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I think Mass Effect trilogy is fairly original and does away with a lot of the space sci-fi cliches like humans being the ruling class of the galaxy, or all spe

by jitix 8y ago

I think Mass Effect trilogy is fairly original and does away with a lot of the space sci-fi cliches like humans being the ruling class of the galaxy, or all species having a united voice, etc. I’d love to see it made into a movie.

bananarepdev 8y ago
When i think about Mass Effect, what comes to mind are these long sequences in the Citadel where you do nothing more than talk, learning about the biology, technology qnd geopolitics of the game's universe. I don't think this kind of content would fit a blockbuster movie, and without it what remains is a bunch of space marines shooting aliens.
- jitix 8y ago
  Actually the looong cutscenes where you cannot do anything, is one of the reasons I think it’d be a good movie. If you think about it it’s a very interactive story. Yes, you have choices like most RPGs but they don’t really matter at the end. The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    Specifically about Mass Effect: I think the difficulty here is that the ME universe is pretty vanilla by scifi standards. The good part about the games is how they present a big universe and fill it up with lore and characters for you to explore and because of it (at least for me) the game's immersion goes very smoothly from "I'm playing a video game" to "I'm commander fucking Shepard and I'm saving this galaxy whether it wants to or not". I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
- skocznymroczny 8y ago
  I view Mass Effect as KOTOR without a Star Wars license. It has always felt to me like Bioware wanted a parallel universe to a popular universe, one they could have creative control over. Kind of like Warcraft was basically Warhammer without license and Starcraft feels in many ways similar to WH40k.
  - HelloNurse 8y ago
    Warcraft and Starcraft are similar to Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 only at the superficial level of having several races and cultures fighting a multilateral war. Races are similar, but generic and traditional; space marines and hive-mind insectoid aliens, for example, are an old standard of science fiction (Starship Troopers has both). The more peculiar elements of the settings, on the other hand, are vastly different, particularly the basic conflict: crowded races and invasions, with peaceful and deranged people on all sides, in Warcraft and Starcraft, feel very different from the fanatical mutual destruction effort of the Emperor and the Chaos Gods of Warhammer and Warhammer 40000.
beloch 8y ago
Movies and games are sufficiently different that the the key to making a good "video game" movie may be to pick a property that gives more options than it takes away. For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting. With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle. Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good. Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  Sometimes I feel like I need a special upvote button for shocking bursts of sanity like this, but this reply will have to do.
- bonesss 8y ago
  > Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good. The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage... Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world. If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it? Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)
pvg 8y ago
"Humanity makes contact with the galactic community of intelligent life and claws its way to respect and acceptance with the help of plucky heroes". That is a very common trope employed by many, Star Trek among them. It's a fine set of games but as a story for a movie, it's as generic as it gets.
learc83 8y ago
It's a good story and I liked their take on it, but Mass Effect borrows everything you mentioned from Babylon 5.
- mrexroad 8y ago
  HUGE Babylon 5 fan here, but any sort of B5 film adaptation would have been a complete crap. Different stories need different mediums?
sametmax 8y ago
I can't recall anything that was surprising in Mass Effect. It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic. I really don't understand the appeal of this game. Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2. And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.
- verinus 8y ago
  So true. Fallout 1+2 are my favorite RPGs of all times. They had real choice for example: you could talk your way out of different situations and even get better over all outcomes (vault city and the ghouls if I remember correctly) ah and humor- not forget humor :)
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Honestly I really wanted to love Fallout 3. I was so excited when it was out, and I tried very hard to get into the game. But it was so shallow compared to the originals. And so short. It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done. Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
    - Lewton 8y ago
      Did you ever play New Vegas? It got a lot closer to the magic of fallout 1+2
      - 8y ago
zaarn 8y ago
There have been Scifi Novels that undid that trope before it became a trope. Esp. in the latest Perry Rhodan Novels the humans on earth are not really that big anymore. It's not a new idea. "Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.

by jitix 8y ago

bananarepdev 8y ago

When i think about Mass Effect, what comes to mind are these long sequences in the Citadel where you do nothing more than talk, learning about the biology, technology qnd geopolitics of the game's universe. I don't think this kind of content would fit a blockbuster movie, and without it what remains is a bunch of space marines shooting aliens.

jitix 8y ago
Actually the looong cutscenes where you cannot do anything, is one of the reasons I think it’d be a good movie. If you think about it it’s a very interactive story. Yes, you have choices like most RPGs but they don’t really matter at the end. The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
- lagadu 8y ago
  Specifically about Mass Effect: I think the difficulty here is that the ME universe is pretty vanilla by scifi standards. The good part about the games is how they present a big universe and fill it up with lore and characters for you to explore and because of it (at least for me) the game's immersion goes very smoothly from "I'm playing a video game" to "I'm commander fucking Shepard and I'm saving this galaxy whether it wants to or not". I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
skocznymroczny 8y ago
I view Mass Effect as KOTOR without a Star Wars license. It has always felt to me like Bioware wanted a parallel universe to a popular universe, one they could have creative control over. Kind of like Warcraft was basically Warhammer without license and Starcraft feels in many ways similar to WH40k.
- HelloNurse 8y ago
  Warcraft and Starcraft are similar to Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 only at the superficial level of having several races and cultures fighting a multilateral war. Races are similar, but generic and traditional; space marines and hive-mind insectoid aliens, for example, are an old standard of science fiction (Starship Troopers has both). The more peculiar elements of the settings, on the other hand, are vastly different, particularly the basic conflict: crowded races and invasions, with peaceful and deranged people on all sides, in Warcraft and Starcraft, feel very different from the fanatical mutual destruction effort of the Emperor and the Chaos Gods of Warhammer and Warhammer 40000.

beloch 8y ago

Movies and games are sufficiently different that the the key to making a good "video game" movie may be to pick a property that gives more options than it takes away. For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting. With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle. Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good. Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.

andrewflnr 8y ago
Sometimes I feel like I need a special upvote button for shocking bursts of sanity like this, but this reply will have to do.
bonesss 8y ago
> Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good. The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage... Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world. If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it? Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)

pvg 8y ago

"Humanity makes contact with the galactic community of intelligent life and claws its way to respect and acceptance with the help of plucky heroes". That is a very common trope employed by many, Star Trek among them. It's a fine set of games but as a story for a movie, it's as generic as it gets.

learc83 8y ago

It's a good story and I liked their take on it, but Mass Effect borrows everything you mentioned from Babylon 5.

mrexroad 8y ago
HUGE Babylon 5 fan here, but any sort of B5 film adaptation would have been a complete crap. Different stories need different mediums?

sametmax 8y ago

I can't recall anything that was surprising in Mass Effect. It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic. I really don't understand the appeal of this game. Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2. And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.

verinus 8y ago
So true. Fallout 1+2 are my favorite RPGs of all times. They had real choice for example: you could talk your way out of different situations and even get better over all outcomes (vault city and the ghouls if I remember correctly) ah and humor- not forget humor :)
- sametmax 8y ago
  Honestly I really wanted to love Fallout 3. I was so excited when it was out, and I tried very hard to get into the game. But it was so shallow compared to the originals. And so short. It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done. Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
  - Lewton 8y ago
    Did you ever play New Vegas? It got a lot closer to the magic of fallout 1+2
    - 8y ago

zaarn 8y ago

There have been Scifi Novels that undid that trope before it became a trope. Esp. in the latest Perry Rhodan Novels the humans on earth are not really that big anymore. It's not a new idea. "Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.