I live down the street from the male voice actor of Commander Shepard, and live in the town this game was made. This game and company was incredible source of pride for Edmonton and its always cool to hear people from all over the world talk about it.
I think the reason people don't want a movie is because they don't believe that Hollywood will get a director that will be willing to put in the work and effort we saw in the lord of the rings, Harry Potter and marvel.
I don’t believe in Hollywood in any way, shape or form these days. The quality of their work has been rapidly declining these last couple of years. The fact that so many of their products are, for some freaking reason, absolutely packed to the brim with political propaganda about how we should think, act and feel doesn’t really help at all… I just want to enjoy a good movie or TV show and enjoy some good old fashioned escapism.. Is that really too much to ask? :/
@@Red0543 I always laugh at people complaining about politics being in stories about politics, which is almost everything. I'm willing to be it's not "politics" you are concerned about, but changing demographics. I'd love to hope that your opinion has changed in two years, but looking at the current climate of the world, that's unlikely.
Episode 1, just ME1. Episode 2, collector attack, lazarus project, start recruiting the team, end in hell on Horizon, maybe combine the "dead" collector ship. Episode 3, Finish preparing, raid the derelict reaper, and launch the suicide mission. Episode 4, The invasion begins. Probably up to Udina's coup. Episode 5, finish gathering the galaxy and end it. Lord of the Rings' ending 2.0
It's less that people forget LOTR exists and more that they recognize what a fluke it was in the history of filmmaking. There just haven't been many projects of that scope that resulted in so much success and acclaim, and it's not like the film industry hasn't tried. Conversely, there have been many examples of high-quality "TV" productions that worked in fantastical settings with large casts of characters and complex, long-running stories.
A thing I’ve always liked about your videos is that you talk about budgets and production when giving your thoughts. Often I see people with ideas and criticisms that completely ignore the reality of filming constraints. These criticisms are especially prevalent when people are talking about adaptations.
The only show that's tried anything close to this was B5 and, while it looked great in its day, those aliens had to be designed with practical effects in mind and haven't universally aged well. Moreover, the like of Kosh didn't need to be in almost every episode, could glide around, and there were rarely many Vorlons on screen at once. If Kosh had been more humanoid, he'd have been and would now still be hugely expensive to include.
Fun thing I heard somewhere. You will never see Kosh pass through a doorway as the suit could not fit through them. On one hand you do not really notice it as scenes are near doorways, but once you know about it then imagining what life would be like day to day on B5 for a Vorlon is amusing.
All I have to say about even the suggestion of live action adaptation of Mass Effect is to quote the great Dr. Ian Malcolm: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Mass Effect should never be adapted for live action. Any attempt would inevitably be at the expense of the trilogy itself. Simply because an adaptation would have to script MET and canonize all the choices that represent player's agency. Which Shepard would be canonized? Jane or John? What companion would get the romance subplot, which one the role of the best friend? Which big or small choices are going to be elevated to canon and which are not? These sort of things: a woman or a man for a lead role, representation in the romantic subplot, removal of agency and choice will have rippling effect (no pun intended) on the existing fandom, and even bigger one on the new people this adaptation would bring into the fandom. Aside from complete inability of such a movie/tv show/animated show to capture the magic of playing the game and making all these choices yourself, the possible toxicity wave that'll result from canonizing any of choices in the games... is just not worth it. It's making me nauseous just thinking about it now. Some things should stay games, where they belong.
I totally agree. I'd be down for a 'Mass Effect' Universe tv/anime series filling in the lore and history of things that we saw hinted at or mentioned, but accessable enough for those who just love good SF. Just, avoid the present day or main characters who we've made our own by our choices.
