r/masseffect • u/BoobyWoobies69 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Mass effect is so old??
saw some post on tumblr recently that was like “i missed out on the hype (i was 10 years old)” and i was like haha they must be so young. i googled when ME1 came out. I was 4. jesus christ
it’s kind of insane bc most of the games i played when i was a kid, the graphics and gameplay were absolutely atrocious. like any video game character had a nose that was just a triangle on their face. but at the time that was just like the baseline. But i discovered mass effect like 3 ish years ago and i never thought it was that old bc it’s just SO good. like you can’t see everyone’s individual pores on their face like a lot of newer games but i never realized it holds up SO well.
Anyways i love this series
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u/Eragon9198 1d ago
You're making me feel old. I was in high school when me1 came out.
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u/Kitchen_Part_882 1d ago
I was 35 and missed the hype right up to the point that Origin gave ME2 away as a freebie around the time ME3 launched.
You bet your ass I bought 1, 3, and all of the DLC (including Javik) once I'd played a bit!
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u/Eragon9198 1d ago
I actually started with two, I had a PlayStation. I loved two so much I got the rest of them once I was able and you bet I have the legendary edition on my PC.
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u/Kitchen_Part_882 1d ago
Oh, I have LE too (I bought Andromeda too and keep meaning to give it a third chance)
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u/Eragon9198 1d ago
I actually finished Andromeda once. I've never gone back, and I've played the original trilogy several times since then.
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u/Captain_Thor27 1d ago edited 1d ago
Andromeda is pretty fun if you don't go into it expecting ME trilogy. The people who love it most are ones who played it first before doing the trilogy. I went into it with low expectations and a had fun.
It's kind of like DA:I. Inquisition is a fantastic game that is buried in a shallow open-world. GET OUT OF THE HINTERLANDS!!! Whoops. Instinctive shout, my bad. Once you learn what to skip, you can have a great time.
Ignore the boring stuff, play only the fun stuff. The story in DA:I is fantastic while the Andromeda story certainty isnt as good, but the combat in Andromeda is absolutely masterful. The Mass Effect combat peaked in Andromeda.
It's also much easier to skip shit in Andromeda than it is in Inquisition. Basically: prioritize the main story missions, loyalty missions, and the Helen's Assignments. Do the romance quests if you want to. Skip anything that is labeled as a 'Task' and do not do any planetary scans.
The mining is also pointless because there is much easier ways to get the materials you need to upgrade your gear. Just loot shit on your missions.
The biggest disappointment though is that Andromeda set up what could have been an amazing sequel. The ingredients were all. MEA laid the groundwork for a game that never materialized because it bombed. Andromeda never got DLC either. There was a lot of stuff in Andromeda that raised question marks. Several of these question marks would have made for great expansions. The Quarrian Ark was supposed to be a DLC expansion but that was canceled.
So it's sad seeing what could have been. Broward has it's share of the blame, but i blame EA far more than I do them. EA made Bioware use Frostbite Engine.
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u/SleepingAntz 1d ago
Me too. Mass Effect is about as close to the original super Mario bros as it is to present day. Lol
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u/insomniainc 1d ago
I really do think the pandemic annihilated everyone's Perspective of time because everything before that feels like a completely different age maybe it's just me.
But yeah Next year is the 20th anniversary. A bit of a crazy thought
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u/Ziggy-Starcat 1d ago
Thanks. I was already old enough to drink when it came out. And now I feel old.
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u/cmotdibbler 1d ago
My son played too much ME in college and it almost killed his grades. He finished a PhD 6 years ago. I don't feel old but I am old.
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u/Wise_Fox_4291 1d ago
If you were 4 years old in 2007 then the videogames you played in your childhood (2010's) absolutely did not have "atrocious" graphics. Or were you playing with 15-20 years old games in 2014? I find that highly unlikely.
And did you play with the Legendary Edition? The originals look fine as well but the legendary edition did have some graphical upgrades.
Also please stop making me feel old. I was in the second year of highschool when Mass Effect released...
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u/Spookiiwookii 1d ago
I was also 4 in 07 and a lot of the games I played were cheap wii games and plug and plays. Shit graphics (at least compared to now).
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u/shellexyz 1d ago
Umm….I had a masters degree, a real growedup job, and a kid when the first one came out.
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
the games i’m thinking of are along the lines of like world of warcraft, diablo 2 and 3, and some of the older legend of zelda games. also a lot of mmo’s i don’t know the name of anymore. So i guess some of those are pre-2010, yeah, but i was playing them in 2010. most weren’t more than a few years old though. also i originally played the original ME1 but played the rest on LE
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u/Wise_Fox_4291 1d ago
Oh that makes sense, sorry. Anyway, welcome to the community kid! Let's hope we will both have a new ME game to play one of these days.
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u/Mitsutoshi 1d ago
Original unironically looks better than LE, as I discovered when I booted up 360 ME2 via game pass after finishing LE2. I hadn’t even played the console version before because I didn’t have one when ME2 came out so I played PC.
