Mass Effect

Mass Effect is a military science fiction media franchise created by Casey Hudson. The franchise depicts a distant future where humanity and several alien civilizations have colonized the galaxy using technology left behind by advanced precursor civilizations. The franchise originated in a series of video games developed by BioWare and originally published by Microsoft Game Studios on the first two games and its expansions. Later on, the series was taken over by Electronic Arts through its acquisition of BioWare. Each installment is a third-person shooter with role-playing elements. The first three games form a trilogy in which the player character, Commander Shepard, attempts to save the Milky Way galaxy from a race of ancient, hibernating machines known as the Reapers. The inaugural video game in the series, Mass Effect (2007), follows Shepard's investigation of Saren Arterius, one of the Reapers' agents. Mass Effect 2 (2010) begins two years later and sees Shepard's forces battling the Collectors, an alien race abducting human colonies to facilitate the Reapers' return. The original trilogy's final installment, Mass Effect 3 (2012), depicts a war between the Reapers and the rest of the galaxy. A fourth game, Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), featured a new setting and cast of characters, and a fifth is in active development.…

Mass Effect is a military science fiction media franchise created by Casey Hudson. The franchise depicts a distant future where humanity and several alien civilizations have colonized the galaxy using technology left behind by advanced precursor civilizations. The franchise originated in a series of video games developed by BioWare and originally published by Microsoft Game Studios on the first two games and its expansions. Later on, the series was taken over by Electronic Arts through its acquisition of BioWare. Each installment is a third-person shooter with role-playing elements. The first three games form a trilogy in which the player character, Commander Shepard, attempts to save the Milky Way galaxy from a race of ancient, hibernating machines known as the Reapers. The inaugural video game in the series, Mass Effect (2007), follows Shepard's investigation of Saren Arterius, one of the Reapers' agents. Mass Effect 2 (2010) begins two years later and sees Shepard's forces battling the Collectors, an alien race abducting human colonies to facilitate the Reapers' return. The original trilogy's final installment, Mass Effect 3 (2012), depicts a war between the Reapers and the rest of the galaxy. A fourth game, Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), featured a new setting and cast of characters, and a fifth is in active development. The original trilogy was met with commercial success as well as acclaim. Critics praised the game's narrative, characters, voice acting, world building, and emphasis on player choice. The ending of Mass Effect 3 drew widespread criticism for being an unsatisfying conclusion to the trilogy, prompting Electronic Arts to release an expanded cut with additional cutscenes. Mass Effect: Andromeda received mixed reviews. Praise was directed at the game's visuals and combat, but the game drew criticism for technical issues and its plot. The series has generated attention and discussion about its representation of same-sex relationships and sexual minorities. It also originated the dialogue wheel, a mechanic similar to dialogue trees, enabling players to dynamically steer conversations by selecting from a number of preset choices; the feature has since seen widespread use in other role-playing video games. The success of the video game series spawned adaptations in other media, including novels, comics, and an animated film. ==Gameplay== While various features of gameplay varied across the series, the Mass Effect games are action role-playing games. The player customizes their version of the game's main character (Shepard for the first three games, and Ryder for Mass Effect: Andromeda) based on physical appearance, background, and one of six character classes, each class centered around one or two specializations in combat, technology, or "biotic" skills (similar to mutant abilities in various franchises.) This establishes a skill tree that the player can advance through as their character gains experience levels through completing missions. Each game generally follows a main story pathway with points of branching narratives and multiple side missions, allowing the player to proceed through the game as they desire. Both story and optional missions most often involve using their ship to travel via the mass relay to remote star systems and explore planets to find target objectives. When exploring planets, the player has the option to bring up to two of their crew members with them, who generally act autonomously but can be given specific orders by the player. In missions, the player can explore an area to find information, discover lootable objects with new gear or in-game currency, non-playable characters to talk to, and key mission items that are to be recovered. Frequently, the player will enter combat, which plays out as a third-person shooter, with the player and their allies using a combination of their