Exactly - fandom gets bad enough when their favourite characters make choices they don't like, imagine when it's not just opinion that 'they wouldn't do that' but objective fact because we've played the story already and decided they didn't. I mean I'd watch a Mass Effect movie anyway, and I'm sure a lot of us would forgive the necessity of picking one version of Shepard just to see our favourite galaxy on the big screen, but there'd be enough disgruntled fans jumping on twitter the next day screaming how 'they got it all wrong' to sour the first impression for everyone else who doesn't know Mass Effect from Space Invaders and just knows it's some video game thing that "fans are saying" is horrible. No studio in its right mind would want to walk into that minefield. Now a movie or series about someone other than Shepard, that'd work - like that Vega animated film, only ideally better written - but can you imagine pitching that to the producers? "We want a couple hundred million to make a movie about this well-regarded but (let's be honest) not famous outside gaming circles video game, only we won't be using the game's plot or any of its characters, we just think people will be really into this unrelated story that happens to have some krogan and turians in it." Don't get me wrong, I'd love five seasons episodes of a CGI animated series about a Justicar stalking a renegade huntress war criminal through the middle of the Krogan Rebellions, but nobody's going to make the equivalent of The Bad Batch before a single Star Wars movie has been made.
I just made a similar comment before I read yours, but I totally agree. Perhaps a series which is separate from the main storyline but still mass effect could be a solution, something like The Mandalorian.
A mass effect movie won't cannonise shit. A mass effect movie is secondary material,the games are canon, since they are the original material. Like lotr,elfs showing up in two towers isn't canon , because it doesn't happen in the books. Unless bioware announces a canon shephard, no canon Shepard exists
You'd need a writer with the strength and vision of a J. Michael Straczynski to make it work as tv over years. Someone familiar with the story from the game. Where these movie studios fail when adapting computer games to film is they never hire the original writers of the games to work the script :)
Even when they do include the writer of the game it doesn't always work out (i.e. Prince of Persia). Even Warcraft proved that the director being familiar with the story and lore is not enough.
@@jarjared3522 Yeah, a director who's a 'fan' of the material hardly ever works, but if you had a solid script true to the IP then maybe the director, whether he knew the work or not, could still give us a half decent movie. I think the main problem is studio interference. They continue to believe they know best when adapting computer games or books, failing to realise that if you change the core of the IP to fit it to screen you gut what made it great in the first place.
The guy who made the Wing Commander games also made the movie version. Bringing the original people doesn't always work since games and movies are two different mediums.
@@Michael_ORourke Yeah, thats a good point. I mean it was 22 years ago and computer games have come a long way since then in the terms of story not only with Mass Effect but also such titles as Dragon Age and even Call of Duty. I mean Call of Duty Black Ops would make an incredible movie, but I still think having the original writers has got to help in the long run. You are right, movie and games are two different mediums which seems to be the problem with video game movies so far. Hollywood tries to force them into what they think the consumers want and so alienate the fans. On the point of Wing Commander, it may simply be that Chris Roberts let the money and power go to his head, it happens. He suddenly had the means to stretch out with visuals etc and it just blew his mind as from what I heard back then he was never happy with what ended up on screen.
The problem is the "live action" element of the question. Animation! Wouldn't even need to be state of the art photorealistic - go for some retro style 2d. A good story well written will transcend it's media.
I'd really love to hear from someone in the VFX business about this. There have been great strides in recent years with mo-cap and computer-controlled/recorded camera positions, and using computer game tech for live-rendering CGI characters, which allow them to take an actor's performance out of the picture, replace it with background and overlay a CGI character (or CGI elements) on top. Given past events in the tech pipeline from movies to TV shows (remember about 5 years after the matrix when every TV show suddenly did bullet time effects?), I'd expect something that's been working well im Marvel movies for about a decade to finally be cheap enough and fast enough for use on TV. Also, keep in mind that Garrus is still surprisingly human. I'm not in the VFX biz, but I don't think you need a full CGI Garrus. You could go for practical effects (mask and a costume with some greenscreen cutouts), not unlike the limb removal CGI in Stargate SG-1's TV movies, and then maybe animate some parts with extra animatronics/CGI in the mask (like Andorian antennae on Enterprise decades ago). Combine that with the usual creative camera angles and lighting to avoid showing the difficult parts most of the time, I think Garrus has come down a lot in cost since the movies and TV shows you use as an example. Add to that the likelihood of most wide-frame space and combat scenes will probably be CGI anyway, you'd probably need convincing CGI versions of the entire cast either way, and those would cost the same whether Garrus had human proportions or not. So basically Garrus is a slightly more expensive case of Tali, where a convincing spacesuit with three-fingered gloves and avoiding to film her knees or lower legs basically gets the illusion across in 90% of the scenes. Then a few special-case CGI or model inserts, some of which could probably be reusablestock footage that just reminds you Garrus or Tali are not human.
