Mass Effect Trivia
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100 free Mass Effect trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Mass Effect trivia questions with answers. Mass Effect is the space opera BioWare built for people who wanted their choices to matter, and this quiz assumes you kept your save files. Forty-two questions cover the original trilogy from Eden Prime to the Crucible: Commander Shepard and the two actors who voice them, the Normandy and its pilot, Garrus, Tali, Liara, Wrex, Mordin, Legion and Miranda, the Illusive Man and Cerberus, Saren and Sovereign, the Collectors and the suicide mission, the genophage, the Reapers' 50,000-year cycle, and the ending that had fans raising money for charity in protest. Andromeda, the Legendary Edition and the planned Amazon series get their turn too. Easy questions ask who develops the games and what the Reapers are; hard ones want Liara's age, the astronaut Shepard is named after, the DLC left out of the remaster and why. It suits anyone from a first-time Legendary Edition player to someone who has romanced every squadmate twice. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the games and characters, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Mass Effect, which rare substance lets starships and biotics raise or lower the mass of objects?
Element zero
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.
Q 02The first Mass Effect (2007) launched exclusively on which console?
Xbox 360
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.
Q 03What default first name does the female Commander Shepard carry in the Mass Effect trilogy?
Jane
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.
Q 04Mass Effect's Commander Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to do what?
Travel into space
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.
Q 05Which two actors voice the male and female versions of Shepard?
Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale
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.
Q 06Whose face was the default male Shepard modelled after?
Mark Vanderloo
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.
Q 07In Mass Effect, Shepard becomes the first human member of which elite agent force?
Spectres
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.
Q 08Who voices Jeff 'Joker' Moreau, pilot of the Normandy?
Seth Green
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.
Q 09In the first Mass Effect, which enormous warship serves as Saren's flagship?
Sovereign
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.
Q 10The first Mass Effect opens with a mission to recover a Prothean beacon from which human colony?
Eden Prime
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.
Q 11In Mass Effect's lore, how often do the Reapers return to wipe out advanced organic life?
Every 50,000 years
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.
Q 12In Mass Effect's backstory, humanity discovers that which real moon is actually a mass relay?
Charon
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.
Q 13What is the six-wheeled vehicle used to explore planets in the first Mass Effect called?
Mako
Q 21Garrus Vakarian belongs to which species?
Turian
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.
Q 22In Mass Effect 2, Garrus Vakarian is recruited under which vigilante alias?
Archangel
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.
Q 23Tali's people, the quarians, were driven from their homeworld by which race of their own creation?
The geth
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.
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.
Q 14On Virmire, Shepard must choose to save only one of which two squadmates?
Ashley or Kaidan
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.
Q 15The morality system in the Mass Effect trilogy uses which two labels?
Paragon and Renegade
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.
Q 16Which insectoid race is abducting entire human colonies in Mass Effect 2?
The Collectors
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.
Q 17What is the operation that brings Shepard back to life at the start of Mass Effect 2?
Lazarus Project
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.
Q 18Which actor voices the Illusive Man?
Martin Sheen
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.'
Q 19The Illusive Man leads which pro-human organisation?
Cerberus
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.
Q 20Miranda Lawson was modelled on and voiced by which actress?
Yvonne Strahovski
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'.
Q 24When Tali's face was finally revealed in Mass Effect 3, fans criticised it for being based on what?
A stock photo
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.
Q 25Liara T'Soni is 106 in the first Mass Effect yet barely an adult; roughly how many years do asari live?
1,000
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.
Q 26Liara is the estranged daughter of which powerful asari matriarch, who serves Saren in the first Mass Effect?
Benezia
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.
Q 27The genophage is an artificial plague that near-sterilised which species?
Krogan
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.
Q 28Which salarian scientist helped strengthen the genophage and later tries to cure it?
Mordin Solus
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.
Q 29In Mass Effect 2, the Normandy's salarian scientist sings an altered version of a song by which duo?
Gilbert and Sullivan
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.
Q 30In Mass Effect 2, the synthetic squadmate Legion is given its name by whom?
EDI
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.