Trivia / Mass Effect

• Ascended Meme: If the player tries to talk to Garrus when he has nothing to say in Mass Effect 2, he’ll ask Shepard to come back later as he’s in the middle of some calibrations; as a result of Garrus having the fewest optional squadmate conversations, players heard this a lot. On top of the numerous jokes about Garrus’ fondness for calibrations in Mass Effect 3, the Legendary Edition renamed the display options as Calibration across the trilogy.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Shepard never says "We'll bang, okay?" in-game. That quote originated from a Youtube Poop that mashed together several Shepard lines out of context.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Four novellas, two comics (plus two free mini-comics), and three spinoff iPhone games, so far.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Mark Meer originally auditioned simply to play various background characters throughout the franchise (which he still does, voicing all the vorcha and hanar, along with various other NPCs) and was surprised when the developers asked him to voice Male Shepard.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: All over the place. Seth Green, Adam Baldwin, Yvonne Strahovski, Tricia Helfer, Martin Sheen, Claudia Black, Carrie-Anne Moss... the list goes on.
• Channel Hop: Xbox Game Studios (then called Microsoft Game Studios) published the initial Xbox 360 version of the first game, but Electronic Arts published all subsequent entries in the franchise, starting with the first game's PC port.
• Creator Backlash: To say that Kai Leng is a...divisive character would be putting it mildly, but even his voice actor Troy Baker dislikes him.
  And they called me, they're like Hey, we've got a role for you, it was like I'm gonna be in Mass Effect!. And they're like This is the guy and I'm like ...I don't have to do this. I really don't. As an actor, it was great. But as a fan of the franchise, I, like, killed Thane, it was like, not...not good, dude. It was not good
• Flip-Flop of God: After the launch of 8th generation consoles, fans began requests for an Updated Re-release of the Shepard trilogy, which Bioware remained silent on but EA confirmed would not be happening due to their lack of interest in remasters. The latter has since changed their mind on the subject with the release of Burnout Paradise remastered, and Bioware would then announce the "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition" in late 2020.
• Inspired by…: Mass Effect's technological aesthetics, particularly of the omni-tools and Alliance armor, were heavily influenced by box office bomb Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The game's art director was a big fan of the movie's style.
• Long Runners: Fifteen years and counting, with four main games, eight episodic expansion packs,^note Bring Down The Sky, Pinnacle Station, Overlord, Lair of the Shadow Broker, Arrival, Leviathan, Omega, and Citadel all have two to six hours of single player content with their own stories, and usually new enemies and weapons/powers to go with them. Add smaller bits of single player DLC with less than two hours like Normandy Crash Site, Firewalker, Stolen Memory, Price of Revenge, and From Ashes, and you've got 25-30 hours total of extra single player content with dozens of new weapons, powers, and enemies - enough for two decent-sized expansion packs. two more-or-less independent multiplayer modes with their own mechanics and extensive unique content,^note Four free expansions were released for 3's, adding thirty playable characters, dozens of new weapons, dozens of powers, seven maps, and a new enemy faction a remaster of the first three games, and two IOS spin-offs, with at least one more main game planned for some time after 2021.
• Missing Episode: The Pinnacle Station DLC, which was released with the original Xbox 360 and PC release, has not been included in the PS3 port or the Legendary Edition remaster for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The reason for this was due to the source code of the DLC being lost. Modders were able to restore it for Legendary Edition on PC, albeit with some changes.^note Bug fixes, slightly decreased difficulty for Volcano Insanity Hunt, tweaking Survival and, most significantly, the lighting.
• No Port For You: Due to an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft (who published the first game on Xbox 360), the original Mass Effect couldn't release on PlayStation 3 until 2012, five years after it first launched.
• Plays Great Ethnics: In an inverse of the usual "White guy playing an ethnic dude," African-American voice actress Kimberly Brooks plays Ashley Williams, who is Hispanic (according to her main writer Patrick Weekes).
  • Taken up to eleven in the Blasto movie blip in the third game where every character is voiced by either Mark or Jennifer Hale, FemShep's voice actor.
• Teasing Creator: This bizarre tweet Bioware posted in January 2020. No context, just the intro of the first game.
• What Could Have Been: Has its very own page.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Different interviews with writers across the series reveals that many things about the series' overall plot and some bits of lore was more or less constantly in flux and changed around quite a bit as members of the writing team were added or left (most notably the lead writer for the first Mass Effect, Drew Karpyshyn, left around half-way through the production of the second game and was replaced by Mac Walters). According to interviews in the interactive documentary about the third game, Final Hours, the (quite controversial) ending was not decided upon up until a few months before the game's release.

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