The proportionally larger budget for a movie also means it has to make more money and over a shorter time frame. There will also be a greater focus on pulling as many people as possible into the theaters; which more often than not; means trying to appeal to a low common denominator -beyond ME fans, and the wider scifi and action-adventure fans.
If Star Trek Discovery can pull off Saru as a main cast member and The Mandalorian can manage Grogu, then it's entirely practical to include 1-2 main cast members who require significant CGI support in a TV show. That said, I think three movies would work just fine. You can cover the essentials of each game in a single movie.
Grogu is mostly a non human language speaking puppet that mostly needs to look cute doing stuff, and Saru is mostly humanoid. While make up and puppetry could arguably get away with maybe minor characters, I don’t think budget and resources are at a point where we could render all the important alien characters in Mass Effect in a TV show and have them truly come to life the way people may feel to the games. I think it creates a really difficult situation for make up and VFX folks, especially for an extended TV format. There is a reason that Saru’s original more alien design never came to be because it was just impractical, and it’s also one of the reasons that even the Picard show had to forgo making certain characters alien based due to budget restrictions and that was for just a minor guest star role. I think a Mass Effect TV show in today’s landscape might actually diminish the actual world experienced in the games because it will have to scale down a lot. Honestly even for a movie, I would still be concerned how it might look and how the alien designs will be.
I don't know anything about Mass Effect so I don't know the requirements for characters or sets but I have a counter example. Farscape managed to have multiple non-human and more importantly non-humanoid main characters as well as weekly side characters. This was done using late 90's, early 2000's technology with a roughly 14 day turnaround time between episodes at only about $1,000,000 per episode. I don't see anything in the Mass Effect pictures in this video that I didn't see similar creatures made for Farscape over 17 years ago on a TV budget and schedule.
I must admit I was on the tv bandwagon but you've convinced me. The comparison to the Lord of the Rings sold it for me. A 5 film mass effect saga would be great to see if executed well
i'd rather see it split into movies primarily because like you said the bigger budget would help bring it to life better than a TV series, but also because even if you had five 3 hour movies, that's only 15 hours. assuming you split the games into roughly that many seasons of 10 1-hour episodes, that balloons to 50 hours. i'm genuinely terrible at watching longer form episodic content and find that even though movies are often hard to pay attention to thanks to my ADHD it's easier for me to sit and enjoy 15 hours spread across a small number of (hopefully well paced) films as opposed to 50 hours spread across as many episodes.
"Cut that Garrus scene" considering how popular he is that sentence is like a guaranteed death sentence. As Mass Effect without Garrus is just.... wrong in my eyes. Heck I was baffled when I learned he's acually an optional companion in the first game. The same goes fore the other Aliens, there overall the most popular karakters so cutting there screen time would ruin any ME TV show. And that gets even worse if we fracture in that most of the enemies in the first game are Geth. That would probably make it even harder
ME2 definitely would need to be cut into 2 movies, especley when they wanna cover the Loyalty missions fore each Krewmember, wich in my eyes they have to as there essential fore each karakters development and in some cases even plot relevant, as with Miranda's sister ore Thanes son. Sure there minor plot elements in ME3 but still important.
I'd prefer movies over a TV show as well. I like TV shows but I find that I rarely want to spend the time to actually watch them (or especially rewatch). I can watch the Lord of the Rings movies repeatedly but Game of Thrones I have no interest in spending 75 hours rewatching (and not just because of the ending).
Iron Sky was written to a budget, and while it's impressive, it still shows. You can't do that with Mass Effect, as the world is already designed, and that world is not designed for a low-budget live-action adaptation.
@@talideon I agree. A budget... cgi would hurt. Maybe if this was made in the 90s or early 2000s it would have been acceptable. But today, when you have the effort of Expanse and Picard, you will need good sets, and better then just average cgi to do it justice.
Great professional breakdown. Thanks for pointing out the long hours in the business and the effort in detail that has to be considered. People seem to forget the value of creativity and manpower amongst all the technology.
