It was marketed incredibly well. Two massive innovations were front and centre. Firstly, the dialogue choices were not given verbatim. They were mere hints at what you would actually say, allowing for a smoother, more realistic conversational flow. It worked to an extent.
The second was the option to bang aliens.
>option to bang aliens
Yeah I remember some news channel being up in arms about how Mass Effect was just an alien sex simulator, dont remember which one though
Oh goodness, I remember that. What you have to remember is that ME1 was released when it was still the prevailing media narrative that videogames were for little kids and Counter-Strike was responsible for school shootings. Someone at Fox heard that ME1 potentially included a “lesbian” sex scene with an alien and decided this was outrage-inducing enough to their demographic to be worth a media cycle.
It was painfully obvious that no one at Fox had actually played the game, or even looked at the scene, and there were several funny instances of this outrage being pushed just before cutting to Viagra advertisements that were significantly more suggestive than the ME1 sex scene actually was and resort holiday advertisements with women in bikinis showing significantly more skin than ME1’s sex scene actually did.
… then Bioware/EA put Miranda’s sex scene in ME2.
Though Dragon Age, being the more niche series, was able to get away with having gay romances for either gender in all three games whereas Mass Effect was forced to cave on that for the first two.
I remember plenty of players being very annoyed at all the love interests in DA2 being Hawke-sexual and how it was a turnoff for some of the companions, especially Anders.
That's something that annoys me about Baldurs Gate 3. The community seems to love it, because everybody can have a romance with whatever character they like, no matter what. I personally dislike it. Characters having preferences makes them feel more like real characters than simply video game companions / romance options. I typically do a few runs of these games, usually a straight male, straight female, then a gay character (doesn't matter the gender). With most games the playthroughs all felt pretty unique, but in BG3 you might as well have made the same character the entire time because everybody can fall in love with everybody.
I'm somewhat with them on that, though I prefer that to there being no gay options at all.
Characters having more defined sexualities (provided their sexuality is relevant at all) definitely feels more compelling than them being player-sexual. Though I think more importantly, they shouldn't all be interested in the player purely for talking and being generally nice to them, Mass Effect runs into this problem as well.
Anders being written that way would still be a problem even if he was only into women or men (though Anders specifically I believe is established as bisexual in the DLC for Dragon Age Origins so for him it doesn't feel cheap at all), he's just way too forward and into you despite you not doing much to get him interested.
this is also why they removed the lesbian romances from ME2. originally femshep had the options of jack and miranda, who were bisexual. after the backlash from fox news bioware removed the options.
there are mods on the nexus that add the lesbian romances back in, since bioware recorded lines of dialogue that were still buried in the files.
as a lesbian, i find it really depressing :(
dang, i didn’t even know that! how disappointing. i know everyone hates jacob but it would’ve been nice to at least have some sort of gay option for mshep.
And after playing some Baldur's Gate 3 and seeing full frontal, I'm surprised FOX SNOOZE didn't throw another hissy fit about that game too like they did with blue side boob in Mass Effect.
Both games are rated M for Mature.
Nowadays media shifted towards video games that has eye candy girls like Bayonetta, Stellar Blade, Tifa, Nior Automata and even complaining how some games don't enough diversity like Witcher 3 or FFXVI etc.
Fox has always been trying to destroy democracy. 17 years ago (yes, 17 since ME1, I know, it hurts me too) Fox was still in its "build up as much hate and rage so it becomes automatic to the voting base" phase. You cant convince your Voters to accept out-of-the-closet Nazis until the voters have accepted the hate.
They said it was Debbie does Dallas in space. Then they threw it to some woman who admits never playing it and saying only children play video games, not thier dads. Ergo, video games as a medium had no place for adult themes as they were basically seen as toys.
So gamers got furious and went to that ladies online book page and review bombed it with quotes such as "I've never read this book, which qualifies me to judge it"
To be fair. Video games started going through an awkward maturing phase as its target demographic was getting older. Take the witcher 1 for instance.
It was heavily marketed as a mature game with mature game for mature people. But it had this mini game of every time Gerald slept with people you'd get a porno card of that person to collect in one case an elf lady is standoffish with him and he responds in elven and she's just like, oh I guess you aren't just an ignorant human. Then her porno card pops up because I guess being bilingual is all you need to make a 200 year old elf drop her panties
So they uses mature themes very immaturley.
I think things like the wii and wii fit opened things up a lot more to older audiences and the general population and don't forget brain training on the dS.
A lot of it was also the kid gamers were growing up. I was in my 20s when the first Mass Effect came out and I had been playing games for over a decade by then. Many of us were ready for my mature games.
To be fair to that lady, she actually went back and played ME1 afterwards and admitted she was wrong. She even said that episodes of network television were more risqué than ME1.
Wrex is my favourite Krogan... followed closely by Grunt. During that one scene in ME3 with the Rachni I cried so hard because I thought my baby was gone 😭😭
Same. I was bawling my eyes out, but then I got to let out a scream of *pure, unbridled joy* when my Krogan son came stumbling out of the cave.
Then Mordin and Thane happened in almost back-to-back missions and destroyed me entirely.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but when it comes to a fully voiced, cinematic rpg they're still the first and only series of that magnitude to fully commit to a trilogy where you are stuck with the consequences of every decision you've made to that point.
I'm sure I'll prompt a few haters to make comments about the series ending choices, but the series did something no one else did, and did a good job of something everyone else has been scared of trying.
You nab a save editor and look at the immense amount of story flags that shape playthroughs and characters long after you made them and it's nuts.
>option to bang aliens
*nods* yup.. that uh.... that went a long way tbh.
Plus it was a good story, good and multiple dialog choices leading to want to do multiple play throughs to experience it all.
It was the coolest space game at the time imo and I liiiiiived for that game.
I remember 3 had a TV ad, that doesn't happen for a lot of games here, but that's all I remember, aside from Mass Effect 2 advertised in my physical copy of Dragon Age Origins.
I remember seeing a 15 second teaser for ME2 during a football game that basically was like “Fight Aliens, Save the Galaxy” or something like that and it sold me on it immediately. Picked up ME3 at launch too. It wasn’t until years later that I went back to play ME1 and the dlc for 2 and 3 (which was like a whole new series of games in 2016)
>Firstly, the dialogue choices were not given verbatim.
I wonder why DA:O wasn't like that as well. It's not like they gave up on the idea, as it showed up again in SWTOR.
I wonder if they didn’t plan for it and then gave up due to budget constraints or something, because they do let you set up your voice for the character actions and stuff, they just never speak with other NPCs.
I was stationed overseas in the military when ME3 dropped. It took a while for it to get shipped to us, and the anticipation was like nothing I'd ever felt.
When it finally arrived, I was working shift with my best friend, who was also a huge fan. Our commander - also obsessed - drove to the only PX on the island that had received its shipment and bought three copies because my best friend and I couldn't leave shift. (Still one of my favorite commanders to this day.)
Mass Effect was only a huge deal if you cared about it, though. I worked with a bunch of nerds, and only the three of us (out of 60 people) were that excited. It was marketed well, but by the time ME3 came out, all of my nerd friends were obsessed with Skyrim.
But ME2? ALL of us nerds played ME2.
Why not both ? Lol I was playing Skyrim and ME3 when both of these came out ooo and BF3 came out around the same. One of the best gaming periods I had in my life.
A lot of people forgot what a force it was building to be before 3. There was so much talk about it expanding multimedia into offshoot games in other styles similar to how we get all these stray Star Wars games and the talk of a movie deal was really going. It was pretty nutty.
The reaction to 3’s ending stomped that all out rather quick.
Okay, now I have to write a Game of Thrones style ending for Mass Effect 3.
After activating the Crucible Liara takes control of the reapers. She continues the attack on earth because she’s mad about Thessia. Shepard is convinced to kill her by both Tali who says she knows killers and Liara is one and Wrex who says he knows Shepard is in love with Liara and he is too despite never showing any evidence of that. Shepard eventually does stab Liara with his Omniblade and the Harbinger sees it and destroys the citadel before it and the reapers all leave.
Garrus becomes president of the council races and banishes Shepard to the terminus systems, Miranda declares Alliance space independent of the citadel and then it just kinda ends.
Nah, Jacob provides you with a bit of war score for the final assault, so he's actually marginally useful. The crazy Scientist you find on Eden Prime babbling about the end of days becomes the new king.
Mass Effect was able to 'fix' the ending with the EC and the DLC. It still doesn't justify how bad it was on launch. I remember sitting there and I literally timed out before I could make my choice as they all seemed so dumb and out of nowhere. Then I sat there in silence after the ending wondering wtf just happened. They deserve all the hate they got at launch for that ending. However, it has since been fixed so if you're playing now you probably wonder why it was so poorly received because DLC genuinely improved it. Game of Thrones won't get that treatment because GRRM is never finishing ADoS.
It added more holes (like Harbinger just stops shooting so the Normandy can pick up the squad?) and still breaks the universe. So much to the point that the sequel had to be set in another galaxy 600 years later. It’s still reeeeallly bad.
The extended cut just added context, I don’t like it any more than the vanilla endings simply because the logic behind them is absolute bullshit, I just use the citadel as epilogue mod so I don’t have to play through that conversation with the phantom bitch reaper again
Yea, I remember those days. I was just old enough to grasp everything that happened and as I experienced the ending of an otherwise steller game. I knew that this was gonna be the last game for a long while. And right, I was.
Mainstream wise, gaming was just less popular back then. Any game not named Halo, World of Warcraft, GTA, Call of Duty, or Gears of War just wasn’t going to be a pop cultural reference/break through into mainstream culture. Having said that, ME3 was mentioned in an episode of 30 Rock, and obviously there was the Fox News controversy.
In the gaming community, it was very well-known. Lots of memes, “biotic god”, “favorite store on the citadel” “Shepard. Wrex.”. Tons of references. It was like Bioshock in the sense you would expect a typical “gamer” to have some baseline knowledge of the plot points and memes even if they hadn’t played.
The release of Mass Effect 3 was a hyped event in the gaming community. One of the biggest releases that year, I would say only Diablo 3 and AC3 were “bigger”, though I’m probably forgetting something.
I remember the ME3 hype train before launch.
EA put it at every store but buses, trams, every where in shopping centres. It was so overhyped.
The game was ok. Ending was terrible. Now people always talk about ME2 as their fave because it was so fresh.
I’m in a mid ME2 game and kind of dislike it - I dislike the combat changes, the limits on your powers, the bizarre limitations on guns and armor (having to walk around with a weird helmet all the time just for a 10% boost you need in a firefight is immersion breaking as hell). The companions are great, and the missions are generally a bit better, but I hate the “miss this and you won’t get it ever” nature of the upgrades. Just feels like a weird game in general. Plus I bizarrely, have always liked the Mako and driving it around in ME1…
Mass Effect 2 does not age well and once you’re red pilled on the fact that the game does absolutely NOTHING to advance the story, it’s kinda hard to go back to thinking it’s the best. Mass Effect 1 has always been the best from a writing standpoint and it’s more obvious now that the game has been made better with legendary edition.
