100 Fun Facts About Mass Effect

In Mass Effect, which rare substance lets starships and biotics raise or lower the mass of objects?

Element zero, nicknamed 'eezo', raises the mass of whatever sits in its field under a positive current and lowers it under a negative one, which is how the series' ships cheat their way past light speed.

The first Mass Effect (2007) launched exclusively on which console?

Xbox 360 had it alone at launch because Microsoft published the game; a Windows version followed in 2008, and PlayStation 3 owners had to wait until 2012.

What default first name does the female Commander Shepard carry in the Mass Effect trilogy?

Jane is the preset, though no character ever says it: the surname was fixed so that voiced dialogue could address a hero whose first name the player picks.

Mass Effect's Commander Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to do what?

Travel into space, in 1961: the writers wanted a common, all-American surname, looked through the original seven astronauts and felt the first one up suited a hero who breaks new ground for humanity.

Which two actors voice the male and female versions of Shepard?

Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale voice the two versions; Meer, a regular in the studio's bit parts, expected to play random aliens and assumed the lead would go to an actor from Los Angeles.

Whose face was the default male Shepard modelled after?

Mark Vanderloo was on the cover of a magazine left on an art director's desk; artist Derek Watts tried the photo on the unfinished hero, liked the less 'jock' look, and the Dutch model was scanned in.

In Mass Effect, Shepard becomes the first human member of which elite agent force?

Spectres, short for Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, are treated as above the law and answer only to the Citadel Council, which strips the traitor Saren of the rank before giving it to Shepard.

Who voices Jeff 'Joker' Moreau, pilot of the Normandy?

Seth Green voices the pilot in all three games; Joker was written with brittle bone disease, so the self-proclaimed best flier in the Alliance can barely walk and does his fighting from the cockpit.

In the first Mass Effect, which enormous warship serves as Saren's flagship?

Sovereign passes for an oversized dreadnought until it speaks to Shepard on Virmire and reveals itself as a Reaper, a living machine left behind to call the rest of its kind back to the galaxy.

The first Mass Effect opens with a mission to recover a Prothean beacon from which human colony?

Eden Prime's beacon fires a vision of war and death into Shepard's head, and much of the game goes on decoding it, first with a cipher gained on Feros and then with Liara's help.

In Mass Effect's lore, how often do the Reapers return to wipe out advanced organic life?

Every 50,000 years the machines sweep in, harvest every spacefaring civilisation and withdraw, leaving the mass relays behind so that the next ones grow up using technology the Reapers chose.

In Mass Effect's backstory, humanity discovers that which real moon is actually a mass relay?

Charon turned out to be a dormant relay cased in ice; switching it on, after clues from a Prothean cache on Mars, threw the rest of the galaxy open to human ships.

What is the six-wheeled vehicle used to explore planets in the first Mass Effect called?

Mako, the M35 infantry fighting vehicle, is built to be dropped from the air so that the Normandy never has to land under fire, and it carries small thrusters for low-gravity worlds.

On Virmire, Shepard must choose to save only one of which two squadmates?

Ashley or Kaidan: one goes with the salarian team, the other stays with the bomb, both end up pinned down, and whoever Shepard leaves behind dies when the base is destroyed.

The morality system in the Mass Effect trilogy uses which two labels?

Paragon and Renegade points open up extra 'charm' and 'intimidate' dialogue options, and the two are tallied on separate scales, so one kind act never wipes out a ruthless one.

Which insectoid race is abducting entire human colonies in Mass Effect 2?

The Collectors turn out to be what is left of the Protheans, the long-dead race whose ruins litter the first game, remade into slaves of the Reapers.

What is the operation that brings Shepard back to life at the start of Mass Effect 2?

Lazarus Project spent two years rebuilding the commander, who dies in the game's opening minutes when the first Normandy is destroyed and Shepard is blown out into space.

Which actor voices the Illusive Man?

Martin Sheen took the role to heart: told that players might tell the Illusive Man to take a flying leap, he objected, 'Oh no, they wouldn't say that.'

The Illusive Man leads which pro-human organisation?

Cerberus, named after the three-headed dog at the gates of Hades, is a rogue black-ops outfit in the first game's side missions, Shepard's paymaster in the second and the enemy in the third.

Miranda Lawson was modelled on and voiced by which actress?

Yvonne Strahovski lent Miranda her face as well as her voice, but not her hair: early designs were blonde like the actress until black was judged a better fit for a 'femme fatale'.