ME has a perfct marriage of a great plot along with deep character relationships. A movie could pull off covering the storyline but I don't think there's enough runtime to get the latter. GoT is a better reference than LotR. Not to mention LotR had a far larger fanbase than ME would have behind it. I don't see a studio throwing that much money at a video game IP.
I initially thought television series too (and stated so in a comment when you announced this video), but I have to say you have made several excellent points here that I didn't consider or thinking of. Definitely have to think about it.
Aye, it is a tough question what would work best. A movie would be best for the over-the-top, galaxy-saving plot. While a TV series best for the world building and character content.
I am SOLD for Henry Cavil as Shepard! Also I prefer guyshep over femshep and I know I'm probably in the minority there. PS $222k is 18% of $1.18M not 81% 😊
I think a Mass Effect movies would be great. I would love to the battle for earth in on the big screen. A big hurdle for any adaption is which Shepherd do you use. Male for femShep, Paragon or Renegade. I think they will go with a Paragon Shepherd maybe with a Male Shepherd for largest appeal. If I had control over a Mass Effect movies series. I would focus the first 3 movies on the crew and then world building up the found family aspect and letting some of the consequences play out with the Reapers as a looming threat. Movie four would really up the Reapers threat. Movie five is for all the spectacle i.e. large scale space battles that more a couple of scenes. I would go with destory ending.
As long as we are fantasizing... Could you imagine if they made two movies in parallel, where one Shepard was a Paragon and other was a Renegade? You could also then have one male Shepard and one female Shepard that way.
Well, actually not the craziest idea. First of all the marketing blitz would be bonkers awesome. Secondly the hubris to do that would be quads out amazing. I think if you were going to do it, you'd have to have all the ensemble characters do their bits seperately then have male shep and femshep do their thing and composite together for each cut. Would it be a pain in the keister, yes. But if they wanted to be true to the source material and the fans, then doing this would break the mould. At the end of the day, it could and should be done and they'd reap (pun intended) the profits from both versions. Personally, I'd love to show up to a theater and have that choice just so I could see my gender reflected properly... just as in the games. Though, respectfully I do request that Jen Hale gets first dibs at playing femshep live action or that, they really go for the fanservice and have jen hale and mark meer dub over the actor/actress lines for shepard. It could be done, and with less difficulty than one might imagine, but it would take a solid focused commitment. Will they do it? I don't think they have the quads to do it. But if they did... well hello gorgeous!
You could easily get a Mass Effect movie out - just hire the director of Dune, I am sure he can do it justice...also you could always go the C.G route as well..
I don't think he would really want to... But,they must hire someone like him: devis Villeneuve (dune's director) is a great director that loved dune and wanted to make an adaptation of it.. they should fine someone that is talented and also wants to adapt mass effect
Not even to mention how a movie/TV show will rob the franchise of it's piece de resistance - players making choices that reverberate throughout the narrative. You can only do that in a video game - not in film. To paraphrase Mr. Plinkett, "The first thing that should have been said is, 'We better not.'"
The main reason I want a show over a movie is because the only good Video Game to Film adaptation to-date is Castlevania, and it also happens to be the only anime* I like. And an animated show would get around the issues of CGI as well as allow the use of the original voice actors.
Also you could do something crazy like making two versions of the show feasibly, one with female Shepard and another with male Shepard. Avoid the romance stuff and it could actually be pulled off.
I gotta say I really like your reasoning in this video! Initially I preferred tv because I just felt like a movie trilogy couldn't do it justice, but I think if they market it well enough they can definitely get general audiences excited. As much as I love Mass Effect, imo its nowhere near the cultural touchstone of LOTR or Harry Potter (during the time period the books were coming out at least) and so would need to convince general audiences to get hyped for that many movies. That being said I still prefer TV. I just think it would allow for more breathing room in the story, especially if they went back to a 20-episode format instead of 8 episodes a season so many do these days. It'd be especially good for covering the first Mass Effect, since so much needs to be established, and it'd give us those little character moments that make them so memorable.
