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Comment by bananarepdev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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