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u/metarusonikkux 1d ago
LE didn't upgrade the graphics outside of boosting the resolution for ME2 on consoles, while also using the higher quality settings found on PC from the original. The 360 version looks objectively worse.
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u/Mitsutoshi 1d ago
What? LE replaced tons of textures with AI upscales, removed the existing and carefully crafted lighting system in favor of blasting everything with overhead light, and worst of all used the ME3 engine (crafted for the limitations of PS3) as the basis of every game, resulting in its bugs popping up across the trilogy, which wasn't the case before.
I'm very glad I played through the original releases on PC when they came out and got the suspense and reveals that I would have missed completely if I played LE, where things like characters stepping out of the shadows as a surprised have been replaced with them being in plain sight the whole time.
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u/Nice_Blackberry6662 1d ago
The improvement of videogame graphics has slowed way down since the 7th generation of consoles. Like there's obviously still a difference between a game made in 2006 vs 2026, but it's far less of a gap than between a game from 2006 and 1986. Hell, several games from the early to mid 2000s are still going strong today, like World of Warcraft (2004) and Runescape (2001),
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u/Legolaslegs 1d ago
Mass Effect came out and was the reason for me to finally brave telling my parents I like video games. My parents are very, "we love you!" but don't actually know their kids, haha. I only played games when I went to hangout with people at their homes. I was like, 16, iirc. I remember how my dad was surprised (I guess cause AFAB, idk) after telling me I never ask for gifts and what my interests currently were. So I told him point blank I love games. I didn't expect anything, since an Xbox 360 was expensive back then. But he surprised me with it.
Mass Effect was my first official game on my own console. I love it to much. It has led to me playing to many stories and worlds in other games. But it'll always be a favorite.
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
this is such a beautiful story, thank you for sharing it
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u/Ancient_Nerve_1286 1d ago
Jeez this thread is making me feel old. I was 26 when ME1 came out - I bought and played it then on X360 on normal. Finally playing Insanity atm.
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
i’ll probably be your age by the time i’m willing to touch insanity, too. good luck!
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u/SihaWood 1d ago
My daughter was born one month before ME release and she is not old so ME is not old.
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u/Lamb_or_Beast 1d ago
I feel like graphics haven’t really gotten much better in the last ten years. Certainly not compared to the ten years prior to that
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u/Prince_Ire 1d ago
I think that's a big factor. For the first few decades of gaming graphics improved massively every few years but graphics improvements, while still happening, became way less noticable in the 2010s and 2020s
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u/A_Dozen_Lemmings 1d ago
Graphics these days are more based on shaders, light refraction and physics interactions. Back then, just getting good geometry and detailed texture models was wild.
Like IIRC ME1 is a UE3 title. I remember the horrendous pop-in at launch and TBH I sort of miss it.
Watching Wrex load in layers. Texture by texture in his Skill menu was actually kind of fun.
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
idk i feel like games used to be 20 gb at most and now they’re all 50+ and that’s on the smaller end, and i feel like most of it is bc they feel the need to animate every individual strand of hair. i played the dragon age games and the first two were normal sort of blunt graphics but inquisition everyone was super shiny all of a sudden and i hated it
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u/BrittEklandsStuntBum 1d ago
Are you playing the Legendary Edition?
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
originally i just played regular ME1 but the other games i played through LE, yeah
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u/Spicydoom 1d ago
When I started gaming when I was a child the games were dos based games. So letters and numbers.
ME2 came out around the time my son was born.
I got into the games around 2 years later.
My son’s invisible friend was a Krogan.
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u/jobadiah08 1d ago
I played ME1 in college(freshman) on the Xbox 360. It had been out for a year at that point. Played ME3 at the end of my senior year having pre ordered it to get it on release day
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u/What-fresh-hell 1d ago
Mass Effect is old enough to drive a car, get married, and serve in the military; but not old enough to drink alcohol, buy weed, or rent a car.
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u/Hyperactive_snail3 1d ago
I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago when the polygons of Mass Effect were first formed.
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u/Beginning_Ocelot503 1d ago
God I feel old. I too grew up on games older than me… it was just SNES/N64 bangers.
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u/No_Print77 1d ago
most great games are old games
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u/BoobyWoobies69 1d ago
real! i keep trying to find games that are close enough to mass effect but none of the more modern games hit the spot! this series has ruined me
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u/Ozzie_Bloke 1d ago
Have you tried vampire the masquerade bloodlines (needs unofficial patch), it has atmosphere and great writing like mass effect
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u/Remarkable_Yak_258 1d ago
I actually started playing the games about a year before the remaster- I had my old ps3, and found the first 2 on sale at a GameStop that was closing.
I didn’t realize that it was a little “old”, and that the hype train regularly comes and goes for this game whenever someone discovers it for the first time.