Have two Shepards, there. Solved. ME1 is to me the hardest to adapt because if people aren't invested, it will fail. My idea had MaleShep already be an N7 and becomes the Spectre with FemShep becoming a Spectre and N7 by the end of the film. ME2 is the easiest to adapt for me. Have FemShep die at the beginning and have her go against the collectors with her team. MaleShep and Liara try to find the Shadow Broker because she found out that the Shadow Broker found a Prothean Relic of significant importance, which turns out to be Javik. ME3 is tricky but I think I got a good idea. Have Part 1 be about the curing of the genophage and act 3 of the film would be the Cerberus attack on the Citadel. Part 2 would have MaleShep find Leviathan with FemShep resolving the Quarian/Geth conflict with act 3 being the battle of Earth which I would change to have the other members of the team and races shown fighting on Earth.
I think a series which each season covers a different race and main character from that race with flashbacks to the history of each race eventually each character coming together or crossing paths building to a few final seasons where they are all teamed together like a quarians pilgrimage would make a good season or a turian bareface shunned from his hierarchy facing racism would also be interesting to watch
Great video man you have my support, with the sequel I would like them to put new races in the franchise and not leave the quarians aside like in the andromeda disaster, I have a question, you plan to make a video about star wars animated shows like bad batch or clone wars?
I could actually see garrus and wrex done practically, with suits and animatronics. Action scenes would require CGI but conversations could, it would probably be easier work in the long run. And since its speculation i would actually like FemShep to happen rather then male shep, i know that would be a dream but i think it would make the show more interesting.
If i could choose i'd go for a farscape level tv show (if possible with the mandalorian tech for sets). If they gave me in Mass Effect likeable/hateable characters like farscape i'd be more than happy .
I think there're a few tricks you could play to make the more extreme alien characters work. For Garrus, for example, you could shoot a lot of his scenes with him only in shot from the waist up. Any shot where he's sitting at a console, laying prone with his sniper rifle, or otherwise not running about could just lose the actor's legs somewhere else in the scenery. The Krogan aren't all that far from Dr Who's Judoon physically, and those were practical effects IIRC. The most obvious way that a TV version could save production money would be to literally re-use the game assets. Extra post-processing on the ship models would probably allow you to make space scenes that passed muster, and certainly would prevent fans complaining it 'didn't look like the game'. Anyway, whatever approach they take we'd better get the Sir Isaac Newton rant at some point, or I riot.
I do think that some species in mass effect could be handled with practical effects. I'm not typically the kind to shout "CGI is evil and practical effects are the only pure medium in film", but more that I think it would be far cheaper to produce a small number of krogan "heads" that can be practically animated and worn by an actor. Turians would be a lot harder, but outside of them the aliens in mass effect are about as alien as Saru from Star Trek Discovery. Farscape's aliens still hold up from where I'm sitting, but then I haven't looked at them in a while.
I’ve got it. All the aliens are invisible...but can still talk! It’ll be invasion of the incredibly terrifying utterly invisible Reapers who use invisible death rays. While I love aliens that actually look alien, this is why you need to keep you ‘bad guys of the week’ and garden variety mooks humanoid.
Sadly I think this is true! Only in Video Game Logic can you combine the pacing of racing to save the galaxy, not a second to lose, with nattering away with the ship's doctor for hours about space brandy!
I'd almost rather see a pure animated series than going live action if they do go the episodic show route. If that much of the show is going to be animated anyway, may as well go all the way with it. Though I guess that runs the risk of turning it into the most elaborate and expensive Let's Play ever created. They could also move toward adapting other stories in the universe where they wouldn't need such a diverse alien cast. Maybe a miniseries about the First Contact War fully from the human perspective where you wouldn't need too many named alien characters to be involved until the end? I
Initially when you announced this video, I was really part of the TV show crowd, I personally enjoyed the Shadowhunters TV series way more than I did the movie. But with what you laid out in this, I can see why you said a movie would work better. Lord of the Rings is epic, and its brilliantly done. But to be honest, I don't think this is the kind of game that anyone could ever really adapt in TV or film and do it justice. The choice of who played Shepherd alone would be a huge point of controversy. Its just got too many choices to pick one single way to do it. Even when I play it through I do some things differently each time just because I can, even if its just the love interest. (Though personally team Garrus all the way for female shep). And don't even get me started on the kind of uproar that would come from whichever of the endings got chosen. You just couldn't do it, Mass Effect should stay a game in my opinion, anything else will ruin it.