Garrus Vakarian belongs to which species?

Turian culture prizes discipline and obedience, which is why Garrus half-jokes that he isn't a very good one: he can't bring himself to follow a bad order.

In Mass Effect 2, Garrus Vakarian is recruited under which vigilante alias?

Archangel is the name Garrus takes to fight crime on a lawless space station; he hurts its three biggest mercenary gangs so badly that they join forces just to kill him.

Tali's people, the quarians, were driven from their homeworld by which race of their own creation?

The geth were built as labourers and slowly woke up; when one asked its owner whether it had a soul, the alarmed quarians tried to shut them all down and lost the war that followed.

When Tali's face was finally revealed in Mass Effect 3, fans criticised it for being based on what?

A stock photo of a model, edited to look slightly alien, was the keepsake picture Tali gives a romanced Shepard; the 2021 Legendary Edition replaced it with a new image.

Liara T'Soni is 106 in the first Mass Effect yet barely an adult; roughly how many years do asari live?

1,000 years or more, in three stages called Maiden, Matron and Matriarch; at 106 Liara is still in the first, yet she already holds a doctorate and is the crew's expert on the vanished Protheans.

Liara is the estranged daughter of which powerful asari matriarch, who serves Saren in the first Mass Effect?

Benezia joined Saren hoping to steer him onto a less destructive course and was enslaved by his flagship's mind control instead; Shepard has to fight her on Noveria.

The genophage is an artificial plague that near-sterilised which species?

Krogan were armed and uplifted to win one war, then multiplied until they started another; the salarian-made genophage ended that by making most of their pregnancies fail.

Which salarian scientist helped strengthen the genophage and later tries to cure it?

Mordin Solus took part in the secret mission that updated the genophage to keep it working; guilt over that drives him, in Mass Effect 3, to help cure the plague he once reinforced.

In Mass Effect 2, the Normandy's salarian scientist sings an altered version of a song by which duo?

Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Major-General's Song' becomes his boast about being a 'scientist salarian'; he says he once performed their work, and if he sang for Shepard he dies singing it in Mass Effect 3.

In Mass Effect 2, the synthetic squadmate Legion is given its name by whom?

EDI, the ship's AI, takes it from the Bible's 'My name is Legion, for we are many', a fit for one body that houses 1,183 separate programs.

The finale of Mass Effect 2, in which squadmates can permanently die, is popularly known as what?

The Suicide Mission can end with the whole team alive or the whole team dead, Shepard included; squadmates' loyalty, won in personal missions beforehand, helps decide who makes it.

Which game beat Mass Effect 2 to Game of the Year at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards?

Red Dead Redemption took Spike's top prize, though the same show named BioWare Studio of the Year; Mass Effect 2 later won Game of the Year from the industry's academy and Best Game at the BAFTAs.

In Mass Effect 3, what is the huge weapon built from plans found in a Prothean archive on Mars?

The Crucible was not purely a Prothean idea: its plans had been handed down and added to by cycle after cycle of doomed civilisations, none of which managed to use it.

The Prothean squadmate added to Mass Effect 3 via DLC is called what?

Javik is the only known Prothean survivor, woken from a stasis pod after outsleeping his entire civilisation; he joins the crew in the From Ashes pack, bent on revenge against the Reapers.

Which actress voices Aria T'Loak, the asari crime boss who rules Omega?

Carrie-Anne Moss, Trinity in The Matrix, plays the station's self-styled queen; by Mass Effect 3 Aria has been thrown off Omega, and a whole add-on is spent helping her take it back.

The 'Retake Mass Effect' protest against Mass Effect 3's ending raised tens of thousands of dollars for which charity?

Child's Play gives toys and games to children's hospitals; fans angry at the ending 'voiced their displeasure with their wallet', in one campaigner's words, passing $70,000 within two weeks of the game's release.

What did BioWare release in June 2012 in response to the backlash over Mass Effect 3's ending?

The Extended Cut DLC was free and changed none of the endings; it added scenes and epilogues showing what each one led to, plus a new option to refuse the final choice altogether.

Mass Effect: Andromeda followed the trilogy on shelves, but when in that story do its arks leave?

Between games two and three: the arks slip away in 2185, the year before the Reapers invade, so those aboard sleep through the trilogy's ending, and Andromeda never says how that war turned out.

In Mass Effect: Andromeda, the player's Scott or Sara Ryder takes on which title?

