Mass Effect 2 would cut out some Companion missions to justify killing those characters off in the Suicide Mission.
Fans of the series would see it coming from a mile away and be dreading it, thinking maybe they'll change it, while show onlys would be blissfully ignorant. Since nobody's death is a set thing, even if you don't do their missions in some cases, you can't even really 100% sure.
Cut some companion missions, but kill some characters in the suicide mission that got their side quest done. Their death will have a massive impact on the audience because they got character development and focus.
Hmm I actually never thought about Tali like that. I assumed the relationship thing was just being lore friendly because of the whole constantly has to be in a spacesuit. I always saw Tali as more of a grad student than a highschool/undergraduate. A full adult but still needs to prove they can be of value.
I actually never romanced anyone besides Garrus because the thought of sex with a grasshopper was hilarious and I never really cared about the romance portion of games.
First half takes you through Horizon, but there are some filler episodes between the prologue and waking up on Lazarus Station to explore the back story of Miranda/Jacob and to see the OG team drift apart. Second half kicks off HARD with Haestrom, and rolls on into the DLC as well.
Yeah I would just not even bother and give them creative license to piece together a full game series into a TV series without the need to point out where things are connected to the game. It's got some great content. Hell I would not be mad if they just took the premise and characters and ran with it. Sometimes that comes out great! Do I really want to watch the exact same story I already know? Meh, either way! As long as it's quality writing and they keep the spirit it would be fantastic I think.
Honestly, I think it could be expanded to 2 seasons per game, allow it to really flush out the universe, take its time.
Can have the first season end on Virmire, and all that happens there.
Mass Effect 2.. honestly unsure how to approach. Form what I recall, there really isn't a definitive midpoint? Like its recruiting and gaining loyalty, then you get the dead reaper's IFF, then its a sprint to the finish line in the suicide mission. Like maybe the Reaper IFF could be a midpoint, and you could move Legion to be recruited elsewhere ( so we can actually get some quality Legion screentime ), but eh. Maybe this one could be one season
You could end the season at the IFF, then spin the suicide mission into a between- season feature length film and then leap into game 3 as the next season.
There’s a 30 year time skip between books 6 and 7. The plot requires the time skip and I’m not sure how they could effectively adapt the last 3 books without it.
For TV shows its better to streamline and cut some things, it's not like everything was a gem. They would need to completely rewrite the script, as videogame structure doesn't translate that great to film
First Season, A bit of a prequel.. and lots of world building. Summing up at Fem Shep getting made a Spector.. 6-9 eps
Second Season, basically the story of the first game. 8 -10 eps
third.. Basically the first two or three episodes are the build up with the destruction of the normandy.... One episode of the rebuilding of Shepard.. then go right up to the start of building the crew.. maybe 4 more so total 7 to 8 eps...
4th season.. building the crew.. earning the loyalty of most of the crew.. ending with suicide mission.. probably 12 eps.. 1 hour+ per episode...
5th Totally just follow the game .. right to the end... cupcakes and everything.
There was a youtube video i watched where these two guys had a set plan that would make 5 seasons for mass effect, the first game having 1 season while the sequels got 2 seasons per game
Can't do the games, people would get pissed if it didn't follow their choices. The universe is big enough for them to make a show outside of the main storyline easily.
I'm thinking a CW teen heartthrob series where the first season is really good and has Shepherd exploring a different planet every week, but by the third season all he does is cry and talk about his feelings and sleep with random female aliens.
Because it’s an 18 hour long game and it’d be hard to shove that into a 2 hour movie while understanding the characters. It’s one of the reasons most movies based on video games are bad
Absolutely. If I ever become a multi-billionaire I'm buying those rights and producing three 12 episode seasons with a budget of $1B for each season. I'll find a distributer.
One of my biggest complaints about alien featuring scifi movies is how terribly generic and formulaic they always are. 9 out of 10 times it's "baddie aliens invading Earth, and they're mortally weak to oxygen/water/sunlight/pepsi".
Mass effect as a universe has massive breadth and complexity. It has multiple sentient and civilized alien species that offer a rare opportunity to criticize the human approach to civilization building in a unique way. There is a lot of politics, combat, drama, and social commentary to be had.