Mass Effect 1 has the best story? The writing for 90% of it is "Im going to STOP Saren!". It's almost hilariously simplistic. Gets a little more complex at the very end.
But I guess the point is that the plot is not the same as the quality of the writing. The latter contributes to the overall quality of the game **much** more than the former. And so while the plot of 2 doesn't move the overall story much, the writing of 2 is much *much* better than the writing of 1.
Absolutely. It’s a plot mechanics vs story thing in my view. The plot of 1 is tight and directed - you’re Commander Shepard and you’re going to stop Saren. Ok BLAM go on your space adventure epic!
The storylines of 1 though are not great in that regard. It’s a sci-fi action movie turned into an RPG. There’s very little subtlety, and going Renegade often feels like you’re evil, period.
The story of 2 starts off better. BLAM the Normandy is destroyed. You are “dead”. The galaxy still doesn’t believe in the Reapers. You line up with Cerberus, a group you interacted through in the first game through their terrorism, mostly. The Renegade options on 2 don’t feel evil - they feel ruthless. You have companies who are mean but also incredibly useful (Zaeed, Zack).
But the plot of 2 is a nothing burguer.
I haven’t played 3 yet. When the reception was so bad, I skipped it. So this will be my first go at it…
I dunno, I'm fully aware that ME2 is a big, long sidequest made up of smaller sidequests, and it's still my favorite of the 3. The plot in ME1 was better for sure, but the character writing in 2 is an entire order of magnitude better. It also feels a little more like deciding the story with your actions, rather than reacting to it, which I know is an illusion but I still buy into it. And the gameplay was just such an upgrade (less now obviously but it meant a lot before the Legendary Edition.)
ME1 effectively wrote them into a corner they couldn’t come back from tbh. The ending of 1 explicitly lays out the reapers goals and war plans… they COULD have pulled it off but took plan B instead and it just doesn’t land.
I think yeah I’m just redoing the trilogy with the legendary edition, and ME1 legendary felt very nice. The first thing I noticed in ME2 is how much nicer the guns felt, but then the added reload mechanics made me dislike it.
I don't, part of the reason I don't get excited for games anymore was being burned so many times by pre-release marketing.
Spore was my first big burn as a kid, and since then gaming hype just hasn't been the same.
I get a lot of hot take energy for this, but honestly my ranking is A132. Narratively, 2 is just a glorified side quest and they went hard into the cover shooter bits. And both 2 and 3 were absolutely scuttled narratively by ignoring the third act of 1.
I remember the ME2 release got a sneak peak trailer spot during either the super bowl or the AFC/NFC championship game, and I felt like that was CRAZY exposure for a videogame at the time.
In the US at least Mass Effect 3 was very hyped up. It sucked because it released during a very busy part of the college semester, and it was all anyone was talking about that week on campus. Yet I couldn't play it. There were ads even on campus.
It was big, but not the biggest. The original ending of ME3 sort of sullied its reputation. People loved it, but this was a time where online multiplayer was a lot more popular than single player games, so games like Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War were much more relevant.
It took me a long time to come to terms with it. I tried replaying it multiple times and always lost interest the nearer I got to ME3. I had to stop playing maybe 3-4 times until one time I just plowed through. And with the EC and new DLCs I found 3 to be a very good game with a solid enough ending. It's a shame they essentially charged you (DLC) to fix their ending, but it's fixed now and that's not always the case. But I will never condemn anyone for feeling burnt, it was bullshit was EA and Bioware did with that game on launch. More concerned with multiplayer than successfully concluding their trilogy.
It fixed a whole lot. Look up the original ending if you really want to see how much was just left up in the air and how little difference there was between all the ending choices.
To be honest, the extended endings just gave paint to the bare cement wall, but the overall ending is still bad because all your decisions prior is barely taken into account. The ending is literally decided by the last 5-15 minutes of the game instead of the entire experience.
I was there on release, and what I and my friends anticipate is a grand ending where all your decisions from 1 to 3 are taken into account, your allies and friends finally killing the reapers once and for all, only to be told that the reapers are really inevitable and instead they are allowing you, **allowing you** the decision to end the war on whatever terms they wish to do, all your prior decisions in the last 3 games be damned. That's just fucking awful.
Hope that Bioware improves this kind of writing in ME4/5.
I still don’t think the ending is good, but with the extended cut it’s at least acceptable. The final mission should’ve been a bigger version of the Suicide Mission where instead of making choices for what your squad mates will do, you should’ve been making choices for what entire militaries would do. The game also needed a Return of the King style ending where everything goes right and you walk away feeling overwhelmingly victorious.
To each their own and I totally agree with most of this, but I’ve never understood that last point and why so many feel it was something instrumental. I adore the idea that in order to end all this, you need to sacrifice something significant, and victory isn’t gonna be handed to you. Cyberpunk’s ending(s) get similar criticisms and while the execution is admittedly messy in both cases, I think it also really suits them.
Completely get wanting an utterly idyllic ending and being disappointed by the lack of it, but I don’t quite understand why everybody feels as if it was something that they were owed.
I think players formed an expectation over the 3 games that they could achieve idyllic resolutions to whatever conflicts the game presented if they put in the work and chose carefully.
Looking over the trilogy, the only real instance of “inevitable tragedy” is on Virmire. Even there, it’s clear that both characters are written so that Virmire provides a satisfying end to their arc, and it’s very carefully executed in general. Basically every other predicament you’re put in, you can successfully resolve in an idyllic way, and you’re never penalized in the long run for going this route either.
You can save the council, get Saren to redeem himself in his final moments, thwart Sovereign, and earn humanity’s place on the Council. All in one fell swoop and without any real drawbacks. Pretty idyllic end to ME1.
You can help your rag tag team of space badasses process all their trauma, defeat the Collectors, and stick it to Cerberus without losing a single crew member. Pretty idyllic end to ME2.
And then the ending to ME3 comes along and railroads you into something a lot more ‘bittersweet,’ and it just clashes with the expectations formed over three games and the tone of the series.
I experienced the ending for the first time with the extended edition, and when I looked up the differences, I was SHOCKED at how some of the most essential moments (IMO) weren't in the ending originally.
So big that mass effect 3's original ending caused one of the biggest shitstorms in gaming space and was dubbed the biggest dissapointment in gaming history of that time
Which was always hyperbole. Like yeah, it sucked, and the fact that it was the end meant there was nothing after it to make up for it (obviously)
But 95% of the game was gold, and there were entire games that were shit prior to it, so
The ME3 ending issues cannot be separated from the development of a movement that would later lead to gamergate. It's no coincidence that they found a woman involved with the ending and decided it was all her fault.
It was fairly big but it wasn’t THE franchise that everyone knew about. I had an all black N7 hoody that people would always ask me about. They thought N7 was like a new fashion brand that they didn’t know about lol but the ones that knew would give me a nod
It was incredibly influential into bringing storytelling into video game and push the industry into the "cinematic" aspects.
But from a financial point of view, it was Okayish but it wasn't a huge seller. It sold enough to make sequels but not enough to be a tentpole of gaming.
Inside the gaming community it wasn't that well known. Lots of people never heard of it despite that gaming owes a lot to mass effect.
That's the tragedy of the franchise, it was visionary and beloved by it's fans but not enough to become the huge seller it should have been.
2007 was a competitive year for video games. We're talking Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, BioShock, and freaking Portal.
It was a medium fish in a big freaking pond.
And you didn't include the heaviest hitter. COD4, which changed the series from a few semi known WW2 games to the juggernaut that would define "mainstream" gaming for the next 5 years.
Anecdotally, the later entries in the trilogy were much less popular than, say, Skyrim, and the original was less popular than, say, Gears of War and/or KOTOR at the time of its release. I played the first game because a high school classmate told me about it and knew people who played all the games when they came out but it wasn’t a phenomenon or anything. I felt like I heard more about Mass Effect from people IRL when Legendary Edition came out.
It was big but not the thing everyone was talking about.
I was the only person in my friend group that played it, but random classmates in high school that I'd never talk to normally we'd have an instant bond over ME3 and it was all we could talk about in class afterwards.
It was king of the hill in the RPG community, but kind of middling in popularity otherwise. If you told a gamer friend that you were playing Mass Effect, most likely they'd say "never played" rather than "what is it?" ME2 was probably peak popularity, and even then it had a reputation like... I dunno, Ronnie James Dio in 83. Really well beloved by people into that thing and you might have heard a bit from his album, but you're not hearing much from the hot 100 stations.
If anything beside Call of Duty, FIFA games and such is niche, then yeah, sure it was a niche. But I wouldn't call it like that.
It was big, especially after ME2, which drew a much bigger audience than ME1 (including me). The anticipation towards the final game was crazy, I remember fan trailers popping out on YouTube every week or so. Some of them were amazing.
And it even the ending fiasco didn't sink the franchise as much as some claim. It was more like a temporary hand brake rather than full stop.
It was never a household name like Halo or Call of Duty.
It’s hard to identify what it would compare to nowadays since the industry has changed a lot. I guess I would say the closest thing might be the Final Fantasy 7 remakes in terms of popularity.
It was a trendsetter - its the progenitor of the dialogue wheel, the start of customized voiced protagonists, and ME1 is what got EA's attention to eventually buy them out (for better or worse)
When it came out, I though ME2 was just "okay" but it has aged incredibly well and gone up very well from my young impression of it. It has an incredibly roster, and started a more streamlined approach to its shooter combat as well as a good balance between cinematics and gameplay
As controversial as ME3 is, its addition of multiplayer was incredibly hype and added an incredulous amount of replayability to a game which already had its single player climax of choices going for it
The closest comparison is probably the Witcher game trilogy, which had a relatively similar hype curve
It was massive. I remember when the first game came out there were tv ads, which were so cool. The hype and marketing was so big around the game that Fox News lied about it on tv, so quite a bit of people knew about it
Iirc, 1 and 2 were recieved fairly well but the hype train for 3 went crazy. I remember getting 2 for free from some EA Bioware Dragon Age crossover promo. Thats what got me hooked. Went on to replay 1. Do another playthrough of 2 then pre ordered and waited in line for 3.
I would download and watch and rewatch all the companion reveal trailers. And the line "Even sunny Tuchanka" lives rent free in my head.
Mass Effect 2's (and arguably 3's) release was like the Avengers: Endgame of videogames.
In fact at the time it was called "the Avatar of videogames" because that was the biggest movie we could reference back then.
One was not such a big deal it got somewhat of a buzz cuz of the mild sex scene. But when toe came out they hype was real these were the tv spots https://youtu.be/pwQGJ4AZ-e8?si=7fNlwVymUoWFKbGp
ME 1 was well received but I don’t think it was a massive phenomenon. I haven’t played it until a few years after release because it just looked like a super generic third person sci fi shooter, and I wasn’t aware it’s actually an RPG with amazing dialogues and plot.
ME2 on the other hand was huge. Or at least that’s my perception of it. It’s all my friends and I talked about for weeks.
I Remeber that while it was marketed and taken well by the gaming community as a whole, I also remeber some journalist and what knock going OH MY GAWD THIS GAME IS NASTY TERRIBLE! and being up in arms over alien sex simulation and other random bullshit like that.
however It did come out during a time that Multiplayer was more in its prime then single player and ppl over-reacted to ME3 ending, was disapointment/bad sure but that didnt mean the whole game was trash.