Pathfinder was their father's job: Alec Ryder gives up his own helmet to save the twin on a poisonous planet, dies, and hands on the role and his AI partner to a recruit with no training for it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda was built on which engine, forcing BioWare to rebuild its tools from scratch?

Frostbite 3 was made for EA's Battlefield shooters and could not track a party or an inventory, so BioWare had to build its role-playing systems afresh; the trilogy had run on Unreal Engine 3.

Which add-on for the first Mass Effect was left out of the 2021 Legendary Edition because its source code was corrupted?

Pinnacle Station was built by an outside studio, Demiurge, whose backups of the code turned out to be almost entirely corrupted; remaking it would have cost the remaster team another six months.

In November 2024, which company officially announced a Mass Effect television series was in development?

Amazon confirmed the series with the writer of Fast & Furious 9 attached; a film version, its rights bought by Legendary Pictures back in 2010, has never been made.

Which director, who had made Knights of the Old Republic, directed the original Mass Effect?

Casey Hudson pitched the series to BioWare's founders over lunch in 2003 under the codename SFX, asking them to commit to a whole trilogy set in a universe the studio would own outright.

Which animated film did Mass Effect's art director name as a big influence on its look?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within gave the artists their glowing computer displays and an early shape for the Normandy; art director Derek Watts kept a folder of its frames to send his team back to.

Which planet is the asari homeworld in Mass Effect?

Thessia falls to the Reapers while Shepard is on it in Mass Effect 3, during a mission to reach a Prothean artifact the asari had kept hidden there.

Which country briefly banned the first Mass Effect before allowing it with an M18 rating?

Singapore's censors objected to a love scene between a woman and a female-looking alien; a day after the ban was reported it was lifted, and the game went on sale with an adults-only M18 label.

Mass Effect 3's final ground battle is fought through the ruins of which city?

London is where the Reapers plant the beam that lifts their human harvest up to the Citadel, so the last push is a charge towards it; the game had opened with Shepard escaping Vancouver.

Which film composer joined four game-music veterans to score Mass Effect 3?

Clint Mansell, composer of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, was the score's one newcomer; Jack Wall, lead composer of the first two games, took no part in the third.

In Mass Effect 3, playing co-op matches raises 'Galactic Readiness' as part of which optional system?

Galaxy at War tied the co-op mode to the story: playing it raised a readiness rating, and that rating multiplied the strength of the forces Shepard had gathered for the final battle.

In Mass Effect: Andromeda, roughly how long do the colonists sleep on the voyage from the Milky Way?

600 years, or 634 by the calendar: the sleepers wake in 2819 to find that the promised 'golden worlds', scouted from afar before they left, have turned hostile in the meantime.

Which Apollo astronaut voices the Stargazer who retells Shepard's story as Mass Effect 3 ends?

Buzz Aldrin, the second person to set foot on the Moon, took the cameo; one alternative ending swaps him for a female Stargazer voiced by an actress.

Which US broadcaster wrongly claimed that the first Mass Effect featured full graphic sex?

Fox News aired the claim, and its guest critic admitted on air that she had not played the game. After watching it played for a couple of hours she took her comments back.

The synth-heavy music of the Mass Effect games is often likened to the score of which 1982 film?

Blade Runner's vintage synthesiser score was the model: the first game's composer paired synthesiser sounds of the late 1970s and early 1980s with organic instruments.

Shepard's pet space hamster in Mass Effect is a nod to Boo, from which older BioWare series?

Baldur's Gate had a party member, Minsc, who carried a miniature giant space hamster called Boo, and many of the trilogy's developers had worked on that fantasy series.

The first Mass Effect was often criticised for hiding its loading screens behind slow rides in what?

Elevators masked the loading in the 2007 original so often that the Legendary Edition remaster made a point of cutting the time spent inside them.

Mass Effect 3 opens with the Reapers attacking which city on Earth, where Shepard is being detained?

Vancouver was chosen because BioWare is a Canadian company and the city had just hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Why do the quarians of Mass Effect, such as Tali, live sealed inside environment suits?

Weak immune systems, worn down further by generations aboard the sterile Migrant Fleet, mean an infection that gets inside the suit can shorten a quarian's life.

In Mass Effect, what is the gradual mind control that Reapers exert over nearby organics called?

Indoctrination does severe and permanent mental damage, and it is how the Reapers made servants of both Saren and the Illusive Man.

