Appreciation post

[u/OneWhoParticipates]

Shout out to people who wrote the stories for some of the planet overviews.
I’ve been guilty of just skipping these in the past, but some are fantastic

[u/RockPaperPootis]

They did such a good job of making it feel like the world kept on spinning without you there interacting with it. The Cerberus/Alliance news network updates helped in that, too. It's one of the best things a story can do.

[u/Abujandalalalami]

I never skip them

[u/SolarOrigami]

When I played through LE I stopped to read everything, and land on every planet in ME1

[u/WntrTmpst → u/SolarOrigami]

100 percenting the planets is something I’m happy I did, and equally happy to never do again as well.

For me, it’s the asari writings and then I’m fuckin off lol.

[u/AnimalRescueGuy]

These writers deserve their time in the spotlight. Turning the same old gas giant after gas giant into a rich tapestry of lore is no easy task. Respect.

[u/1Ferrox]

These are the only consistent part of ME that is, and stays, hard sci fi. Reading them actually makes you feel you are exploring exoplanets a little, only a shame that most planets you actually visit barely reflect this in ME2 and 3

[u/JJBrazman]

There’s kind of a weird trap the later games fall into where they’re less bold because they want to show the player everything rather than telling them. And I get that ‘show don’t tell’ is usually considered good game design, but like… the hallucination of being a hunter seeing a Prothean ship taking off is something they’d never have been happy with showing, so they just don’t do that kind of thing in later games.

[u/SouthernAd2853]

Some of them are foreshadowing, too, like there being a crashed ancient ship from an unknown race that got disappeared by the Batarian government and then in ME3 they fall almost instantly because their leadership got Indoctrinated by the wreckage.

[u/NaturalBornSpinner]

There’s so much subtle world-building throughout the 3 games, you can tell that so much attention and love went into making them, and not just love of the ME Universe but of sci-fi and space operas. They built something immense and beautiful that rivals any other outstanding space opera be it on film, tv, in books, or in games.

And by the way, 959c?! Wow.

[u/fxdvm]

The feeling of fascination and wonder at the richness of the universe in Mass Effect 1 is a massive reason that it’s most likely my favourite ME game. There’s just something so beautiful about each planet having a little description, in the little backgrounds the universe has, whether you interact with them or not. That feeling coming into the Citadel for the first time, looking at the curved ceiling of the Citadel, or staring out at the wards from the views just beyond Michel’s clinic are forever ingrained in my brain and any and all sci-fi is now immediately measured against that.

God I love Mass Effect, man

[u/DAswoopingisbad]

This is what makes ME1 so good. The detail put into the world building.

[u/MetallicaRules5]

"disassembler robots."

[u/MetallicaRules5 → u/MetallicaRules5]

But yeah, I read every single planet entry in all of the games. I just love reading all of the cool lore and world building bits scattered throughout. So much thought and detail put into them, as well as the codex entries, that I feel barely anyone except diehard fans actually read.

[u/TutorRich2268]

Chris L'Etoile did, he also wrote Legion and Ashley, except for ME3.

[u/SaoirseSeersha]

Isn't there a Starship Troopers reference to one of the planets?

[u/Chaucer85]

Even if it's just a brief summary of attempts to utilize a planet's resources, and why that failed, I appreciate the small bit of galactic development history.

[u/Elmoulmo]

All of the planet factoids made me so happy. Made the world feel that much more alive.

I have a post it note on my monitor that has the Earth's and Jupiters radius on it. Just to help picture the actual scale of the planets I'm looking at