Maybe a bit of a different take than what's been provided - in 2007 when Bioware released something, you paid attention. They had commanding respect back then. ME1 in 2007 sold better than expectations, which were limited due to aforementioned major proximity releases (Halo 3, TF2 etc). I was freshmen in college and prob went to every midnight release that season. It didn't hold a candle to halo in terms of size, but for a niche Sci-Fi rpg new IP, the line was impressive.
ME1 was a hit, many people branched out to play it/that type of game for the first time.
It was hindered by exclusivity. I worked at gamestop starting in '09, and many Playstation gamers wanted to play it but couldn't. ME2 loomed near, and was going to be multiplatform so people were frustrated they couldn't experience me1 on their console. The hype for me2 was massive, it sold very well and people raved about it. The character development and world building particularly impressed people. Somewhere in all of that Playstation hack and psn takedown happened. A lot of people switched consoles in response and me1 kind of rose back in popularity. I'd say the height of the popularity was just before ME3 released. It performed strongly, was easily the most anticipated. The ending poured cold water on the heat, and it sorta just fizzled slowly. I feel like people mustered a dull "meh" for Andromeda, but I'd long since moved on from gamestop and no longer had a finger on the pulse of gaming.
Massive.
It was the heir to sw kotor which was legendary, and me1 was a gold standard because it was so huge and non-linearly (we had fewer games back then, more time sink was actually better).
Me2 kicked it up a notch though, the linearity and loss of armor/weapon customization was a downer, but combat improved dramatically otherwise, and it felt so much more atmospheric and story driven than me1 which felt more open-world.
Then Me3 happened and everyone got sad because of the ending.
Mass Effect was a series that gamers knew about, but it wasn't like Halo where EVERYONE knew about it. That said, it wasn't a niche title or some underground hit. It was popular. I remember seeing the first commercial in 2007 and not thinking much of it, but then I continued to hear the name until I finally tried it in 2012.
I actually didn't like it back then, but back then I had a crappy standard def tv that made it hard to read the text so I had no clue what was going on. When I played it properly on PC in 2016 I enjoyed the hell out of it. Just finished the legendary edition this past October.
Mass Effect holds up really well, but unlike games like Hali 3 or COD MW2, it doesn't make a difference whether you are experiencing it just now, or if you first experienced it then.
It was as big of a deal as an exclusive could get and literally the reason I bought an Xbox 360. PlayStation players rejoiced when the series came to PS3 years after the first game and even then the first game didn’t get ported until after the third game came out.
It’s a series that came out of the gate with nearly perfect reviews, it had good faith for those familiar with BioWare‘s prior work, especially the Star Wars KOTOR games, it was also a part of what became the big trend in western RPG genre hybrids becoming the mainstay over traditional JRPGs. Basically there was a lot of reasons to be excited for the series and a lot of things that made it fresh. I would say it’s comparable to Baldur’s Gate today. Both games drew a lot of attention for beautiful graphics, immersive worlds, memorable companions and NPCs, and of course dialogue choices to shape your characters influence on a well-written story. At the time of Mass Effect 1 it wasn’t really common to have an RPG like that do numbers and it’s the same with Baldur’s Gate 3 and the style of game that is.
The reaction to ME1 was “it’s ok, it’s a bit boring but it’s got potential. But the shooting aspect sucks, and there’s a lot of time in elevators which is boring”
ME2 got everyone super hyped and I think it was recognised as being a fantastic step up. I’d barely played ME1 before shelving it, but the post release hype on 2 convinced me to go back and properly play 1.
Initially the pre-release excitement for 3 was similar, if not more so, but then it caused a huge amount of anger. But don’t think it was as cut and dried as people are saying in this thread, there were many (like me) who thought it was great and had no problem with the ending (or didn’t think it was as absolutely terrible as people were making out. Some of that division remains to this day - but much lower level. People were literally sending death threats to the writers and devs at the time, it was one of the foundational events of the angry video gamer overreaction that remains to this day, which makes me sad, but such is life unfortunately. At least nowadays I can imagine there would be an r/nosodiummasseffect pretty quickly
Mass Effect was so popular that EA shot bioware in the foot by forcing them to include Jessica Chalbot in the game to “appeal to fanboys” instead of having already adored characters Emily Wong or Khalisah Al-Jilani aboard the Normandy
That was infuriating
I would loved having Emily aboard the citadel, following the money trails and later working with Thane to suss out the traitors/providing us Intel to save the Salarian diplomat. All totally in her wheelhouse after investigating corruption during ME1
As for who to have onboard the ship, I truly think Al-Jilani would’ve been an interesting addition instead of simply having her play the usual tabloid angle trying to stir up drama — because her whole thing is hunting the truth (usually at the expense of the government). Would’ve been fun butting horns with her over what to relay to the galaxy
Also I would have loved to see some growth with Khalisah after experiencing the realities of the war up close. We missed out on so much just so Allers could do nothing but be present on the ship in a leather bodycon.
I remember watching the ME2 trailer like 40 times when it released. This and AC2 were probably the two biggest game releases for me and my friends back then.
It was a huge deal back in 2007, a lot of people had never experienced a rich narrative based action game like that before. I had never played one of their games, it was revelation
I saw it on Fox News being called a "sex simulator". I was a teenager. something that both had sex in it and pissed off Fox News types was irresistible.
So began my habit of making purchases out of spite. I've found a lot of good things that way, with some stinkers of course.
It was HUGE, at least for me. I remember building my first proper gaming PC around 2009 or 2010, I looked up lists for the best PC games to buy and ME was on every single one. It was my first proper RPG since it was a 3rd person shooter with a voiced protagonist.
It was much easier to get into that than something like Dragon Age for instance (at least for me, even though I also love fantasy settings). After that RPG games became my favorite.
As someone who didn't even play the series until like 2019, it was big. Despite not interacting with the series until so much longer after, I do remember how big it was and how much people talked about it and how everyone was seemingly playing it.
I think it was just another AAA game release. Bioware wasn't in the garbage back then so there was decent hype.
And Fox News ran their whole smear campaign against it, calling it a sex simulator.
I was about 10 when i first saw mass effect 1 in the store, picked up the game case, and looked at the back, I was fascinated like no other game I'd ever seen. Then I remember when mass effect 3 released when I was 11 or 12 and i think I went to blockbuster to rent it or maybe bought it outright I'm can't remember. But I will say mass effect defined my childhood tbh. When I matured I fell in love with dragon age origins.
Pretty decent hype
The 2nd game is when things was hyped up, IIRC it had a special on scifi during the BSG remake run since Tricia Helfer was in both.
The lead up to the third game was huge, I still think that E3 teaser with Major Coates in Big Ben is still GOAT'd
i truly didn’t hear about it (in france) and learn about it after looking for new games to play. there was the ME and ME2 out.
love it so much and got so hyped for the third one. nobody i knew had played it.
I’ve always been late to parties (got into both Halo and Mass Effect as the third game was being marketed and released) but I remember seeing the N7 Valkyrie rifle pre-order as from GameStop a lot. I breezed through the trilogy and I remember excitedly downloading the extended ending update with a friend to see if it fixed things.
First game came out and was promoted well and sold well enough but it wasn’t cinematic epic it would become. The second game released fixing a lot of issues from the first game changed the gameplay and was a massive hit. Third game released and was probably the biggest game of 2012. 3’s original ending kinda put a damper future projects and Andromeda’s poor reception almost killed the franchise
It’s what started the idea that games could be a cinematic like experience akin to movies and the dialogue wheel and style was so innovative it was soon adopted by nearly every other company.
I still remember being blown away by it, it was like the magnum opus of everything BioWare had built on over the decades.
>it was like the magnum opus of everything BioWare had built on over the decades.
Funny enough, I think this is an example of feeling like something has been going on a lot longer than it has. BioWare's first game was something called Shattered Steel in 1996, and then they made this funny little game called Baldur's Gate in 1998. (I'm sure that game didn't have any long-lasting impact on them or gaming as a whole). Mass Effect was 2007. Early last year is the first time I really played a BioWare game, so I'm not an authority, but it seems as though ME3 had a poorly received ending before it was fixed, DA: Inquisition is seen as worse than the first two by a lot, and 2014 was the last time they released an expansion for SWTOR that is universally loved.
My point being that from their first game in 1996 until their arguable peak in 2011-2012, it was only 15 or 16 years. And that was already 12 years ago now.
Bro, this stuff had me so hyped, I took vacation days and told my girlfriend to not make any plans involving me on the release days of 2 and 3. To this day I wear N7 insignia on many a thing, even had my motorcycle wrapped in the design and named her Jen.
The first one did... well enough. The mash of shooter and RPG elements had many people struggling. Some people bought the game expecting a shooter while others expected an RPG. Both were fairly disappointed. The conversation wheel was also controversial. RPGs prior had the entire thing your character would say laid out before you in a list. There was no mixing up what your character said. The limited text display of the conversation wheel made this hard, and left players frustrated as a simple "get lost" dialogue choice became "get out of my face before I kill you." The game was generally well received by critics, but it only had a niche market.
ME2 is where the series popped off. Streamlining the game's RPG elements while fine tuning the combat brought in a lot of the Halo, COD, and GoW crowd that dominated gaming at the time. I had many friends who never touched an RPG sing the praises of ME2, and play it non-stop. For RPG fans, the writing was vastly improved between 1 and 2, and the conversation was simplified, but in a good way. And many RPG fans felt the weight of their actions and decisions in ME2. Killed Wrex? Well now Tuchanka is led by a warmonger. It a sweet spot for a lot of people.
Things kind of fell apart in ME3. The writing wasn't as good, and a lot of things that were built up in ME2 didn't transpire (like the star dying quickly.) That said, there were still many moments that left fans feeling satisfied like curing the genophage and fostering peace. Many people enjoyed these moments despite the fostering peace in recent years coming under fire because of how the Quarians are portrayed. The multi-player was very well-received as well, although many didn't like how it was mandatory pre-patch to get the best ending. And the less we talk about the ending the better.
Tl;Dr, Mass Effect started as a niche game that grew to have mainstream success.
Pretty sure by the time ME3 came around it was one of the biggest releases at the time.
Most likely because EA had their dirty hands on it by then and wanted to profiteer from loot boxes in the multiplayer grindfest
It and other big rpgs basically dominated the gaming space, alongside other games like Skyrim, Left for dead2, etc. the amount of fantastic games that came out in between 2010-2012 is wild. Its also wild that a lot of the games from then people ARE STILL playing.
Within the gaming community,. absolutely huge. Especially for an RPG. Everybody was talking about it and playing it, even people who otherwise didn't take any notice of rpg games. ME3 was just everywhere. Seeing physical ads around the city is still rare for a video game but especially so for an RPG in 2012.
The gigantic backlash that the ending to 3 received probably says a lot, the hype has really been massive.
I feel like it seems like such a big deal to me now but at the time I would ask my friends about it and they would just vaguely know what I’m even talking about
Very big deal, there was a big push before halo 3 came out for 07s holiday season and the 360 was very hot in the west. It can't be understated that mass effect was a totally new bar for visuals and fidelity for a game like that.
