Mass Effect was BioWare’s answer to a question its own success had raised: what would the studio behind Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic do with a galaxy it owned? The answer, released on the Xbox 360 in November 2007, was a science-fiction role-playing game with real-time gunfights, a conversation system built for a joypad, and an unusual promise. It was announced as the first part of a trilogy, and the decisions you made as its hero, Commander Shepard, were meant to follow your saved game into the sequels. Five years later they did, and the way the story ended produced what Edge judged the biggest outcry of 2012.
Fast facts
- Developer: BioWare, Edmonton; project director Casey Hudson.
- Released: November 2007, Xbox 360, published by Microsoft. A Windows version followed in May 2008 and a PlayStation 3 version in December 2012.
- Hero: Commander Shepard, male or female, the first human agent of the galactic Council’s elite Spectres.
- Sequels: Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012), with saved games carried forward.
- Remaster: Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the trilogy and its downloadable content, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2021.
A galaxy of its own
BioWare revealed Mass Effect in the autumn of 2005, as a Microsoft-published exclusive for the new Xbox 360. “We want the player’s actions to affect the world more than ever before,” Hudson told Electronic Gaming Monthly, “to affect change across the entire galaxy in a meaningful way.” The game is set in 2183. Humanity has mastered space travel and learned, as EGM put it, “that not only is it not alone in the universe, but that it’s behind the curve”.
Edge’s preview in December 2006 laid out the story. Shepard, captain of the SSV Normandy and the only human among the Spectres, a peacekeeping force answering to the galactic council, begins by hunting a rogue Spectre, a turian, one of “a proud, austere and militarily advanced avian-like race” whose bloody first contact with humanity had ended with mankind joining the council. Behind him are the Geth, networked artificial intelligences, and behind them an extinction cycle that wipes out almost all organic life every 50,000 years. At the start you choose Shepard’s gender, appearance, background and class: Soldier, Tech, or Biotic, a discipline of telekinetic powers drawn from the game’s “dark energy”. All three games, the preview said, were planned to come out during the Xbox 360’s lifespan, with saved games transferable from one to the next.
Playing it
Combat happens in real time, but you can pause it to order your two squadmates about, choose their weapons or use their powers. Between missions you explore planets in the Mako, an all-terrain vehicle Edge described as “a cross between a Warthog and a tank”, whose boosters hop it over incoming fire. The main story runs alongside many optional missions on outlying worlds. An in-game encyclopaedia, the Codex, filled in the history, species and politics behind it all, “an almanac of histories and planetary profiles” in Edge’s words.
Conversations used a wheel at the bottom of the screen with up to six options. Instead of choosing a line of dialogue word for word, you chose its tone and intent, and Shepard spoke the line. Options on the right-hand side moved the conversation towards its end, those on the left explored it further, and replies towards the top were generally more polite than those towards the bottom. Choices earned Paragon or Renegade points, and two skills, Charm and Intimidate, opened extra ways to talk round a problem. Edge thought Paragon and Renegade were the Light Side and Dark Side of KOTOR under new names.
The squad was the heart of the game: two human soldiers, Ashley Williams and Kaidan Alenko; Garrus, a turian officer of the Citadel’s security force; Tali, a quarian mechanic; Wrex, a krogan mercenary; and Liara, an asari archaeologist. Some of them could die, and the sequels remembered who had. On the planet Virmire Shepard can save only one of Ashley and Kaidan, and when Edge previewed Mass Effect 2, it noted that “either Ashley or Kaiden will be back”, depending on what each player had done.
Reception
Edge gave the game 7 out of 10 in its Christmas 2007 issue. It found it “epic and only half as daft as its title suggests, part KOTOR and Jade Empire, part Gears Of War and Ghost Recon”, and summed it up as “KOTOR all over again, but without the licence”. It admired the look of the worlds and the Mako, but found the combat “engages, but never electrifies”, the two genres of “stats-based RPG and frenetic shooter” uneasy together, and the conversation wheel too often offering choices that were “more or less the same”. It reckoned the game good for about 24 hours.
The trilogy
Mass Effect 2, published in January 2010 by Electronic Arts, which had bought BioWare, kept the universe and threw out much of the machinery. Edge gave it 9: when you pull out your gun, “the game genuinely feels like a shooter rather than an RPG dressing up”, cover and the cooldowns on powers had been reworked, and the cast had become “complex personalities instead of philosophical arguments in jumpsuits”. Shepard’s crew from the first game came back, or did not, according to the imported save.
Mass Effect 3 (March 2012), released for the PlayStation 3 as well as the Xbox 360 and PC, put the galaxy at war with the genocidal Reapers. Almost everything you did now fed a measure of your readiness for war, drawn from the alliances you made and the allies you had kept alive across three games. Edge gave it 7. Many players were furious about its ending. One Edge reader wrote in that May to ask whether “30 — perhaps even 100-plus” hours could “really be undone in the final five minutes”, and noted that fans had started an online petition to change it. BioWare announced in April that it would expand the ending, and released the Extended Cut as a free download in June 2012. Looking back on 2012, Edge said that “the outrage that united the hordes and mobilised the industry to take action” had been about “the ending to Mass Effect 3”, and that after the Extended Cut, “few seemed satisfied”.
Later
BioWare returned to the series with Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) and in 2021 released the Legendary Edition, a remaster of the original trilogy bundled with its downloadable content, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In January 2025 BioWare said a core team of veterans of the original trilogy was working on the next Mass Effect.
Sources
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 198, December 2005, p. 67: the announcement (Casey Hudson, project director; a 360-exclusive trilogy).
- Edge issue 156, December 2005: the X05 showing.
- Edge issue 169, December 2006, pp. 37–40: preview (the Spectres, the turian, the Geth, the 50,000-year cycle, classes, the conversation ring with up to six options, the Mako, transferable saves and the trilogy timetable).
- Edge issue 183, Christmas 2007, pp. 86–87: review (Xbox 360, Microsoft, £50; Paragon and Renegade; the conversation wheel; the Mako; about 24 hours; 7/10).
- Edge issue 210, January 2010, p. 30: Mass Effect 2 preview (returning characters; “either Ashley or Kaiden will be back”).
- Edge issue 212, March 2010, pp. 92–93: Mass Effect 2 review (EA; 9/10).
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 100–102: Mass Effect 3 review (PS3, 360, PC; readiness for war; Paragon and Renegade; the Rachni Queen; 7/10).
- Edge issue 240, May 2012, p. 29: reader’s letter on the ending and the petition.
- Edge issue 249, January 2013, p. 87: Edge’s awards for 2012 (the ending and the Extended Cut).
- Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 22, and issue 55, September 2021, p. 111: Mass Effect Legendary Edition (announcement; PC, PS4 and Xbox One).
- The Vault’s BioWare entry: Electronic Arts’ purchase of BioWare, Mass Effect: Andromeda and the January 2025 announcement, with its sources.
- Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, p. 42: the Legendary Edition bundled “with all its disparate DLC”.
- Wikipedia, “Mass Effect (video game)” (web, secondary): release dates for the Xbox 360 (20 and 23 November 2007), Windows (28 May 2008) and PlayStation 3 (4 December 2012); the year 2183; the dialogue wheel’s layout; the Codex; the squad members and the Virmire choice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Mass Effect 3” (web, secondary): the release on 6 March 2012; the Extended Cut, announced on 5 April and released free on 26 June 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_3