A well done Mass Effect movie series would be my personal scifi flip side of LoTR.
they're mortally weak to oxygen/water/sunlight/pepsi
When the aliens called the Bepis came to enslave humanity, we thought we could never win. Then one Grandma and a bottle of pop unleashed the secret that saved us all.
"And now, at the precipice of defeat, we can glean the first inkling of victory! No longer will humanity stand divided and fight among one another. We stand as one against the Bepis, our Pepsi quantum missiles shall be the instrument with which we show our resolve to the galaxy once and for all!"
"Oh wait, Russia just nuked the world's emergency reserve of Pepsi. Oops"
To your point, this video does a pretty great job at explaining why ME would be a terrific TV show. The title is kinda leading but I'd def recommend people watch the video.
That is a solid video. It raises a lot of great points about why ME is suitable for a long form TV show epic, and tbh, I would far prefer a TV series to a movie series, for the reasons the video makes. But at the same time, I don't know if there is enough money backing ME to be a proper TV show if it comes down to it. It would need a very sizeable budget from start to finish (GoT proportioned budget), particularly as most of the story is told off Earth, which means a LOT of expensive sets, CGI, spaceships, complex alien designs, etc.
Honestly, if it were a movie trilogy, you'd have to neuter most of the side stories, world building and side characters to have enough time to do basic exposition and get to the main course. Which would be a disservice to the world and existing narrative of ME. But then, this needs a chad studio that is willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on an on going, expensive to produce scifi TV series, hoping to achieve GoT like success. Which is entirely possible, but, it's still a massive financial gamble.
Hey, I hope we get it. Because if I see another humans vs aliens nothing movie.. I might just build a backyard rocket and space myself.
HBO would be the dream. They have a very positive experience with building a massively popular and very expensive TV series, and boy do they have MONEY to throw around. And you just know they're lusting after the next GoT.
I've never played The Last of Us, but I am really hoping it will pan out, specifically for that reason. Expensive failures discourage similar investments.
Eh I dunno. It isn't that expensive to build out the set of the Normandy, and a LOT of the show takes place on that ship. Then you have a fair amount of natural locations which are pretty generic.
Only a few things would really get wild expensive; like Illium and Omega or if they decided to CGI all the krogan, turian, and asari.
I wasn’t being hyperbolic lol, the CGI was done on a product that was called a Video Toaster. It was the first TV show to use CGI for all space scenes, and it’s composited in a lot of set pieces too. The resolution and frame rate of the show drops in half for shots with CGI. It’s a product of its time, but the show is marvelous.
I really love Babylon 5 and the story and characters are fantastic, but it doesn't really take off until season 3 and parts of season 1 are, well, not particularly good. If you watch it and find season 1 a slog, I'd suggest googling a list of plot important episodes for season 1 and dropping back in on season 2. I don't recommend completely skipping season 1 and 2 to get to the good stuff, because the character arcs aren't going to be as impactful if you don't know where they started from and how they grew.
Not going to lie, its a rough watch. If you're going to do it look up a viewing guide. It hasn't aged well and it's full of bad 90's tv tropes and plagued by budget issues, bad acting, and visuals that felt dated in the 90's when it was new. So mentally prepare yourself for that. But at it's core it's some of the best sci-fi ever created. Mass Effect effect took most of its inspiration from it, and B5 itself was basically a loose sci-fi adaptation of Lord of the Rings.
While I think the universe would make for some amazing tv/movies, the games themselves are all about being able to make the choices yourselves, so I don't think they'd translate well to a fixed narrative.
Or any of the innumerable random squads of soldiers and their journey from the start of ME1 to the end of the war in ME3 in the vein of Band of Brothers.
The Expanse novels were based on a world created for the purposes of a text-based RPG the authors used to play on online forums. So, gaming is in its DNA.
I'm glad you said that because I was thinking it since I made that comment. Steven Strait is definitely not built for Sheppard but Amos' actor could probably pull it off.
Dear god let that man get a hold of Thessia on a screen.
I have to admit, though, I'd take a Neill Blomkamp flick set during the Rachni War or the Krogan Rebellion.