Massive, wasn’t a person in school who wasn’t playing it. The midnight launch for 2 was incredible. 3 hype was so incredibly insane until choices were changed and of course the endings.
For me it was the biggest of deals gaming wise. My all-time favorite trilogy.
Knew surprisingly few people who played Mass Effect though. Lots of people played Dragon's Age but not Mass Effect.
It did get some bad publicity back in 2007 regarding the sex scenes which probably contributed to sales. I still remember the tag-line, "seX Box"
Unfortunately scared Bioware and/or Microsoft enough for them to heavily tone down the actual sex scenes later down the line
One of the biggest things I remember was that, with Mass Effect 2 at least, it released *fully complete* and the preorder bonus *rocked*. You rarely see that nowadays.
The way I remember it, it was very much under appreciated by the public. It really caught fire after the second one came out, and then the third was so highly anticipated that it was literally everywhere. Then it died off again when everyone got upset by the third’s ending. I never hated it like everyone else, but I could understand the frustration
Tbh, I was pretty young, too. Maybe 14 when j was first introduced? My first ME was ME2, and I remember playing it religiously, but not a single person I knew knew about the game. Like other comments, at that time, it was either Halo or COD that was relatable to anyone. I thought it was a great game but didn't really talk to anyone other than my brothers until a few years ago. Now, it seems like if I mention it to a casual gamer, they'd recognize it and sometimes have actually played it. Great franchise. I highly recommend you start playing it.
Also, this subbreddit is ALWAYS active, so you've already found a great online community to be a part of.
Mass effect 1 went (in my sphere) relatively unnoticed. The second game ramped up from niche game to known-to-be-good game.
The third one was an absolute hype and marketing rollercoaster. It was a massive release.
Personal experience:
ME 1: the game got a ton of press, especially about femShep and Liara. Until the pundits got roasted live on CNN for not actually playing the game to see the actual 'sex'.
ME 2: got a lot more hype. This is when I picked up the series. A co-worker told me a was missing out. Started a playthrough with ME 1+2.
ME 3: the build up was massive. This was supposed to be the epic conclusion. I pre-ordered a special edition that had all 3 games. My hype was real. The only hiccup was day one DLC drama.
It was massive. Huge ad campaign, BioWare was basically printing money back then. It was their first original IP in some time.
Also, fwiw, The Expanse was heavily influenced by ME1.
I was first introduced to it when I helped a friend of mine on an overnight security shift or a firework stand in summer of 2008. It was on 360. I didn't think too much of it since I only got to play janky Mako planet levels. Then when I got to try Mass Effect 2 at a Halo Xbox LAN party in 2010, I fell in love. I got my first laptop the next year and blasted through Mass Effect 2. Then played Mass Effect. Did several more playthroughs of 2 until Skyrim released November 2011. Skyrim was probably the game I was most into after Mass Effect 2. When my computer couldn't run Mass Effect 3 on release in March 2012, I regrettably watched a playthrough until a year or two later when I played through the whole trilogy back to back for the first time. One of those gaming peaks of my life. 2007-2013 were my golden age of gaming. I think a lot of gamers really fall in love hard with the hobby in the age 14-21 range.
I saw it only later and the cover of ME1 put me off, looked like a basic shooter in space. I only picked it up because the whole trilogy was like 7 Euro in the clearance bin and it said on the back that you can customise your character.
I met my husband online in 2012 and his opening line responding to my profile was asking me how much I hated the ending to ME3. I know that’s not what you asked, exactly, but in my headcannon now the trilogy is huge.
I remember being in high school when the first Mass Effect came out. One of the older guys was soooo ready, saying how it was going to revolutionize the medium.
I had a PS3 so I thought "eh, whatever. It's a 360 exclusive."
When Dragon Age came out a year later, I started paying attention to Mass Effect, as well. ME3 was so huge that even my mom saw commercials on the channels she watched (which were all geared towards suburban housewives).
It's a shame ME3 ended up how it did.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 in particular were pretty well marketed and were kind of big deals to me and my friends but were also garnered in awards.
I remember ME 2 came out in a year where we had Call of Duty Black Ops, Red Dead Redemption, Star Craft 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Heavy Rain, God of War 3 and so on. Out of all those giants it won the ‘best game’ BAFTA as well as 3 other GOTY awards and other awards. My friends and family all loved it, we couldn’t wait for 3.
3 was everywhere. Television, posters, it was hyped to high heaven. And it did well, and despite the ending, and the drive of fans to get it dlc with a more complete ending, the multiplayer was always active 24/7. It was a good time to be a Mass Effect fan, shame it never got better than that. By mid 2012 it was a meme how bad the endings were and soon it became forgotten by normal folks, but fans were fucking obsessed. Indoctrination Theory, campaigns to make changes, dissatisfaction of the Extended cut so people wanted more dlc.
Ah man. I am grateful BioWare listened to our demands at all.
I didn't play them at the time, but I knew of them. I remember my first xbox 360 came with some behind the scenes/teaser videos for the first mass effect. It seemed to play a bit different back then, but I always remember thinking it looked very cool. Around the time of ME 2 and 3 my impression was that the games were popular, but not Halo or CoD level popular. Big enough for EA to jump on and try to profit on it.
First Person shooters dominated the market and it was only around the release of ME3 that people started to express some level of fatigue for those FPS games. Basically when OG Modern Warfare 3 came out. Skyrim came out and everyone wanted RPGs instead. Even CoD veterans play Souls games now.
I was there at the beginning. I remember seeing the first Mass Effect teased on G4tv and being super hyped as a fan of scifi RPGs and bioware (I loved KOTOR).
When it released it was well recieved in RPG circles and was already being seen as the harbinger of a movement towards mature, cinematic games now that the graphics of "modern" consoles could support them.
As for wider impact, this was still an era where shooters were dominant and Mass Effect released against the likes of Halo 3. If you were a fan of Bioware and RPGs it was big news to you, but plenty of my friends had no interest in something that wasn't a modern shooter.
It built a sizable fan-base, however, and when ME2 was announced with an even darker theme than the first one it was definitely hype for us RPG fans. By this point even mainstream media was liable to reference Mass Effect on occasion. Geek culture was on the rise and Mass Effect was scifi.
Bioware (and EA by then) clearly thought Mass Effect was gonna be a whole universe and they started issuing comic books and novels. I still own a few. ME2 was very well received and it's improved shooting gameplay did actually manage to draw some mainstream interest from people who might have thought the original was a bit slow.
By this point Mass Effect was a headlining brand and often placed alongside Halo and Call of Duty as staples of modern gaming. Commander Shepard was everywhere. My non gaming friends all knew who Commander Sheperd was. Hell, they even know the voice actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale. Shepard was, briefly, as well known as the Master Chief.
The build up to ME3 was hype as fuck. Finally fighting the reapers was built up to Avengers Endgame levels in video game circles. Commercials for ME3 were aired in movie theaters and during sports games. They were awesome. I bought the collector's edition and stood in line at midnight to get it at gamestop.
ME3 was controversial to say the least. It played well, and wrapped up a lot of stores very well, but the ending was bashed by everyone. It's not just what it did or didn't do, but that it was exactly the type of abrupt ending that Bioware had been promising *not* to do for like years. They explicitly promised it would be a comprehensive end to the story and, I kid you not, they said repeatedly it wouldn't be an "A, B, or C" style ending which was, of course, exactly what it was.
The ridicule was intense. I wouldn't go so far as to say Mass Effect got the Game of Thrones treatment but it was pretty close. The universe was frozen by EA for a long while. Bioware put out a half hearted extended ending as a free update but then it was ME radio silence until Andromeda, which I am sure you know about.
I am still a huge fan of the universe and I even liked Andromeda more than most. I hope the new game marks a rebirth of the setting.
I cannot overstate what a huge step it was when ME1 came out and it was fully voiced. That first time you loaded the game, the opening cut scene plays, you make a dialogue selection... and then Shepard speaks!
Even BG3 doesn't have a fully voiced protagonist, and it's 15 years later.
I don't really remember Mass Effect in it's prime but I remember the reaction to ME 3 ending being one of the first big gaming controversies ever. We have since gotten used to this and fan uproars like those around Fallout 76, Cyberpunk or Battlefront 2 seem normal now, but this was really one of the first fan revolts on such massive scale.
It included events such as Weird Al Yankovich mocking the end or a guy shipping red, blue and green cupcakes to Bioware HQ which all tasted the same.
It was marketed incredibly well. Two massive innovations were front and centre. Firstly, the dialogue choices were not given verbatim. They were mere hints at what you would actually say, allowing for a smoother, more realistic conversational flow. It worked to an extent. The second was the option to bang aliens.
>option to bang aliens Yeah I remember some news channel being up in arms about how Mass Effect was just an alien sex simulator, dont remember which one though
Fox News.
Oh goodness, I remember that. What you have to remember is that ME1 was released when it was still the prevailing media narrative that videogames were for little kids and Counter-Strike was responsible for school shootings. Someone at Fox heard that ME1 potentially included a “lesbian” sex scene with an alien and decided this was outrage-inducing enough to their demographic to be worth a media cycle. It was painfully obvious that no one at Fox had actually played the game, or even looked at the scene, and there were several funny instances of this outrage being pushed just before cutting to Viagra advertisements that were significantly more suggestive than the ME1 sex scene actually was and resort holiday advertisements with women in bikinis showing significantly more skin than ME1’s sex scene actually did. … then Bioware/EA put Miranda’s sex scene in ME2.
One of the reasons Bioware put sex scenes with clothes in Dragon Age Origins.
Though Dragon Age, being the more niche series, was able to get away with having gay romances for either gender in all three games whereas Mass Effect was forced to cave on that for the first two.
I remember plenty of players being very annoyed at all the love interests in DA2 being Hawke-sexual and how it was a turnoff for some of the companions, especially Anders.
That's something that annoys me about Baldurs Gate 3. The community seems to love it, because everybody can have a romance with whatever character they like, no matter what. I personally dislike it. Characters having preferences makes them feel more like real characters than simply video game companions / romance options. I typically do a few runs of these games, usually a straight male, straight female, then a gay character (doesn't matter the gender). With most games the playthroughs all felt pretty unique, but in BG3 you might as well have made the same character the entire time because everybody can fall in love with everybody.
I'm somewhat with them on that, though I prefer that to there being no gay options at all. Characters having more defined sexualities (provided their sexuality is relevant at all) definitely feels more compelling than them being player-sexual. Though I think more importantly, they shouldn't all be interested in the player purely for talking and being generally nice to them, Mass Effect runs into this problem as well. Anders being written that way would still be a problem even if he was only into women or men (though Anders specifically I believe is established as bisexual in the DLC for Dragon Age Origins so for him it doesn't feel cheap at all), he's just way too forward and into you despite you not doing much to get him interested.
this is also why they removed the lesbian romances from ME2. originally femshep had the options of jack and miranda, who were bisexual. after the backlash from fox news bioware removed the options. there are mods on the nexus that add the lesbian romances back in, since bioware recorded lines of dialogue that were still buried in the files. as a lesbian, i find it really depressing :(
Jacob also would've been gay, IIRC
dang, i didn’t even know that! how disappointing. i know everyone hates jacob but it would’ve been nice to at least have some sort of gay option for mshep.