weapons and combat, tech, and biotic powers along with tactic use of the environment to defeat opponents. There are six different types of weapons: assault rifles, grenades, sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, and in later games, heavy weapons (i.e. grenade launchers, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, or heavy machine guns). Due to these weapons being collapsible for easy storage, it is possible for a player to carry all five weapons at once and alternate between them depending on their position, enemy type, and situation. Melee weapons include fists, the butt of a gun, or in later games, a condensed transparent silicon-carbide dagger called an Omni-blade. Through story encounters and missions, the player meets a number of non-player characters and engages in dialogue trees with them to learn information and progress the story. This is presented through what BioWare called a Dialogue Wheel, with the player-character reply options shown as choices extending radially outward from a circle at the bottom of the screen. Most of these choices are simple questions and responses, but in some dialogues, they offer additional choices that either influence how the game plays out from there, or are as a result from those previous choices. In the first three games, these choices influenced the player-character's morality, putting them on the path of a Paragon or Renegade, indicated by color and positioning on the Dialogue Wheel. With the second and third game, it became possible to select these choices during the non-player's character dialog, resulting in an interruption of the action that could have even larger ramifications. The player's choices of Paragon or Renegade could change how some parts of the story progressed and could limit choices of allies they could gain later in the game or the ability to access powerful gear. Cinematic designer John Ebenger stated in 2020 that only about 8% of the players chose the Renegade route across the first three games, and jokingly lamented about the amount of effort they had put into some of the Renegade cinematics. In Andromeda, BioWare replaced the Paragon/Renegade distinctions, which were tied more to the Shepard character, to a new system based on four ideals of emotional, logical, casual, and professional attitudes. Among notable side missions in the series include the various romancing options with the main character's crewmates: these included both hetero- and homosexual relationships since the player-character's gender was selectable, as well as inter-species options. Players could work to improve their relationship with these characters through dialogue options, providing them gifts, or completing various side missions specific to each character. Successfully romancing a character would typically lead to scenes leading up to a sexual encounter though otherwise not showing anything inappropriate for the game's rating. These options had created some controversy for the first game on release with mainstream reporters critical of the sexual content of the game. ===Critical response=== The original Mass Effect trilogy has received near-universal critical acclaim across all release platforms, according to review aggregator Metacritic. All three games have received numerous nominations as well as number of year-end awards from video game publications and major award ceremonies. The first two Mass Effect titles are widely considered to be among the greatest games of all time. Mass Effect 2 in particular is the most critically acclaimed game in the series and garnered numerous game of the year awards following its release. It received over 70 perfect review scores. In 2013 IGN rated the Mass Effect Trilogy the best Xbox 360 game(s) out of a list of 25, and the 7th best PS3 game(s) out of a list of 25. The fourth installment, Mass Effect: Andromeda, received a less enthusiastic critical reception, with a consensus among critics that it was not up to par with its predecessors in terms of overall quality, although the improved combat received praise. ===Sales=== The Mass Effect franchise has been successful commercially. The first game in the franchise sold over one million units worldwide in less than three weeks after launch. Sales rose to 1.6 million copies after six weeks of availability by January 2008. Its sequel, Mass Effect 2 shipped more than two million copies to retailers within the game's first week. The game sold over 500,000 copies in the month of release, despite being released at the end of the month. Before the release of the third game, the series sold a combined total of 7 million copies worldwide. Mass Effect 3 was the most commercially successful game of the series: it sold over 800,000 copies in its first 24 hours, and its opening month sales were twice that of its predecessor's, selling over 900,000 copies on the Xbox 360 version, outselling the PlayStation 3 version 4 to 1 and bringing in over $200 million in revenue. By April 2012 it sold over twice as many copies as Mass Effect 2 in their respective launch months and generated lifetime sales of over six million copies. The Mass Effect series had sold a total of 14 million units by July 5, 2014. Mass Effect: Andromeda continued the sales success of its predecessors. By