Which star of the teen film She's All That voices marine James Vega in Mass Effect 3?

Freddie Prinze Jr. joined the cast for the third game as James Vega, and BioWare later cast him again as the Iron Bull in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

In Mass Effect 2, completing a squadmate's personal mission earns which status and a bonus power?

Loyalty also unlocks an alternate outfit and improves that squadmate's chances of surviving the game's final assault.

Which actor, also Halo's Arbiter, voices Shepard's mentor Anderson in the Mass Effect trilogy?

Keith David voices Anderson in all three games; film fans know him from Platoon and They Live, and as Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog.

Which Mass Effect class combines the offensive powers of the Soldier and the Adept at close range?

Vanguard players close on enemies quickly, and their biotic charge strikes a target with enough force to start the fight at point-blank range.

Which publisher announced it was buying BioWare in 2007, weeks before the first Mass Effect went on sale?

Electronic Arts paid 775 million dollars for the holding company that owned both BioWare and Pandemic Studios.

The original Mass Effect trilogy runs on which licensed software, also used for Gears of War?

Unreal Engine 3 was licensed from Epic Games and paired with a framework BioWare built specifically for the Mass Effect games.

Which Mass Effect device appears as an orange hologram over the user's forearm when activated?

Omni-tool fabricators can also assemble small objects on the spot, including a flash-forged weapon for melee attacks.

In Mass Effect, victims impaled on spikes nicknamed dragon's teeth turn into which creatures?

Husks stay on their spikes until someone comes close, then drop and attack, which is how marines trying to recover their dead get ambushed.

In the first Mass Effect, the Conduit leads Shepard to a Citadel relay long mistaken for what?

A statue is what it passed for: the Relay Monument was taken for a piece of Prothean art, while the Conduit on the lost world of Ilos was its hidden other end.

Which arid homeworld can the quarians of Mass Effect 3 retake after nearly three centuries in exile?

Rannoch orbits an older star in the Tikkun system, and for many quarians winning it back is a physical necessity as much as a cultural one.

Which Reaper, waiting in dark space with its fleet, directs the colony abductions of Mass Effect 2?

Harbinger can possess individual enemy troops to fight Shepard in person, though the body it takes over always disintegrates when beaten.

Liara T'Soni hunts down, and then replaces, which unseen figure in a major Mass Effect 2 add-on?

The Shadow Broker is revealed to be a yahg, one of a pre-spaceflight species whose homeworld had been declared off limits.

Which six-wheeled rover carries the Ryder twins across open worlds in Mass Effect: Andromeda?

Nomad rovers have no mounted guns, largely because the Andromeda Initiative was a peaceful exploration project bound by limits on civilian arms.

Which artificial intelligence in Mass Effect: Andromeda talks to the Ryder twins through an implant?

SAM is short for Simulated Adaptive Matrix, and the twins' father, Alec Ryder, designed it himself.

Which kett leader hunts the vault-controlling Meridian as the villain of Mass Effect: Andromeda?

The Archon dies when the Ryder twins cut him off from Meridian, though a post-credits scene shows his second-in-command still watching it.

Which space station is the seat of government for the colonists of Mass Effect: Andromeda?

The Nexus is still unfinished when the human ark reaches it, and its leaders admit that every promised world has turned out inhospitable.

Which Game of Thrones actress voices Lexi T'Perro, the crew's doctor in Mass Effect: Andromeda?

Natalie Dormer, the show's Margaery Tyrell, voices the asari medic who keeps watch over the health of everyone aboard.

Which Mass Effect rite of passage sends quarians like Tali off to find something of value?

The Pilgrimage ends when the returning quarian offers the find as a gift to a new ship's captain, proving they will not be a burden on its scarce resources.

Which Mass Effect 2 add-on has Shepard crash an asteroid into a relay to delay the Reaper invasion?

Arrival was the last add-on released for the second game and a bridge to the third, and Shepard fights almost all of it without a squad.

What let PlayStation 3 players of Mass Effect 2 make the first game's major story decisions?

An interactive comic called Genesis retold the first game's plot and let newcomers settle six of its major decisions before the sequel began.

Liara T'Soni, the asari who joins Shepard's squad in the first Mass Effect, works in which profession?

Archaeologist is how she starts out, a researcher of ancient ruins; by Mass Effect 3 she makes her living trading in secrets instead.