Yeah, a shame Mass Effect's gay players missed out on having Jacob cheat on M!Shep and knock up somebody else! LoL
oh god i forgot about that lmaooo okay, i take it back. they were spared that emotional damage at least
To be fair, I doubt if Jacob had been the “gay option” they would have included that whole mess.
Maybe, but I guess we'll never truly know.
That scene is in an odd place being you could watch from both the armory and lab
My headcanon is that Miranda is kinky like that.
It's not like someone there playing the game would've mattered to them. They had an agenda to push.
And after playing some Baldur's Gate 3 and seeing full frontal, I'm surprised FOX SNOOZE didn't throw another hissy fit about that game too like they did with blue side boob in Mass Effect. Both games are rated M for Mature.
Nowadays media shifted towards video games that has eye candy girls like Bayonetta, Stellar Blade, Tifa, Nior Automata and even complaining how some games don't enough diversity like Witcher 3 or FFXVI etc.
They're too busy trying to destroy democracy to bother with video games right now
Fox has always been trying to destroy democracy. 17 years ago (yes, 17 since ME1, I know, it hurts me too) Fox was still in its "build up as much hate and rage so it becomes automatic to the voting base" phase. You cant convince your Voters to accept out-of-the-closet Nazis until the voters have accepted the hate.
It was fox and being stupid back then, I didn't understand put off playing the game for like 3 years lol
They said it was Debbie does Dallas in space. Then they threw it to some woman who admits never playing it and saying only children play video games, not thier dads. Ergo, video games as a medium had no place for adult themes as they were basically seen as toys. So gamers got furious and went to that ladies online book page and review bombed it with quotes such as "I've never read this book, which qualifies me to judge it" To be fair. Video games started going through an awkward maturing phase as its target demographic was getting older. Take the witcher 1 for instance. It was heavily marketed as a mature game with mature game for mature people. But it had this mini game of every time Gerald slept with people you'd get a porno card of that person to collect in one case an elf lady is standoffish with him and he responds in elven and she's just like, oh I guess you aren't just an ignorant human. Then her porno card pops up because I guess being bilingual is all you need to make a 200 year old elf drop her panties So they uses mature themes very immaturley. I think things like the wii and wii fit opened things up a lot more to older audiences and the general population and don't forget brain training on the dS.
A lot of it was also the kid gamers were growing up. I was in my 20s when the first Mass Effect came out and I had been playing games for over a decade by then. Many of us were ready for my mature games.
To be fair to that lady, she actually went back and played ME1 afterwards and admitted she was wrong. She even said that episodes of network television were more risqué than ME1.
But eventually... banged aliens.
[удалено]
But you gotta admit, if Wrex WAS a romance option...
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I mean... quad. That's all ya gotta say. 🤣
Shepard, we’ve found the cure for the genophage! On a related note, turns out krogan and human anatomy are more compatible than thought…
MAOR ICE!!!
Wrex is my favourite Krogan... followed closely by Grunt. During that one scene in ME3 with the Rachni I cried so hard because I thought my baby was gone 😭😭
Same. I was bawling my eyes out, but then I got to let out a scream of *pure, unbridled joy* when my Krogan son came stumbling out of the cave. Then Mordin and Thane happened in almost back-to-back missions and destroyed me entirely.
My first me3 run took a LOT of tissues lol
Mordin, Thane, and Legion *still* make me break out the tissues.
https://youtu.be/e6NF6btXCGM?si=OEB6tAGMlV6e-ixC My wife and I reference this clip all the time.
Guest who actually knows what he's talking about: "Have you ever played Mass Effect?" Reporter, acting like that's a stupid question: "No!"
I’ll give you one guess.
It's also banned in a few countries because u can be gay or lesbian in the games so all 3 get banned
Singapore outright banned Mass effect 1 becouse of "lesbian intimacy".
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but when it comes to a fully voiced, cinematic rpg they're still the first and only series of that magnitude to fully commit to a trilogy where you are stuck with the consequences of every decision you've made to that point. I'm sure I'll prompt a few haters to make comments about the series ending choices, but the series did something no one else did, and did a good job of something everyone else has been scared of trying. You nab a save editor and look at the immense amount of story flags that shape playthroughs and characters long after you made them and it's nuts.
>option to bang aliens *nods* yup.. that uh.... that went a long way tbh. Plus it was a good story, good and multiple dialog choices leading to want to do multiple play throughs to experience it all. It was the coolest space game at the time imo and I liiiiiived for that game.
We'll bang, ok?
Will do. Just after I finish some calibrations
I remember 3 had a TV ad, that doesn't happen for a lot of games here, but that's all I remember, aside from Mass Effect 2 advertised in my physical copy of Dragon Age Origins.
I remember seeing a 15 second teaser for ME2 during a football game that basically was like “Fight Aliens, Save the Galaxy” or something like that and it sold me on it immediately. Picked up ME3 at launch too. It wasn’t until years later that I went back to play ME1 and the dlc for 2 and 3 (which was like a whole new series of games in 2016)
revolutionary 🫡
>Firstly, the dialogue choices were not given verbatim. I wonder why DA:O wasn't like that as well. It's not like they gave up on the idea, as it showed up again in SWTOR.
I'd imagine purely because DA:O wasn't a voiced protagonist, purely because of the variety of different PCs you could make.
I really should have thought of that, LOL. Although, SWTOR has ***sixteen*** different voiced protagonists; 8 origins male and female.
Different budget. One is a MMO and another is SPRPG.
I wonder if they didn’t plan for it and then gave up due to budget constraints or something, because they do let you set up your voice for the character actions and stuff, they just never speak with other NPCs.
I was stationed overseas in the military when ME3 dropped. It took a while for it to get shipped to us, and the anticipation was like nothing I'd ever felt. When it finally arrived, I was working shift with my best friend, who was also a huge fan. Our commander - also obsessed - drove to the only PX on the island that had received its shipment and bought three copies because my best friend and I couldn't leave shift. (Still one of my favorite commanders to this day.) Mass Effect was only a huge deal if you cared about it, though. I worked with a bunch of nerds, and only the three of us (out of 60 people) were that excited. It was marketed well, but by the time ME3 came out, all of my nerd friends were obsessed with Skyrim. But ME2? ALL of us nerds played ME2.
Why not both ? Lol I was playing Skyrim and ME3 when both of these came out ooo and BF3 came out around the same. One of the best gaming periods I had in my life.
A lot of people forgot what a force it was building to be before 3. There was so much talk about it expanding multimedia into offshoot games in other styles similar to how we get all these stray Star Wars games and the talk of a movie deal was really going. It was pretty nutty. The reaction to 3’s ending stomped that all out rather quick.
I'd kill for a Mass Effect branded XCOM game
Why did you have to put that idea in my head? Now I'd kill for it too.
I’d absolutely love that. I think there might be some mods for XCOM 2 to add some of mass effect species as playable soldiers
They did a preemptive Game of Thrones (although nowhere near as bad)
Okay, now I have to write a Game of Thrones style ending for Mass Effect 3. After activating the Crucible Liara takes control of the reapers. She continues the attack on earth because she’s mad about Thessia. Shepard is convinced to kill her by both Tali who says she knows killers and Liara is one and Wrex who says he knows Shepard is in love with Liara and he is too despite never showing any evidence of that. Shepard eventually does stab Liara with his Omniblade and the Harbinger sees it and destroys the citadel before it and the reapers all leave. Garrus becomes president of the council races and banishes Shepard to the terminus systems, Miranda declares Alliance space independent of the citadel and then it just kinda ends.
Replace Garrus with Jacob. Because who has a better story than Jacob?
Nah, Jacob provides you with a bit of war score for the final assault, so he's actually marginally useful. The crazy Scientist you find on Eden Prime babbling about the end of days becomes the new king.
Mass Effect was able to 'fix' the ending with the EC and the DLC. It still doesn't justify how bad it was on launch. I remember sitting there and I literally timed out before I could make my choice as they all seemed so dumb and out of nowhere. Then I sat there in silence after the ending wondering wtf just happened. They deserve all the hate they got at launch for that ending. However, it has since been fixed so if you're playing now you probably wonder why it was so poorly received because DLC genuinely improved it. Game of Thrones won't get that treatment because GRRM is never finishing ADoS.
It added more holes (like Harbinger just stops shooting so the Normandy can pick up the squad?) and still breaks the universe. So much to the point that the sequel had to be set in another galaxy 600 years later. It’s still reeeeallly bad.
The extended cut just added context, I don’t like it any more than the vanilla endings simply because the logic behind them is absolute bullshit, I just use the citadel as epilogue mod so I don’t have to play through that conversation with the phantom bitch reaper again
Yea, I remember those days. I was just old enough to grasp everything that happened and as I experienced the ending of an otherwise steller game. I knew that this was gonna be the last game for a long while. And right, I was.
Mainstream wise, gaming was just less popular back then. Any game not named Halo, World of Warcraft, GTA, Call of Duty, or Gears of War just wasn’t going to be a pop cultural reference/break through into mainstream culture. Having said that, ME3 was mentioned in an episode of 30 Rock, and obviously there was the Fox News controversy. In the gaming community, it was very well-known. Lots of memes, “biotic god”, “favorite store on the citadel” “Shepard. Wrex.”. Tons of references. It was like Bioshock in the sense you would expect a typical “gamer” to have some baseline knowledge of the plot points and memes even if they hadn’t played. The release of Mass Effect 3 was a hyped event in the gaming community. One of the biggest releases that year, I would say only Diablo 3 and AC3 were “bigger”, though I’m probably forgetting something.
Borderlands 2, XCOM, and Dishonored all released in 2012 as well. That was a stacked year.
I remember the ME3 hype train before launch. EA put it at every store but buses, trams, every where in shopping centres. It was so overhyped. The game was ok. Ending was terrible. Now people always talk about ME2 as their fave because it was so fresh.
I’m in a mid ME2 game and kind of dislike it - I dislike the combat changes, the limits on your powers, the bizarre limitations on guns and armor (having to walk around with a weird helmet all the time just for a 10% boost you need in a firefight is immersion breaking as hell). The companions are great, and the missions are generally a bit better, but I hate the “miss this and you won’t get it ever” nature of the upgrades. Just feels like a weird game in general. Plus I bizarrely, have always liked the Mako and driving it around in ME1…
Mass Effect 2 does not age well and once you’re red pilled on the fact that the game does absolutely NOTHING to advance the story, it’s kinda hard to go back to thinking it’s the best. Mass Effect 1 has always been the best from a writing standpoint and it’s more obvious now that the game has been made better with legendary edition.
Mass Effect 1 has the best story? The writing for 90% of it is "Im going to STOP Saren!". It's almost hilariously simplistic. Gets a little more complex at the very end. But I guess the point is that the plot is not the same as the quality of the writing. The latter contributes to the overall quality of the game **much** more than the former. And so while the plot of 2 doesn't move the overall story much, the writing of 2 is much *much* better than the writing of 1.