I wonder if there might be room for something more like Star Wars Rebels or Roughnecks, Starship Troopers Chronicles for Mass Effect? Hell, Star Trek Lower Decks meets Mass Effect? We still seem too locked into the idea of animation means kids show as far as TV is concerned unless it is going comedy. As a side idea. Animatrix/Halo Legends but Mass Effect universe?
No, no, no. These are background, world-building events that only exist to fill out of the history of the current universe. The Star Wars Prequels are what happens when you take a piece of throway dialog and try to grow into a full size story arc. The Hobbit trilogy was the same, not nearly enough source material to fill three movies. And we saw the same thing with Enterprise, another shitty prequel that didn't have enough original material to keep it interesting.
One thing I’m concerned about is how everyone is focusing on casting a male Shepard. I don’t mind a male Shepard but a big aspect of mass effect is choosing your characters gender and background and I can’t see any way for them to cast Shepard as one gender and not alienate people who wanted the opposite. The same applies to the characters background, if they focus on one background then they lose out on the others.
I personally would prefer a Anime. We already got a Anime movie with Vega in the main role and I would love seeing more of it. Preferably with Fem Shep as the main lead.
I’m in the crowd no; mainly because of those technical limitations and secondly, because I feel reapers don’t work as a tv antagonist. It’ll be the GOT white Walker problem all over again.
NO. Not "anime". I know why you suggested rather specifically "Anime", and it is a bad choice. Anime is way too stylized and the character are almost always completely off model from the source material. HALO, BATMAN, MARVEL, and so on do not look right (I'm being very diplomatic, they look wrong) in "anime". The shapes and details are lost or wrong. Character movement does not match the source material or expectations. And Anime is CHEAP not really effective. Eating hamburger when you could be having steak. To be done right, Mass Effect as an animated series would need to be CGi, basically using spruced up and enhanced versions of the actual game assets.
Intriguing approach but I'd say, why not both? Open with a movie depicting the first contact war between humans and turians. It's an unknown quantity so it's hard to screw up. If that does well, you know you have an audience. Follow that with a six episode miniseries between that war and the first Mass effect game, use it to do a lot of the introfuctory heavy lifting for Mass Effect 1. Do Mass Effect 1 as your next movie. The plot is simple enough to get the whole thing into one three hour flick with the worldbuilding already done. Next do a good chunk of Mass effect 2's side missions in an 8 episode mini series and then do the big stuff in the next film. Repeat the same process for Mass Effect 3 and you've got a cinematic universe of 4 movies and three TV shows following one story that is now ripe for spinning off into a whole bigger franchise like Star Trek or Star Wars. Dammit. Now I want to watch that.
I am new to your channel but have really enjoyed your work!! Hoping you will apply your skills to the best show I've watched since the S.T. series. It's called "The Expanse" and all seasons are found on Prime Video. Here's hoping...
as i have said for a long time, stuff like this, if done now, needs to be animated, mainly because of the scale, i agree the investment in live action sets needed to make it come off as a real set not projected... if you re-watch mando, you can notice that they were careful where and how, for the most part, they used the virtual sets and set pieces, even with that...dear gods.... hell, they could re-make the games on UE5 or another modern FPS centric engine, and use like an 8k render of the story for the main line show, if its a hit, do side stories as well, hell...alot of gamers would endup clamoring for that im quite sure... hell... they could use it as a launching point to get a mass effect MMO of some kind setup.... like NMS but... good :P
I dunno my shepherd was damn harsh so I don’t know about seeing a self desicion driven series being adapted. Could see a lot of “that’s not my shepherd” getting thrown around
Honestly, I think they are better off doing an animated TV show of the Mass Effect Universe. True it is not as popular, but a movie would be limited when using live characters that such a universe would be costly and hard press to support. Especially when going with a large number of certain species, like the krogan, hanar, turians, and geth. Also, animated would allow them to be more creative than even a videogame and flush out the world better than a videogame. Honestly, this is a show whose material expanded for unlike Tolkien's Lord of the Ring, whose story can be condensed as large chunks looked at more than one front of the war. The Mass Effect main story is already condensed, so I don't think a movie would be possible, without cutting a lot of stuff unless they are going to three movies, and that is also not including spinoffs.
mass effect is one of my favorite franchises my favorite breeds are krogans and quarians. Not for nothing in Andromeda did people ask for quarians and not the rest of the simpler races such as the Hanar, the Volus or the Legion race.
