And of course, it limits the demands on the development teams and hardware, or it allows developers to channel resources into other aspects of the game. It reduces the desire and the capacity to fill the game world with extraneous content. It enables the writers to pace the narrative around several clear choke points, usually mapping the transition between hubs to something like the classic three-act narrative structure. It’s possible to introduce varied locations without having to worry about seamlessly integrating them into each other. The hub world approach offers clear benefits. But it also worked in numerous other highly regarded RPGs that preceded it: Diablo II, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, and Deus Ex, to name only a few. It’s an approach that worked for BioWare before in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which in many ways feels like a proof of concept for Mass Effect. That is - provide the player with a relatively small hub world that contains a bunch of quest givers, and have the player venture out of that hub into a limited surrounding area to complete the quests before moving on to another hub. BioWare delivered them with unprecedented cinematic flair, largely thanks to Mass Effect’s innovative and now often-imitated dialogue selection wheel, but they still follow a classic approach to RPGs. Rather, I am nostalgic for the main and side quests that occur on the Citadel, Noveria, Feros, and a few other key locations. The game box marketing promised “interplanetary exploration of an epic proportion,” but in reality most planets were just collections of well-written flavor text – they could not be landed on or otherwise explored. Even at the time of release Mass Effect was criticized for its cut-and-paste planet design, exhausting resource collection tasks, and overly long rides in a bouncy surface vehicle (which has been partially fixed in the remaster). This might imply that Mass Effect was a perfectly paced, lean, and tightly structured RPG. But mostly the warm feeling is because the Mass Effect galaxy menu reminds me of a simpler time for RPGs – a time before seemingly obligatory open-world maps bloated with collectibles and generic side tasks. After so many years and several replays, this somehow feels like my own personal Mass Effect, and I am pleased that it stands up well in 2021. It’s also partly an odd sense of pride that this remaster of a 14-year-old game looks and plays better than 2017’s ill-fated Mass Effect: Andromeda.

No doubt the warm feeling I get is partly a response to the familiar Tangerine Dream-esque synths that play in the galaxy menu. A few hours into BioWare’s Mass Effect Legendary Edition, I walk Commander Shepard up to the galaxy map on the bridge of her ship for the first time.

Mass effect 1 maps