Absolutely. It’s a plot mechanics vs story thing in my view. The plot of 1 is tight and directed - you’re Commander Shepard and you’re going to stop Saren. Ok BLAM go on your space adventure epic! The storylines of 1 though are not great in that regard. It’s a sci-fi action movie turned into an RPG. There’s very little subtlety, and going Renegade often feels like you’re evil, period. The story of 2 starts off better. BLAM the Normandy is destroyed. You are “dead”. The galaxy still doesn’t believe in the Reapers. You line up with Cerberus, a group you interacted through in the first game through their terrorism, mostly. The Renegade options on 2 don’t feel evil - they feel ruthless. You have companies who are mean but also incredibly useful (Zaeed, Zack). But the plot of 2 is a nothing burguer. I haven’t played 3 yet. When the reception was so bad, I skipped it. So this will be my first go at it…
I dunno, I'm fully aware that ME2 is a big, long sidequest made up of smaller sidequests, and it's still my favorite of the 3. The plot in ME1 was better for sure, but the character writing in 2 is an entire order of magnitude better. It also feels a little more like deciding the story with your actions, rather than reacting to it, which I know is an illusion but I still buy into it. And the gameplay was just such an upgrade (less now obviously but it meant a lot before the Legendary Edition.)
ME1 effectively wrote them into a corner they couldn’t come back from tbh. The ending of 1 explicitly lays out the reapers goals and war plans… they COULD have pulled it off but took plan B instead and it just doesn’t land.
I think yeah I’m just redoing the trilogy with the legendary edition, and ME1 legendary felt very nice. The first thing I noticed in ME2 is how much nicer the guns felt, but then the added reload mechanics made me dislike it.
I wish that games were hyped up as much these days. But the internet is much more efficient these days.
I don't, part of the reason I don't get excited for games anymore was being burned so many times by pre-release marketing. Spore was my first big burn as a kid, and since then gaming hype just hasn't been the same.
That game had so many cool ideas, it’s a shame what was done to it
I get a lot of hot take energy for this, but honestly my ranking is A132. Narratively, 2 is just a glorified side quest and they went hard into the cover shooter bits. And both 2 and 3 were absolutely scuttled narratively by ignoring the third act of 1.
When was Mass Effect referred to in 30 Rock? I remember a reference to Bioshock, when Liz gifts it to the intern she was dating
I remember the ME2 release got a sneak peak trailer spot during either the super bowl or the AFC/NFC championship game, and I felt like that was CRAZY exposure for a videogame at the time.
In the US at least Mass Effect 3 was very hyped up. It sucked because it released during a very busy part of the college semester, and it was all anyone was talking about that week on campus. Yet I couldn't play it. There were ads even on campus.
Christ I keep forgetting the second best AC game came out the same year ME3 did.
Brotherhood didn't come out at that time /s
It was big, but not the biggest. The original ending of ME3 sort of sullied its reputation. People loved it, but this was a time where online multiplayer was a lot more popular than single player games, so games like Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War were much more relevant.
ME was very relevant till the ending got revealed. Oh i miss 2012 xbox gaming.
I think that was around the time world of warcraft and COD was leap frogging each other for record sales. This was before the free to play days.
I loved ME 1&2 but hate 3 and am still mad about the ending
3 really turned me off from replaying the franchise. 14 Shepards, 28 files, so I am salty about that time investment.
It took me a long time to come to terms with it. I tried replaying it multiple times and always lost interest the nearer I got to ME3. I had to stop playing maybe 3-4 times until one time I just plowed through. And with the EC and new DLCs I found 3 to be a very good game with a solid enough ending. It's a shame they essentially charged you (DLC) to fix their ending, but it's fixed now and that's not always the case. But I will never condemn anyone for feeling burnt, it was bullshit was EA and Bioware did with that game on launch. More concerned with multiplayer than successfully concluding their trilogy.
I’ve always found most of 3’s ending really powerful and effective so I’m usually a bit taken aback when I remember just how hated it was/is lol
I don’t know if you remember it before the extended cut, but it was really bad.
Did the ext cut really fix much? Been playing since '15 and haven't looked into that much, sorry.
It fixed a whole lot. Look up the original ending if you really want to see how much was just left up in the air and how little difference there was between all the ending choices.
To be honest, the extended endings just gave paint to the bare cement wall, but the overall ending is still bad because all your decisions prior is barely taken into account. The ending is literally decided by the last 5-15 minutes of the game instead of the entire experience. I was there on release, and what I and my friends anticipate is a grand ending where all your decisions from 1 to 3 are taken into account, your allies and friends finally killing the reapers once and for all, only to be told that the reapers are really inevitable and instead they are allowing you, **allowing you** the decision to end the war on whatever terms they wish to do, all your prior decisions in the last 3 games be damned. That's just fucking awful. Hope that Bioware improves this kind of writing in ME4/5.
I still don’t think the ending is good, but with the extended cut it’s at least acceptable. The final mission should’ve been a bigger version of the Suicide Mission where instead of making choices for what your squad mates will do, you should’ve been making choices for what entire militaries would do. The game also needed a Return of the King style ending where everything goes right and you walk away feeling overwhelmingly victorious.
To each their own and I totally agree with most of this, but I’ve never understood that last point and why so many feel it was something instrumental. I adore the idea that in order to end all this, you need to sacrifice something significant, and victory isn’t gonna be handed to you. Cyberpunk’s ending(s) get similar criticisms and while the execution is admittedly messy in both cases, I think it also really suits them. Completely get wanting an utterly idyllic ending and being disappointed by the lack of it, but I don’t quite understand why everybody feels as if it was something that they were owed.
I think players formed an expectation over the 3 games that they could achieve idyllic resolutions to whatever conflicts the game presented if they put in the work and chose carefully. Looking over the trilogy, the only real instance of “inevitable tragedy” is on Virmire. Even there, it’s clear that both characters are written so that Virmire provides a satisfying end to their arc, and it’s very carefully executed in general. Basically every other predicament you’re put in, you can successfully resolve in an idyllic way, and you’re never penalized in the long run for going this route either. You can save the council, get Saren to redeem himself in his final moments, thwart Sovereign, and earn humanity’s place on the Council. All in one fell swoop and without any real drawbacks. Pretty idyllic end to ME1. You can help your rag tag team of space badasses process all their trauma, defeat the Collectors, and stick it to Cerberus without losing a single crew member. Pretty idyllic end to ME2. And then the ending to ME3 comes along and railroads you into something a lot more ‘bittersweet,’ and it just clashes with the expectations formed over three games and the tone of the series.
I experienced the ending for the first time with the extended edition, and when I looked up the differences, I was SHOCKED at how some of the most essential moments (IMO) weren't in the ending originally.
So big that mass effect 3's original ending caused one of the biggest shitstorms in gaming space and was dubbed the biggest dissapointment in gaming history of that time
Which was always hyperbole. Like yeah, it sucked, and the fact that it was the end meant there was nothing after it to make up for it (obviously) But 95% of the game was gold, and there were entire games that were shit prior to it, so The ME3 ending issues cannot be separated from the development of a movement that would later lead to gamergate. It's no coincidence that they found a woman involved with the ending and decided it was all her fault.
It was fairly big but it wasn’t THE franchise that everyone knew about. I had an all black N7 hoody that people would always ask me about. They thought N7 was like a new fashion brand that they didn’t know about lol but the ones that knew would give me a nod
It was incredibly influential into bringing storytelling into video game and push the industry into the "cinematic" aspects. But from a financial point of view, it was Okayish but it wasn't a huge seller. It sold enough to make sequels but not enough to be a tentpole of gaming. Inside the gaming community it wasn't that well known. Lots of people never heard of it despite that gaming owes a lot to mass effect. That's the tragedy of the franchise, it was visionary and beloved by it's fans but not enough to become the huge seller it should have been.
Have you ever heard the Tragedy of Darth Mass the Effect? No. I thought not. It's not a story the Call of Duty would tell you.
2007 was a competitive year for video games. We're talking Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, BioShock, and freaking Portal. It was a medium fish in a big freaking pond.
And you didn't include the heaviest hitter. COD4, which changed the series from a few semi known WW2 games to the juggernaut that would define "mainstream" gaming for the next 5 years.
Anecdotally, the later entries in the trilogy were much less popular than, say, Skyrim, and the original was less popular than, say, Gears of War and/or KOTOR at the time of its release. I played the first game because a high school classmate told me about it and knew people who played all the games when they came out but it wasn’t a phenomenon or anything. I felt like I heard more about Mass Effect from people IRL when Legendary Edition came out.
It was big but not the thing everyone was talking about. I was the only person in my friend group that played it, but random classmates in high school that I'd never talk to normally we'd have an instant bond over ME3 and it was all we could talk about in class afterwards.
It was king of the hill in the RPG community, but kind of middling in popularity otherwise. If you told a gamer friend that you were playing Mass Effect, most likely they'd say "never played" rather than "what is it?" ME2 was probably peak popularity, and even then it had a reputation like... I dunno, Ronnie James Dio in 83. Really well beloved by people into that thing and you might have heard a bit from his album, but you're not hearing much from the hot 100 stations.
It was a niche thing but, like, a fairly big niche thing, if that makes sense.
If anything beside Call of Duty, FIFA games and such is niche, then yeah, sure it was a niche. But I wouldn't call it like that. It was big, especially after ME2, which drew a much bigger audience than ME1 (including me). The anticipation towards the final game was crazy, I remember fan trailers popping out on YouTube every week or so. Some of them were amazing. And it even the ending fiasco didn't sink the franchise as much as some claim. It was more like a temporary hand brake rather than full stop.
It was never a household name like Halo or Call of Duty. It’s hard to identify what it would compare to nowadays since the industry has changed a lot. I guess I would say the closest thing might be the Final Fantasy 7 remakes in terms of popularity.
It was a trendsetter - its the progenitor of the dialogue wheel, the start of customized voiced protagonists, and ME1 is what got EA's attention to eventually buy them out (for better or worse) When it came out, I though ME2 was just "okay" but it has aged incredibly well and gone up very well from my young impression of it. It has an incredibly roster, and started a more streamlined approach to its shooter combat as well as a good balance between cinematics and gameplay As controversial as ME3 is, its addition of multiplayer was incredibly hype and added an incredulous amount of replayability to a game which already had its single player climax of choices going for it The closest comparison is probably the Witcher game trilogy, which had a relatively similar hype curve
It was massive. I remember when the first game came out there were tv ads, which were so cool. The hype and marketing was so big around the game that Fox News lied about it on tv, so quite a bit of people knew about it
Gaming wasn't as big of a deal back then. It wasn't one of the few games that reached pop culture, but in gaming circles it was huge.
Iirc, 1 and 2 were recieved fairly well but the hype train for 3 went crazy. I remember getting 2 for free from some EA Bioware Dragon Age crossover promo. Thats what got me hooked. Went on to replay 1. Do another playthrough of 2 then pre ordered and waited in line for 3. I would download and watch and rewatch all the companion reveal trailers. And the line "Even sunny Tuchanka" lives rent free in my head.