I think its a case of do we simply take what we can get now, with the movies, or wait until the technology is advanced enough that we can do Garus and the other aliens justice on the small screen. Personally, I would prefer a tv show along the lines of GoT, one season for every game, or even two seasons per game so we get ALL of the incredible story rather than just pieces of it. That would be the issue with the movies I think, and although Peter Jackson did incredibly well adapting LotR's to three movies and keeping to the books story, I just don't have faith that Hollywood would do the same for a computer game. Which brings up another point. We talk about GoT's, LotR's, Star Wars, Star Trek, but we aren't considering the millions upon millions of fans those projects already had. Can we honestly say that Mass Effect has that many followers, or are we talking hundreds of thousands rather than millions? The studios will ask that question first so they know how much money to throw at the project.
I know how I would do a Mass Effect movie trilogy, but the inescapable issue is that with a game that is so personal in the way you choose how you play, no adaptation will ever satisfy all or likely even most fans.
I don't think mass effect would work very well outside of an interactive medium, since there are so many different choices to make.. Even coming down to the gender of the main character. Regardless of what direction they take the film or TV show or whatever in, it will end up alienating a big part of the fanbase because it's not /their/ mass effect
I'm going to go with a comment that's more "duh" but I mean no disrespect. If they want to make a Mass Effect movie, go for it. If they want to make a serial show, go for it. Ultimately, it depends on the script and story being told. The ME trilogy, yeah, that's a movie trilogy right there. But maybe they want to do something different for the show, not just re-tell the story in live action. Maybe they had some ideas for Andromeda which would be fine to do as a show. I know people hate on that game but it was a good game despite the bugs. There were some neat concepts I'd love to see fleshed out (along with bugs being ironed) in a sequel or, if they want to forgo the ironing, you can have the ideas show up in a show.
before even watching the video I can safely say neither as any attempt to make a mass effect show/film you take away the integral part of the whole trilogy Player Choice. Mass effect is a game built on the idea of individual player choice at hundreds of different points. No non-interactive media will ever do Mass Effect justice as it can never encompass the essence of that sense of choice.
In a way I agree, but also the game had to airbrush away a lot of the real consequences of any choice you made game to game (not counting character deaths). Save the Council or not? Doesn't matter, there will still be a Council next game. Who do you choose to be the human representative on the Council? Doesn't matter. It will still be Udina in ME3. What do you want to do with the Collector base? Does not matter! I think curing the Genophage and bringing peace to the Geth and Quarians are the main exceptions? A TV show could really bring out the consequences of Shepard's choices in a way the games don't.
@@gerard4559 this does not negate the fact that when adapting an interactive medium into a non-interactive one you take away one of if not the most signifigant aspect of the expericance. This is my main point Mass Effect has a greater range of possible paths to get you from start to finish. Any game will suffer from such an adaptaion yet ME having so much that a player can experince one cant do so on a single playthrough. so which shepard male/female? which morals regenage/paragon? are we going to get two seperate ciniematc universes one for paragon and one for renegage? There are better chioces for adaptions from games like I don't know one where the course of the narrative is not so heavily dependant on a players in-game choices?
@@lordomacron3719 I get it. I think you are right the best medium for ME is as a game. It is only with Game World Logic can you balance the pacing of racing to save the galaxy, not a second to lose, with spending days and days taking about poetry and sourcing space brandy! Not to mention the moments where Shepard is like, 'Hey Joker, know this ship I'm commander off. Can you explain how it works to me again as if I was 5?' As for player choice driving the narrative, in ME at least for me, it does feel that way as strongly. Male/Female Shepard really only effects which romance options are available. Bar one throwaway line from a merc in Omega all the dialogue is the same in how the game treats Shepard. Same with /paragon. As long as you commit to one or the other you can save Wrex either way. And as I said before, the big /paragon choices at the end on ME1&2 don't matter. My Shepard could be a genocidal monster and the game wouldn't treat them much different from a saint Shepard.