Which Mass Effect squadmate can be shot dead on Virmire in a standoff over a cure for the genophage?

Urdnot Wrex survives only if Shepard talks him down, and if he lives he goes on to lead his clan in the sequel.

What does the Normandy launch at mineral deposits in the planet-scanning minigame of Mass Effect 2?

A probe goes down whenever an oscilloscope warns of resources nearby, and critics complained about how slow the whole scanning routine was.

N7 Day, BioWare's annual Mass Effect celebration, takes its name from what on Shepard's armour?

A special forces rating is what N7 is: the N denotes special forces and the 7 the highest level of proficiency, and the day falls on 7 November to match.

Which part of Mass Effect 3 was cut from the Legendary Edition remaster as too complex to rebuild?

Multiplayer was dropped to protect the schedule, and the remaster was rebalanced so that the story no longer leans on it.

At the climax of Mass Effect 3, the Catalyst appears to Shepard as a translucent projection of what?

A young boy is the form it picks, copied from one Shepard saw killed during the invasion of Earth, and it claims to have created the Reapers.

Which actor, the android Bishop in Aliens, voices Admiral Hackett across the Mass Effect trilogy?

Lance Henriksen voices Hackett, the commanding officer of the Fifth Fleet and one of the three officers who put Shepard forward for elite service.

Which assassin, the Illusive Man's most trusted agent, duels Shepard with a sword in Mass Effect 3?

Kai Leng began as a villain of the tie-in novels, first appearing in Mass Effect: Retribution, before the third game made him a recurring boss.

Which former human ambassador to the Citadel leads a coup against the Council in Mass Effect 3?

Donnel Udina spends the trilogy at odds with Shepard and Anderson, and he can end the first game as humanity's first Councilor.

Which ring of Mass Effect's Citadel, landscaped as parkland around a lake, houses the embassies?

The Presidium even runs a day-night cycle with six hours of darkness, and at its heart stands the tower where the Council meets.

The original Mass Effect trilogy was led by BioWare's home studio in which Canadian city?

Edmonton, Alberta, is BioWare's original home base, whereas Mass Effect: Andromeda was handed to a newer team in Montreal.

Which lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games also wrote the prequel novel Revelation?

Drew Karpyshyn wrote the scenario and much of the dialogue for Knights of the Old Republic before turning to Mass Effect and its tie-in novels.

Which composer of BioWare's Jade Empire went on to score the first two Mass Effect games?

Jack Wall was picked for his range of styles, and for the sequel he aimed at a darker, more mature sound to match the mood of the game.

Which IGN host lent her voice and likeness to war correspondent Diana Allers in Mass Effect 3?

Jessica Chobot's character asks to come aboard the Normandy as an embedded journalist, and Shepard can pursue a romance with her.

In Mass Effect 2, an advert promotes an all-elcor production of which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet delivered in the flat, ponderous monotone of the elcor is a running gag, and the advert pays homage to a Star Trek VI joke about Shakespeare in Klingon.

The Thorian, which enslaves the Feros colonists in the first Mass Effect, is what kind of being?

A sentient plant at least fifty thousand years old, the Thorian can hibernate for millennia and sees other thinking beings only as potential slaves.

Mass Effect: New Earth opened at California's Great America in 2016 as what kind of attraction?

A motion simulator ride with 80 seats and a 60-foot 3D screen, it launched with a live actor playing Conrad Verner, Shepard's most obsessive fan.

Which Mass Effect novel had so many continuity errors that BioWare and the book's publisher apologised?

Deception, the fourth novel and written by William C. Dietz, prompted fans to compile shared documents listing scores of its slips.

In Mass Effect's backstory, which human colony fell to an orbital siege in the First Contact War?

Shanxi was the closest colony to the relay where the fighting began, and its starving garrison surrendered after a long blockade from orbit.

Which Canadian band's song M4, Part II plays over the closing credits of the first Mass Effect?

Faunts came back for the finale: another of their songs, Das Malefitz, plays during the closing credits of Mass Effect 3.

In Bring Down the Sky, Mass Effect's first add-on, extremists aim an asteroid at which colony?

Terra Nova has no natural satellites, and the hijacked asteroid, X57, had been planned as an artificial one before it was turned into a weapon.

Which Sirta Foundation product heals wounded squadmates in the field in Mass Effect?

Medi-gel combines an anaesthetic with a clotting agent, and it stays in use even though it ostensibly falls foul of the Council's laws on genetic modification.