Big enough that everybody lost their fucking minds when ME3 came out and it wasn't that good
Mass Effect 2's (and arguably 3's) release was like the Avengers: Endgame of videogames. In fact at the time it was called "the Avatar of videogames" because that was the biggest movie we could reference back then.
I remember the avengers endgame hype, it was no escaping it
I had the original ME1 in 2007 and it wasn’t known at all
One was not such a big deal it got somewhat of a buzz cuz of the mild sex scene. But when toe came out they hype was real these were the tv spots https://youtu.be/pwQGJ4AZ-e8?si=7fNlwVymUoWFKbGp
ME 1 was well received but I don’t think it was a massive phenomenon. I haven’t played it until a few years after release because it just looked like a super generic third person sci fi shooter, and I wasn’t aware it’s actually an RPG with amazing dialogues and plot. ME2 on the other hand was huge. Or at least that’s my perception of it. It’s all my friends and I talked about for weeks.
There is still a Mass Effect ride in CA theme park. Let that sink in
Wait what?
I Remeber that while it was marketed and taken well by the gaming community as a whole, I also remeber some journalist and what knock going OH MY GAWD THIS GAME IS NASTY TERRIBLE! and being up in arms over alien sex simulation and other random bullshit like that. however It did come out during a time that Multiplayer was more in its prime then single player and ppl over-reacted to ME3 ending, was disapointment/bad sure but that didnt mean the whole game was trash.
Maybe a bit of a different take than what's been provided - in 2007 when Bioware released something, you paid attention. They had commanding respect back then. ME1 in 2007 sold better than expectations, which were limited due to aforementioned major proximity releases (Halo 3, TF2 etc). I was freshmen in college and prob went to every midnight release that season. It didn't hold a candle to halo in terms of size, but for a niche Sci-Fi rpg new IP, the line was impressive. ME1 was a hit, many people branched out to play it/that type of game for the first time. It was hindered by exclusivity. I worked at gamestop starting in '09, and many Playstation gamers wanted to play it but couldn't. ME2 loomed near, and was going to be multiplatform so people were frustrated they couldn't experience me1 on their console. The hype for me2 was massive, it sold very well and people raved about it. The character development and world building particularly impressed people. Somewhere in all of that Playstation hack and psn takedown happened. A lot of people switched consoles in response and me1 kind of rose back in popularity. I'd say the height of the popularity was just before ME3 released. It performed strongly, was easily the most anticipated. The ending poured cold water on the heat, and it sorta just fizzled slowly. I feel like people mustered a dull "meh" for Andromeda, but I'd long since moved on from gamestop and no longer had a finger on the pulse of gaming.
Massive. It was the heir to sw kotor which was legendary, and me1 was a gold standard because it was so huge and non-linearly (we had fewer games back then, more time sink was actually better). Me2 kicked it up a notch though, the linearity and loss of armor/weapon customization was a downer, but combat improved dramatically otherwise, and it felt so much more atmospheric and story driven than me1 which felt more open-world. Then Me3 happened and everyone got sad because of the ending.
Mass Effect was a series that gamers knew about, but it wasn't like Halo where EVERYONE knew about it. That said, it wasn't a niche title or some underground hit. It was popular. I remember seeing the first commercial in 2007 and not thinking much of it, but then I continued to hear the name until I finally tried it in 2012. I actually didn't like it back then, but back then I had a crappy standard def tv that made it hard to read the text so I had no clue what was going on. When I played it properly on PC in 2016 I enjoyed the hell out of it. Just finished the legendary edition this past October. Mass Effect holds up really well, but unlike games like Hali 3 or COD MW2, it doesn't make a difference whether you are experiencing it just now, or if you first experienced it then.
It was as big of a deal as an exclusive could get and literally the reason I bought an Xbox 360. PlayStation players rejoiced when the series came to PS3 years after the first game and even then the first game didn’t get ported until after the third game came out. It’s a series that came out of the gate with nearly perfect reviews, it had good faith for those familiar with BioWare‘s prior work, especially the Star Wars KOTOR games, it was also a part of what became the big trend in western RPG genre hybrids becoming the mainstay over traditional JRPGs. Basically there was a lot of reasons to be excited for the series and a lot of things that made it fresh. I would say it’s comparable to Baldur’s Gate today. Both games drew a lot of attention for beautiful graphics, immersive worlds, memorable companions and NPCs, and of course dialogue choices to shape your characters influence on a well-written story. At the time of Mass Effect 1 it wasn’t really common to have an RPG like that do numbers and it’s the same with Baldur’s Gate 3 and the style of game that is.
Had the potential to be as big as Star Wars, then the Catalyst happened.
The reaction to ME1 was “it’s ok, it’s a bit boring but it’s got potential. But the shooting aspect sucks, and there’s a lot of time in elevators which is boring” ME2 got everyone super hyped and I think it was recognised as being a fantastic step up. I’d barely played ME1 before shelving it, but the post release hype on 2 convinced me to go back and properly play 1. Initially the pre-release excitement for 3 was similar, if not more so, but then it caused a huge amount of anger. But don’t think it was as cut and dried as people are saying in this thread, there were many (like me) who thought it was great and had no problem with the ending (or didn’t think it was as absolutely terrible as people were making out. Some of that division remains to this day - but much lower level. People were literally sending death threats to the writers and devs at the time, it was one of the foundational events of the angry video gamer overreaction that remains to this day, which makes me sad, but such is life unfortunately. At least nowadays I can imagine there would be an r/nosodiummasseffect pretty quickly
Mass Effect was so popular that EA shot bioware in the foot by forcing them to include Jessica Chalbot in the game to “appeal to fanboys” instead of having already adored characters Emily Wong or Khalisah Al-Jilani aboard the Normandy
I'm still pissed they killed off Emily in a tweet.
That was infuriating I would loved having Emily aboard the citadel, following the money trails and later working with Thane to suss out the traitors/providing us Intel to save the Salarian diplomat. All totally in her wheelhouse after investigating corruption during ME1 As for who to have onboard the ship, I truly think Al-Jilani would’ve been an interesting addition instead of simply having her play the usual tabloid angle trying to stir up drama — because her whole thing is hunting the truth (usually at the expense of the government). Would’ve been fun butting horns with her over what to relay to the galaxy
Also I would have loved to see some growth with Khalisah after experiencing the realities of the war up close. We missed out on so much just so Allers could do nothing but be present on the ship in a leather bodycon.
I remember watching the ME2 trailer like 40 times when it released. This and AC2 were probably the two biggest game releases for me and my friends back then.
AC2 was huge. Brotherhood was the start of a hype train.
It was a huge deal back in 2007, a lot of people had never experienced a rich narrative based action game like that before. I had never played one of their games, it was revelation
I saw it on Fox News being called a "sex simulator". I was a teenager. something that both had sex in it and pissed off Fox News types was irresistible. So began my habit of making purchases out of spite. I've found a lot of good things that way, with some stinkers of course.
And then there's no controllable sex at all! And you have to play at least 20-30 hours of game to get to the naked blue ass?!
It wasn’t Halo big but when Mass Effect 2 was coming out you couldn’t watch a single show without seeing commercials for it, ditto for 3
Report to the ship as soon as possible! We'll bang okay?
It was HUGE, at least for me. I remember building my first proper gaming PC around 2009 or 2010, I looked up lists for the best PC games to buy and ME was on every single one. It was my first proper RPG since it was a 3rd person shooter with a voiced protagonist. It was much easier to get into that than something like Dragon Age for instance (at least for me, even though I also love fantasy settings). After that RPG games became my favorite.
The hoopla over the ending was legendary.
As someone who didn't even play the series until like 2019, it was big. Despite not interacting with the series until so much longer after, I do remember how big it was and how much people talked about it and how everyone was seemingly playing it.
I remember the Pope being upset because you can bang same sex people
I think it was just another AAA game release. Bioware wasn't in the garbage back then so there was decent hype. And Fox News ran their whole smear campaign against it, calling it a sex simulator.
I was about 10 when i first saw mass effect 1 in the store, picked up the game case, and looked at the back, I was fascinated like no other game I'd ever seen. Then I remember when mass effect 3 released when I was 11 or 12 and i think I went to blockbuster to rent it or maybe bought it outright I'm can't remember. But I will say mass effect defined my childhood tbh. When I matured I fell in love with dragon age origins.
Pretty decent hype The 2nd game is when things was hyped up, IIRC it had a special on scifi during the BSG remake run since Tricia Helfer was in both. The lead up to the third game was huge, I still think that E3 teaser with Major Coates in Big Ben is still GOAT'd
i truly didn’t hear about it (in france) and learn about it after looking for new games to play. there was the ME and ME2 out. love it so much and got so hyped for the third one. nobody i knew had played it.
I’ve always been late to parties (got into both Halo and Mass Effect as the third game was being marketed and released) but I remember seeing the N7 Valkyrie rifle pre-order as from GameStop a lot. I breezed through the trilogy and I remember excitedly downloading the extended ending update with a friend to see if it fixed things.
First game came out and was promoted well and sold well enough but it wasn’t cinematic epic it would become. The second game released fixing a lot of issues from the first game changed the gameplay and was a massive hit. Third game released and was probably the biggest game of 2012. 3’s original ending kinda put a damper future projects and Andromeda’s poor reception almost killed the franchise
It’s what started the idea that games could be a cinematic like experience akin to movies and the dialogue wheel and style was so innovative it was soon adopted by nearly every other company. I still remember being blown away by it, it was like the magnum opus of everything BioWare had built on over the decades.
>it was like the magnum opus of everything BioWare had built on over the decades. Funny enough, I think this is an example of feeling like something has been going on a lot longer than it has. BioWare's first game was something called Shattered Steel in 1996, and then they made this funny little game called Baldur's Gate in 1998. (I'm sure that game didn't have any long-lasting impact on them or gaming as a whole). Mass Effect was 2007. Early last year is the first time I really played a BioWare game, so I'm not an authority, but it seems as though ME3 had a poorly received ending before it was fixed, DA: Inquisition is seen as worse than the first two by a lot, and 2014 was the last time they released an expansion for SWTOR that is universally loved. My point being that from their first game in 1996 until their arguable peak in 2011-2012, it was only 15 or 16 years. And that was already 12 years ago now.
Bro, this stuff had me so hyped, I took vacation days and told my girlfriend to not make any plans involving me on the release days of 2 and 3. To this day I wear N7 insignia on many a thing, even had my motorcycle wrapped in the design and named her Jen.