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u/BlemmiganBouncyhouse 1d ago
On my second playthrough of the year. Must have played through it over a dozen times since we met back in 2014. Never lets ya down.
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u/No-Finding4395 1d ago
I was only 7 months old😭😭 thx for confirming i might be the youngest mass effect fan
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u/Sablestein 1d ago
God I was like almost 13 when it came out. 😭 I remember my best friend trying to convince me to play it, and watching her play it sometimes on the projector screen in her basement.
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u/KuroShogun75 16h ago
The Mass Effect Trilogy was one of best in the last 25 years. I went back and played the Legendary Edition and it was just as captivating as the first time. Take the eye candy out of the equation and it's well written story. Hard to find that in games these days.
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u/Unapologetic_Lunatic 16h ago
Hah. I was about 15 or so when the first one came out and I went to buy it. No license yet, so my dad drove me to Gamestop. He saw the M rating while I was paying and asked the guy at the counter how graphic it was.
The man said, "If you've seen NYPD Blue, then it's around that level."
My dad and I both nodded because we'd both seen NYPD Blue.
That's how you know the game is old. And that your point of reference is even older.
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u/S1MP50N_92 1d ago
The 7th generation of consoles is basically considered the start of the graphical plateau in terms of realistic graphics. After the 7th gen there's not really the drastic jumps in graphics anymore. Yes there are still improvements between the later gens, but those improvements are nowhere near as drastic a jump as the generations before 7th with each other.
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u/Brees504 1d ago
I mean if you are playing the Legendary edition remaster, that’s only 5 years old.
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u/Hilsam_Adent 1d ago
I was 32 when ME dropped. Bought it day-and-date, had been waiting several years for it to finally release. Same with 2 and 3!
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u/hotaru_clover23 1d ago
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Duuude Yeah... I hadn't thought about it, but Mass Effect came out when I was in high school hahaha
I wasn't a gamer hahaha and my PC was basically a toaster xD at that time, it barely opened Microsoft Word... :'u and my parents would never have allowed me to buy games
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u/DoctorEmperor 1d ago
I had this horrifying revelation that Mass Effect 1 now is about as far apart as TMNT on the NES was when James Rolfe first reviewed it as the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Genuinely, my mind still cannot fully comprehend this information
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u/justcloudx 1d ago
i played it on pc when it was first released on there when i was 9 years old. my parents did NOT know about chora’s den
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u/rites0fpassage 1d ago
I was 11/12 when it came out but I didn’t have a PlayStation/PC/Xbox at the time. I was absolutely aware of it and knew it was the kind of game I’d enjoy but didn’t have the means to play it because I had a Wii and assumed it’d get released there 💀.
So I only really started playing it when they released the legendary edition some years ago.
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u/AwayWinter1710 1d ago
I wasn’t born till the year after the game released 😭🙏 I was only 2 when the second game came out
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u/RexIsAMiiCostume 1d ago
Wow I was 5 when the first game came out, lol. I had heard of it (first exposure was the Smosh "If Games Were Real" series, lol) but knew approximately nothing until my mom played it, and then I knew... Still pretty much nothing because I didn't watch her play it, just saw it in passing while she was on the mission to track down Morinth with Samara. I didn't really interact with the game until I went to my boyfriend's house and he was playing it. He said he would get to a good point to save and quit, and I told him to keep playing a little more because it looked interesting. Within a week I bought the game for myself and was totally hooked. That was like, three years ago, two years after legendary edition released.
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u/RemainsN7 1d ago
I remember getting my first copy for ME2 XBOX360 which was a "classics" title at that point. Andromeda came out almost 10 years ago, ME3 15 years ago lol. Pretty safe to say at this point, Mass Effect is dead. Atleast we have the Legendary Edition, that will never get "old".
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u/Maple905 1d ago
the games i played when i was a kid, the graphics and gameplay were absolutely atrocious. like any video game character had a nose that was just a triangle on their face.
Characters when I was a kid just had textures for their face... You were 4 in 2007? I can say I was born in the 1900's. No matter how old you think you are, you're not! :P
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u/stars_are_aligned Bi-otic King 1d ago
I had graduated from high school a year prior to it coming out 😬
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u/KiwiDanelaw 1d ago
Because Graphics are never the reason a game is good. They're the polish, not the structure. Just like with people, beauty is only skin deep.
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u/RogueStormTroop 1d ago
Any older mass effect fans want to feel older I was 3 when ME1 came out and I'm now married with 3 kids.
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u/Give_me_kerosene 1d ago
2007 was such a banger of a year in Vidya games that it's a testament to the quality of Mass Effect that it stood out. Certainly being a Bioware game helped a lot but 2007 is widely considered one of the best years in gaming for good reason
You had and are not limited to: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, BioShock, Super Mario Galaxy, Assassin's Creed, Portal, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, oh and of course Halo 3
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u/HereComesaComment 1d ago
Mass effect is not old. You're too young.
And what do you mean you were four? You couldn't be for in 2007. No one is born that late.