May 2017, an analyst noted that at least 2.5 million retail copies of Mass Effect: Andromeda had been shipped for $110 million in revenue. Additionally, $53 million in net sales from digital and special editions for Andromeda were generated in March 2017 but deferred to a later date. ==Legacy and cultural impact== Tauriq Moosa from The Guardian lauded the Mass Effect franchise as some of the best science fiction ever made, describing its overarching theme of "aspiration and connection in the face of an indifferent cosmos" to be "as cerebral as Star Trek, as hopeful as Asimov and as dramatic as Battlestar Galactica". Jessi Sampson from PCGamesN concurred and called Mass Effect an "impressive melting pot of ideas" from various seminal science fiction works, and that the ambition of the first game and its developers shaped the video game industry and "left behind a legacy as bright as the stars it had so vividly imagined". Writing for Wired, Jonathan Wood said the first Mass Effect set a high bar for storytelling in the video game medium unmatched by most of its contemporaries. Benjamin Bullard from Syfy noted that the first game debuted at a time when science fiction video games mainly revolved around persistent conflict and violence between alien and human characters, and the franchise had since grown from a niche RPG into a "full-scale AAA gaming phenomenon." In 2010, GamesRadar called Mass Effect the best new franchise of the (then seventh) generation, with a galaxy setting "so well-constructed that it felt like a decades-old franchise and represented a high-water mark for video games as a story-telling medium." Colin Moriarty stated that "the Mass Effect series is one of the defining video game franchises of [[History of video game consoles (seventh generation)|[the seventh] generation]]". Kyle Munkittrick from Gizmodo argued that Mass Effect, based on several factors articulated in his article, is the most important science fiction universe of the contemporary generation. Patrick Carlson from PC Gamer called Mass Effect one of the grandest and most personal science fiction epics across all mediums due to the successful combination of classic space opera's best elements with an RPG adventure structure that "encourages both playful and serious challenges to traditional science fiction". Cian Maher from TheGamer credited the series' well-written codex entries as playing an instrumental role in building "one of the most fascinating universes in the history of video games". N7 Day is an informal commemorative day observed annually on November 7 by BioWare, Electronic Arts and Mass Effect fandom. It originated as a marketing initiative by BioWare in 2012 to celebrate the Mass Effect media franchise. "N7" refers to Commander Shepard's in-universe military designation code worn on the character's armor: "N" is the classification for special forces and "7" is for Shepard's highly prestigious in-universe rank. ===Controversies=== The Mass Effect series has been the subject of several major video game controversies. A cutscene from the first Mass Effect, which contains depictions of partial nudity and sexual activity, was accused by conservative media outlets of being obscene content in late 2007. Controversy over the cutscene, especially one version which depicts a potential intimate scene between Liara T'Soni and a female Commander Shepard, attracted at least one instance of government scrutiny, which led to the game being briefly banned in Singapore. The controversy prompted an intervention from BioWare management into the development of Mass Effect 2 to remove planned same sex romantic content for companion characters like Jacob Taylor and Jack. Although Mass Effect 3 garnered critical acclaim like its predecessors, controversy surrounded its release. The most notable incident involved the public's reaction and refusal to accept the game's (and the trilogy's) ending. Several players organized themselves around internet campaigns to demand a better ending to the game. Both the US Federal Trade Commission and the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received complaints alleging that BioWare misled consumers under existing law which governs product advertising and consumer rights. BioWare later released an "extended cut" patch which would expand upon, but not replace, the endings of Mass Effect 3. BioWare also faced accusations of unethical business practices over its handling of the release for the Mass Effect 3: From Ashes DLC pack, as well as potential conflict of interest over video game media personality Jessica Chobot's involvement in Mass Effect 3. Other noteworthy controversies surrounding the series include public outrage over the alleged link between the series' in-game combat violence to the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which was later debunked; the appropriation of assets from Mass Effect 2 into a propaganda video to support the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, which was promoted by Trump's social media accounts shortly before it was taken down over claims of copyright infringement by publisher EA; and reactions to the portrayal and representation of women as well as sexual minorities.

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