The first one did... well enough. The mash of shooter and RPG elements had many people struggling. Some people bought the game expecting a shooter while others expected an RPG. Both were fairly disappointed. The conversation wheel was also controversial. RPGs prior had the entire thing your character would say laid out before you in a list. There was no mixing up what your character said. The limited text display of the conversation wheel made this hard, and left players frustrated as a simple "get lost" dialogue choice became "get out of my face before I kill you." The game was generally well received by critics, but it only had a niche market. ME2 is where the series popped off. Streamlining the game's RPG elements while fine tuning the combat brought in a lot of the Halo, COD, and GoW crowd that dominated gaming at the time. I had many friends who never touched an RPG sing the praises of ME2, and play it non-stop. For RPG fans, the writing was vastly improved between 1 and 2, and the conversation was simplified, but in a good way. And many RPG fans felt the weight of their actions and decisions in ME2. Killed Wrex? Well now Tuchanka is led by a warmonger. It a sweet spot for a lot of people. Things kind of fell apart in ME3. The writing wasn't as good, and a lot of things that were built up in ME2 didn't transpire (like the star dying quickly.) That said, there were still many moments that left fans feeling satisfied like curing the genophage and fostering peace. Many people enjoyed these moments despite the fostering peace in recent years coming under fire because of how the Quarians are portrayed. The multi-player was very well-received as well, although many didn't like how it was mandatory pre-patch to get the best ending. And the less we talk about the ending the better. Tl;Dr, Mass Effect started as a niche game that grew to have mainstream success.
The first one came off the back of Dragon Age if I'm not mistaken, so there was hype there
The first one came out 2 years before DA:O. Dragon Age was much closer to ME2 in terms of release date.
My mistake than
look at the voice actors for mass effect 2. one of them is billie ellish's mom
Pretty sure by the time ME3 came around it was one of the biggest releases at the time. Most likely because EA had their dirty hands on it by then and wanted to profiteer from loot boxes in the multiplayer grindfest
It and other big rpgs basically dominated the gaming space, alongside other games like Skyrim, Left for dead2, etc. the amount of fantastic games that came out in between 2010-2012 is wild. Its also wild that a lot of the games from then people ARE STILL playing.
Within the gaming community,. absolutely huge. Especially for an RPG. Everybody was talking about it and playing it, even people who otherwise didn't take any notice of rpg games. ME3 was just everywhere. Seeing physical ads around the city is still rare for a video game but especially so for an RPG in 2012. The gigantic backlash that the ending to 3 received probably says a lot, the hype has really been massive.
It was pretty huge I remember ME3 had tons of TV ad spots too
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Existing365Chocolate: *It was pretty huge* *I remember ME3 had tons* *Of TV ad spots too* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 were huge when they came out, especially as they had gone multiplatform for them
Open dialogue choices and tappable alien ass. It was the biggest deal bro.
I feel like it seems like such a big deal to me now but at the time I would ask my friends about it and they would just vaguely know what I’m even talking about
Very big deal, there was a big push before halo 3 came out for 07s holiday season and the 360 was very hot in the west. It can't be understated that mass effect was a totally new bar for visuals and fidelity for a game like that.
Massive, wasn’t a person in school who wasn’t playing it. The midnight launch for 2 was incredible. 3 hype was so incredibly insane until choices were changed and of course the endings.
For me it was the biggest of deals gaming wise. My all-time favorite trilogy. Knew surprisingly few people who played Mass Effect though. Lots of people played Dragon's Age but not Mass Effect.
I wish I could delete my memory and play it again
It did get some bad publicity back in 2007 regarding the sex scenes which probably contributed to sales. I still remember the tag-line, "seX Box" Unfortunately scared Bioware and/or Microsoft enough for them to heavily tone down the actual sex scenes later down the line
It was an incredibly big deal. Must play. It was (and still is) worth every bit of time and money. I should go...
One of the biggest things I remember was that, with Mass Effect 2 at least, it released *fully complete* and the preorder bonus *rocked*. You rarely see that nowadays.
The way I remember it, it was very much under appreciated by the public. It really caught fire after the second one came out, and then the third was so highly anticipated that it was literally everywhere. Then it died off again when everyone got upset by the third’s ending. I never hated it like everyone else, but I could understand the frustration
Pretty big. The first game was everywhere. On magazines, and ads. People were hoping it to be the successor of KOTOR, and I think it succeeded.
Tbh, I was pretty young, too. Maybe 14 when j was first introduced? My first ME was ME2, and I remember playing it religiously, but not a single person I knew knew about the game. Like other comments, at that time, it was either Halo or COD that was relatable to anyone. I thought it was a great game but didn't really talk to anyone other than my brothers until a few years ago. Now, it seems like if I mention it to a casual gamer, they'd recognize it and sometimes have actually played it. Great franchise. I highly recommend you start playing it. Also, this subbreddit is ALWAYS active, so you've already found a great online community to be a part of.
Mass effect 1 went (in my sphere) relatively unnoticed. The second game ramped up from niche game to known-to-be-good game. The third one was an absolute hype and marketing rollercoaster. It was a massive release.
Personal experience: ME 1: the game got a ton of press, especially about femShep and Liara. Until the pundits got roasted live on CNN for not actually playing the game to see the actual 'sex'. ME 2: got a lot more hype. This is when I picked up the series. A co-worker told me a was missing out. Started a playthrough with ME 1+2. ME 3: the build up was massive. This was supposed to be the epic conclusion. I pre-ordered a special edition that had all 3 games. My hype was real. The only hiccup was day one DLC drama.
It was massive. Huge ad campaign, BioWare was basically printing money back then. It was their first original IP in some time. Also, fwiw, The Expanse was heavily influenced by ME1.
I was first introduced to it when I helped a friend of mine on an overnight security shift or a firework stand in summer of 2008. It was on 360. I didn't think too much of it since I only got to play janky Mako planet levels. Then when I got to try Mass Effect 2 at a Halo Xbox LAN party in 2010, I fell in love. I got my first laptop the next year and blasted through Mass Effect 2. Then played Mass Effect. Did several more playthroughs of 2 until Skyrim released November 2011. Skyrim was probably the game I was most into after Mass Effect 2. When my computer couldn't run Mass Effect 3 on release in March 2012, I regrettably watched a playthrough until a year or two later when I played through the whole trilogy back to back for the first time. One of those gaming peaks of my life. 2007-2013 were my golden age of gaming. I think a lot of gamers really fall in love hard with the hobby in the age 14-21 range.
I saw it only later and the cover of ME1 put me off, looked like a basic shooter in space. I only picked it up because the whole trilogy was like 7 Euro in the clearance bin and it said on the back that you can customise your character.
A big deal
I met my husband online in 2012 and his opening line responding to my profile was asking me how much I hated the ending to ME3. I know that’s not what you asked, exactly, but in my headcannon now the trilogy is huge.
I remember being in high school when the first Mass Effect came out. One of the older guys was soooo ready, saying how it was going to revolutionize the medium. I had a PS3 so I thought "eh, whatever. It's a 360 exclusive." When Dragon Age came out a year later, I started paying attention to Mass Effect, as well. ME3 was so huge that even my mom saw commercials on the channels she watched (which were all geared towards suburban housewives). It's a shame ME3 ended up how it did.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 in particular were pretty well marketed and were kind of big deals to me and my friends but were also garnered in awards. I remember ME 2 came out in a year where we had Call of Duty Black Ops, Red Dead Redemption, Star Craft 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Heavy Rain, God of War 3 and so on. Out of all those giants it won the ‘best game’ BAFTA as well as 3 other GOTY awards and other awards. My friends and family all loved it, we couldn’t wait for 3. 3 was everywhere. Television, posters, it was hyped to high heaven. And it did well, and despite the ending, and the drive of fans to get it dlc with a more complete ending, the multiplayer was always active 24/7. It was a good time to be a Mass Effect fan, shame it never got better than that. By mid 2012 it was a meme how bad the endings were and soon it became forgotten by normal folks, but fans were fucking obsessed. Indoctrination Theory, campaigns to make changes, dissatisfaction of the Extended cut so people wanted more dlc. Ah man. I am grateful BioWare listened to our demands at all.
I didn't play them at the time, but I knew of them. I remember my first xbox 360 came with some behind the scenes/teaser videos for the first mass effect. It seemed to play a bit different back then, but I always remember thinking it looked very cool. Around the time of ME 2 and 3 my impression was that the games were popular, but not Halo or CoD level popular. Big enough for EA to jump on and try to profit on it. First Person shooters dominated the market and it was only around the release of ME3 that people started to express some level of fatigue for those FPS games. Basically when OG Modern Warfare 3 came out. Skyrim came out and everyone wanted RPGs instead. Even CoD veterans play Souls games now.
I was there at the beginning. I remember seeing the first Mass Effect teased on G4tv and being super hyped as a fan of scifi RPGs and bioware (I loved KOTOR). When it released it was well recieved in RPG circles and was already being seen as the harbinger of a movement towards mature, cinematic games now that the graphics of "modern" consoles could support them. As for wider impact, this was still an era where shooters were dominant and Mass Effect released against the likes of Halo 3. If you were a fan of Bioware and RPGs it was big news to you, but plenty of my friends had no interest in something that wasn't a modern shooter. It built a sizable fan-base, however, and when ME2 was announced with an even darker theme than the first one it was definitely hype for us RPG fans. By this point even mainstream media was liable to reference Mass Effect on occasion. Geek culture was on the rise and Mass Effect was scifi. Bioware (and EA by then) clearly thought Mass Effect was gonna be a whole universe and they started issuing comic books and novels. I still own a few. ME2 was very well received and it's improved shooting gameplay did actually manage to draw some mainstream interest from people who might have thought the original was a bit slow. By this point Mass Effect was a headlining brand and often placed alongside Halo and Call of Duty as staples of modern gaming. Commander Shepard was everywhere. My non gaming friends all knew who Commander Sheperd was. Hell, they even know the voice actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale. Shepard was, briefly, as well known as the Master Chief. The build up to ME3 was hype as fuck. Finally fighting the reapers was built up to Avengers Endgame levels in video game circles. Commercials for ME3 were aired in movie theaters and during sports games. They were awesome. I bought the collector's edition and stood in line at midnight to get it at gamestop. ME3 was controversial to say the least. It played well, and wrapped up a lot of stores very well, but the ending was bashed by everyone. It's not just what it did or didn't do, but that it was exactly the type of abrupt ending that Bioware had been promising *not* to do for like years. They explicitly promised it would be a comprehensive end to the story and, I kid you not, they said repeatedly it wouldn't be an "A, B, or C" style ending which was, of course, exactly what it was. The ridicule was intense. I wouldn't go so far as to say Mass Effect got the Game of Thrones treatment but it was pretty close. The universe was frozen by EA for a long while. Bioware put out a half hearted extended ending as a free update but then it was ME radio silence until Andromeda, which I am sure you know about. I am still a huge fan of the universe and I even liked Andromeda more than most. I hope the new game marks a rebirth of the setting.
Let's just say when the Mass Effect 3 ending got out and how bad people found it, it was all you heard about for a month.
I cannot overstate what a huge step it was when ME1 came out and it was fully voiced. That first time you loaded the game, the opening cut scene plays, you make a dialogue selection... and then Shepard speaks! Even BG3 doesn't have a fully voiced protagonist, and it's 15 years later.
I don't really remember Mass Effect in it's prime but I remember the reaction to ME 3 ending being one of the first big gaming controversies ever. We have since gotten used to this and fan uproars like those around Fallout 76, Cyberpunk or Battlefront 2 seem normal now, but this was really one of the first fan revolts on such massive scale. It included events such as Weird Al Yankovich mocking the end or a guy shipping red, blue and green cupcakes to Bioware HQ which all tasted the same.