five years after the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy, Bioware published a new game in the series. Far from continuing its predecessors’ narrative, it was instead set more than six hundred years later. The Milky Way is left behind, and the game’s structure is instead centered on the exploration of the Andromeda galaxy.

In many ways, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a throwback to the tone and mechanics of the first Mass Effect title. Vehicular exploration returns, and is indeed a major part of the new open-world geography; large-scale worlds had become a major design trend during the mid-2010s, and played a significant role in shaping the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda. The actual navigation was an improvement on the clunky Mako controls of 2007, but little had changed in the implementation. For all of their size and visual grandeur, the six planets offer little more than rocky expanses sparsely populated with basic collection or combat sidequests.

On-foot navigation is also expanded from the tight, corridor-oriented shooter gameplay of Mass Effect 3. Jetpacks were heavily featured in the game’s promotional material, and the open design of environments directs the player away from cover-based combat. Mobility is key to both exploration and battle.

The narrative is guided by the game’s thematic hook, as it replaces the original trilogy’s grim march towards galactic extinction with an optimistic outlook. The player takes on the role of the human Pathfinder, still presented with a wide variety of character creation options, and leads a coalition to explore and populate the distant Andromeda galaxy. Each of the four Council species from the earlier games is represented, along with the Quarians. Two new species are introduced: the somewhat cat-like Angara and the zealous Kett. The former functions as an allied species which helps the galaxy’s new arrivals, while the latter plays the role of the game’s antagonist force, led by a dangerous if bland leader.

The game was a critical and commercial disaster, unfortunately. Its narrative concerning the Angara strays dangerously into a positive take on colonialism, while the Kett lack the relatability of Mass Effect’s Saren, the tragedy of Mass Effect 2‘s Collectors, or the cosmic horror of Mass Effect 3‘s Reapers. The open worlds are aesthetically forgettable and mechanically uninteresting, barely distinguished from other fantasy or science fiction games. The plot effectively retreads territory already covered in earlier Mass Effect titles while the lack of new species renders it inherently less exciting than its predecessors.

The most notorious issue in Mass Effect: Andromeda, however, is the game’s lack of polish. The visuals are overall quite impressive, but environmental collision detection and character faces are abysmal. Prior to patches, characters would semi-regularly glitch out of bounds, resulting in broken plot progression. Facial expressions are downright disastrous, as character faces display a wide range of seemingly arbitrary movements, entirely out of sync with the committed voice performances of the game’s cast. In a narrative-driven title, this oversight is not one that can be overlooked.

Much of Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s failure comes down to a troubled development process. The executive producer of the original trilogy, Casey Hudson, had left the series behind after Mass Effect 3 for new projects at Bioware and eventually left the studio entirely in 2014. The fourth installment of the science fiction epic was assigned to an under-resourced and under-experienced studio, Bioware Montreal, which would experiment with various concepts over the next several years. The game was originally intended to feature hundreds of procedurally generated planets, then shrunk its scope to thirty planets, then finally settled on six; the procedural generation software was unable to suit the purposes of a title designed around scripted narrative sequences. Bioware’s parent company, EA, also mandated use of the troubled Frostbite engine – a powerful tool when leveraged by teams with the experience and resources to use it, but in no way easily adapted by a small, inexperienced staff. With limited time and money, Bioware Montreal utilized a computer program to automatically generate facial expressions rather than animating them by hand, leading to the poor match between voice and expression. More details on this process are available in an outstanding piece of journalism by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, “The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Troubled Five-Year Development.”

This game’s failure would have significant consequences for Bioware Montreal in particular and the series in general. With regard to the former, the studio worked diligently in the weeks after release to push out patches that improved the game’s numerous technical issues and planned to expand its content in DLC based on player response; unfortunately, the studio was shuttered as a result of Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s dismal commercial performance. With regard to the series, it remains in an ambiguous state; no announcements have been made, aside from Bioware’s plan to take a break from Mass Effect and focus on a new IP called Anthem for the foreseeable future. The original trilogy is broadly considered one of the most effective stories in the medium, but recapturing its lightning in a bottle may prove challenging.

Spinoffs

There have been few spinoffs from the Mass Effect franchise in spite of its overwhelming popularity. The most notable additional content is a series of novels that expand the series’ mythology and characters. Revelation, Ascension, Retribution and Deception were published by Del Rey books between 2007 and 2012, offering tales set around the events of the original trilogy, while two prequels to Mass Effect: Andromeda were published in 2017 by Titan Books. Given the series’ heavy emphasis on player choice in its narrative, its unlikely that the games’ identity could easily be shifted to another medium or gameplay style.

---

What do you think: Which games were your favorites or least favorites? What choices did you make in the series? Who did your Shepard romance? Let’s discuss!