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Mass Effect is a military science fiction media franchise created by Casey Hudson. The franchise depicts a distant future where humanity and several alien civilizations have colonized the galaxy using technology left behind by advanced precursor civilizations. The franchise originated in a series of video games developed by BioWare and originally published by Microsoft Game Studios on the first two games and its expansions. Later on, the series was taken over by Electronic Arts. Each installment is a third-person shooter with role-playing elements. The first three games form a trilogy in which the player character, Commander Shepard, attempts to save the Milky Way galaxy from a race of ancient, hibernating machines known as the Reapers. The inaugural video game in the series, Mass Effect (2007), follows Shepard's investigation of Saren Arterius, one of the Reapers' agents. Mass Effect 2 (2010) begins two years later and sees Shepard's forces battling the Collectors, an alien race abducting human colonies to facilitate the Reapers' return. The original trilogy's final installment, Mass Effect 3 (2012), depicts a war between the Reapers and the rest of the galaxy. A fourth game, Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), featured a new setting and cast of characters, and a fifth is in active development. The original trilogy was met with commercial success as well as universal acclaim. Critics praised the game's narrative, characters, voice acting, world building, and emphasis on player choice. The ending of Mass Effect 3 drew widespread criticism for being an unsatisfying conclusion to the trilogy, prompting Electronic Arts to release an expanded cut with additional cutscenes. Mass Effect: Andromeda received mixed reviews. Praise was directed at the game's visuals and combat, but the game drew criticism for technical issues and its plot. The series has generated attention and discussion about its representation of same-sex relationships and sexual minorities. It also originated the dialogue wheel, a mechanic similar to dialogue trees, enabling players to dynamically steer conversations by selecting from a number of preset choices; the feature has seen widespread use in other role-playing video games. The success of the video game series spawned adaptations in other media, including novels, comics, and an animated film. Setting The Mass Effect original trilogy takes place in the Milky Way towards the end of the 22nd century. In 2148, humanity discovered an alien outpost on Mars, and learned that Charon is actually an alien artifact known as a "mass relay" that enables faster-than-light travel to other mass relays located across the galaxy. These discoveries drastically increased the enhancement rate of humanity's technology. Humanity comes into contact with numerous other space-faring alien species, some far more advanced than humans. Humanity's first encounter resulted in the First Contact War, but the Council, a ruling body for the galaxy, intervened to achieve peace and welcomed humanity. The main species encountered by humanity include the asari, a species of mono-gendered beings closely resembling human women; the salarians, an amphibious species with considerable technological and intellectual prowess and an extremely high metabolism; and the turians, a heavily militaristic race of raptor-like avian humanoids who fought humanity in the First Contact War. The center of the Council's governing power is the Citadel, another artifact and a massive space station that, like the mass relays, were made by a race known as the Protheans believed to be the progenitor race for all species but long since disappeared. Over the next few decades, humanity is given access to new technology, allowing them to colonize new planets, and they are made part of the Citadel Security (C-Sec) forces, a highly regarded position that other species had been long waiting for and take resentment over. Numerous other inter-species conflicts remain active at the time of the first game, results of past wars and conflicts. The first three games center on the character of Commander Shepard (whose gender and personality are determined by the player), a leading Special Forces soldier in Earth's Systems Alliance space force, the Systems Alliance Navy. After an Earth colony discovers a new Prothean artifact, it is attacked by an unknown vessel, and the Council names Shepard its first human SPECTRE (Special Tactics and Reconnaissance), an elite agent with associated authority and impunity, to investigate the incident. Shepard comes in contact with the artifact and has a vision of war and death across the galaxy. Following their vision, Shepard discovers that the strange craft is one of thousands of artificial lifeforms called Reapers, and learns that every fifty-thousand years, the Reapers scour the Milky Way and eliminate all higher forms of life, leaving the younger species to advance and thrive until the next cycle as to prevent constant war and chaos, part of what the Protheans had left behind along with their artifacts. The appearance of the Reapers in this cycle is being manipulated by numerous forces, including a human-centrist terrorist organization known as Cerberus led by the Illusive Man who believe they can control the Reapers and use them for humanity's benefit. Shepard and their allies discover the Citadel is key to ending the Reapers' cycle and determining the fate of the galaxy. The fourth game takes place in the Heleus Cluster of the Andromeda galaxy, 634 years after the events of its predecessor. In the midst of events of the first three games, the combined races of the Milky Way sent a number of ships to Andromeda to establish the Nexus, a space-borne operations base and a number of colonies to accept future colonists once contact is established. After over 600 years of travel in cryogenic stasis, they arrive to find the Heleus Cluster in brutal conflict between two native races: the Kett, a barbaric race obsessed with assimilating the traits of other sentient species through a process known as "exaltation"; and the Angara, an emotionally charged humanoid species whose civilization has recently been targeted and nearly decimated by the Kett. The Heleus Cluster is also the location of a series of ruins predating an advanced, spacefaring race known as the Jardaan. The Jardaan made use of powerful terraforming technologies to colonize worlds in the Heleus Cluster, which was otherwise extremely hazardous and naturally unsustainable for life. They later fled from the Heleus Cluster three centuries before the arrival of the Milky Way races, when a protracted battle against an unknown enemy faction resulted in the usage of a weapon of mass destruction aboard a Jardaan space station. The weapon's activation unleashed a cataclysmic energy phenomenon known as the Scourge, which spread across the cluster and greatly damaged the Jardaan's terraforming systems. After the Jardaan left, the Angara, genetica.... Discover the Drew Karpyshyn William C Dietz popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Drew Karpyshyn William C Dietz books.