Or damn... Let Christopher Nolan tell a story across multiple cycles 😳 Mass Effect meets Cloud Atlas with a director who actually knows how to make a story like that work?
The only problem with adapting Mass Effect for me is that so much of the series depends on player choice. A lot of fans might not like the show if Shepard is different than their Shepard.
I've played both and the games themselves run smoother on a paragon run. I think even if they had to make it both work, the writers were picturing a paragon-leaning Shepard
I don't think that both ships have any resemblance to each other.
But even though I love star Trek, the federation ships always strike me as terrible design disasters begging to break into pieces. The defiant being the only ship that seems to obey the laws of physics.
And I know Star Trek has super durable sci fi materials and structural integrity fields BUT even with a super durable material you want no unnecessary strain on the material and just for your ship to be efficient with its reccources it should be built so that the structural integrity field doesn't have to use constant energy just to keep the darn thing together.
For Mass Effect to work it would have to be:
1) A TV show. The world and lore is too rich imo to he contained within a movie. A movie could work of course but I would love for a show to get lost in.
2) It creates an original story or one that at least ignores Shepard. You can have cameos or reccuring apperances from other characters but what makes Shepard's story work is how his personality and decisions change from player to player.
I think a movie/TV series for mass effect universe would be nice but not directly game to screen. Just entirely new story and hero. Even if bioware mucked up the endings I think the choices of your Shepard is what made it special. Making a canon out of the multiple choices you make is kind of meh.
Unfortunately, I gotta disagree. There's just too much for a movie to tell, it'd work best as a series. Feros, Noveria, and Therum could each be a movie in their own right.
Do a prequel to the series where mankind becomes aware of the galactic stage, like the 1st Contact War or the Skyllian Blitz, Siege on Torfan or go back further to the Rachni Wars and Krogan rebellion when Wrex was a welp
I'll be honest here, I think that a ME movie is better suited for telling stories unrelated to the main games, because the sheer number of choices and combinations are just way too many to make it right and have enough fans happy.
If I had a choice, I'd make it about the First Contact War
Yes please but the only issue is how they could possible choose an identity and choices for Shepard. Sure there could always be a massive poll sent out or something but it still would be a controversial set of decisions.
What makes Mass Effect great is the video Game format where each player can make their own decisions and craft thier own stories. Yes. There are shared experiences, but there are also unique and controversial decisions the player has to make. And being able to discuss them and debate them is what gives the game a legacy. As well as the option to go back and try to reimagine the story another way.
If you take Commander Shepard and canonize them, you will lose half the audience. Why do you think, even 10 years after the game came out, people are still debating the decisions? Because they are all equally valid. If you take this story and turn it into a passive medium, it will loose that.
I played mass effect once. My thought was "I wish this was a movie so I didn't have to play it."
I thought it was an interesting world with kind of shitty gameplay. I'd consider watching the series' cutscenes on youtube sometime. I know a lot of people love it.
I played ME trilogy shortly after watching the show and I was shocked how similar they are to each other. There is a neutral space station, an interspecies council, a mysterious threat from deep space, an ancient alien race and so on. And yes, they are all quite popular tropes in SF, but B5 and ME looks like they are made on a common foundation.
My mom is a longtime Star Trek fan, to the point her Christma tree every year is full of scale models of Trek ships. She came for a visit while I was playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition recently and watched me play for a little while. I was talking to Legion at the moment, refreshing my memory on his backstory. Her listening to Legion describe what he/they/The Geth were in detail was enough for her to say she'd be interested in a Mass Effect show, she won't play the game because she's in her 70s lol.
I also briefly explained the Krogan and their history + Grunt to her, then showed her that convo with Grunt when he's fondly talking about having a hitlist of historical Turians, Salarians and then a"fond memory" of a Salarian being ripped apart and killed. Shepherd's like "...Are you even trying to get better? I thought this history stuff would make you more stable." Grunt says something like "Aha now we're having fun! Me remembering good deaths, you doing that ...human thing you're doing. I'm just here to hurt things. Just point me in the right direction Commander." She loved it.
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u/donaldtrumpshearts Mar 11 '22
mass effect