Mass Effect - Retrospective @ Gamemoir

Gamemoir takes a a look back at the Mass Effect series, and talks about what made it stand out from other games.

Mass Effect was announced on October 4th, 2005 and in retrospect the description afforded the game fell far short of doing justice to the product which was eventually released in 2007.

Team Xbox’s Brent Soboleski wrote:

“As the first human Spectre – sworn defenders of galactic peace – your mission is to halt the advancing armies of a legendary agent gone rogue. But as you lead your elite team across hostile alien worlds, you will discover the true threat is far greater than anyone imagined.”

It sounds so utterly generic, doesn’t it?

When players ultimately got their hands on the game those “hostile alien worlds” were found to be worth visiting time and again for the story BioWare had crafted and the species which populated those planets.

The characters which populated Shepard’s team proved to be so popular that Garrus and Tali both became love interests in the later games while Wrex returned as a squad mate for Citadel. Their conversations in the elevators of the galaxy’s heart of government, the Presidium, illuminated a universe with an ornate history dating millennia.

As time passed and gamers delved deeper into the overarching narrative of the trilogy, it emerged that Mass Effect’s past covered hundreds of thousands of years if not longer and as with the Halo series, the technology which powered the galaxy was built on the remnants of those who had come before.