Two reasons. Firstly, it's Mass Effect, no LotR. The built-in fan-base of the former is miniscule compared to the latter. Secondly, that's still probably not enough money to create all those CGI characters and sets for just the first game.
Lotr is one of the most recognizable IPs-1000 times bigger and more well known than ME-and lotr is also a proven successful live action film franchise. ME is an unknown to film and tv productions and so is a massive risk for risk-averse studios.
Because LOTR is a proven onscreen live action IP. It’s been done before, it’s been done successfully, there is a basis to go on and tangible results that gets studios and producers to want to go ahead and put down that much money for an investment. Mass Effect is entirely unproven in the world of live action, yes the games are great but it’s not proven that it can translate well to live action, no tangible proven track record of successful live adaptations, a studio would hesitate a lot before putting down that kind of money.
Because: 1) lotr will require way less cgi,you can make most elfs orcs and dwarves practically 2) Lotr has a massive fan base that would bring instant money,even if it is less than stellar. Mass effect adaptation would have to win over the general audience who has now idea what it is
look up unreal engine 5 and maybe rethink what you're saying... it truly is a game changer, before this I would agree with you but now I don't think this is the case
I'm very familiar with Unreal 5, I've even played around with it a bit. But as I said in the video, it's the character pipeline which is still a massive hurdle for TV productions. Compare the CG Tarkin from Rogue One to the Deep Fake Luke in The Mandalorian.
@@RowanJColeman what i mean is that they could make super high poly cgi characters for the aliens that would work and the sets can be made with those giant video walls they've started using, I mean would it be a challenge? absolutely but I think doable
I do not agree with the claim that the show would not be successful. It is enough if they follow the footsteps of Babylon 5. The creators of Mass Effect, moreover, in the construction of lore, modeled heavily on what was created in Babylon 5. Moreover, the creator of Babylon 5 is still alive and probably hasn't been working out lately :) Of course, the spoiled audience with the latest series expects the series for 100 million per episode, but only the series, written for 4-5 seasons, would make sense. Of course, a full-length film is also an option, but all in all, the film could only show a short story from this universe and nothing else. And one would have to go away in promoting a movie or TV series to emphasize over and over again that it is based on the game. Unfortunately, then it will probably be a failure. Let it stand on its feet.
Love me some Farscape, but that show was shot around the foibles of the puppets, and most of the episodes were bottle episodes. Tis not called a "corridor show" for nothing!
I have not watched it, but on Hulu I do see an animated Mass Effect movie. (Just an FYI.) Mass Effect: Paragon Lost, the prequel to best-selling Mass Effect 3, follows the early career of Alliance Marine, James Vega, as he leads an elite Special Forces squad into battle against mysterious aliens known as The Collectors. www.imdb.com/title/tt2140141/
I live down the street from the male voice actor of Commander Shepard, and live in the town this game was made. This game and company was incredible source of pride for Edmonton and its always cool to hear people from all over the world talk about it.
You live near Mark Meer?! 😯
Can I move in with you, please?
I should go
@@sarahscott5305 Sure do! Hes a very accomplished local improv and voice actor in Edmonton.
I think the reason people don't want a movie is because they don't believe that Hollywood will get a director that will be willing to put in the work and effort we saw in the lord of the rings, Harry Potter and marvel.
I don’t believe in Hollywood in any way, shape or form these days. The quality of their work has been rapidly declining these last couple of years. The fact that so many of their products are, for some freaking reason, absolutely packed to the brim with political propaganda about how we should think, act and feel doesn’t really help at all…
I just want to enjoy a good movie or TV show and enjoy some good old fashioned escapism.. Is that really too much to ask? :/
Harry Potter. Lol. Trash compared to the other two.
@@Red0543 litterallly nothing is "escapism" about mass effect games,its a very political, morally dubious and philosophical work
@@Red0543 I always laugh at people complaining about politics being in stories about politics, which is almost everything.
I'm willing to be it's not "politics" you are concerned about, but changing demographics. I'd love to hope that your opinion has changed in two years, but looking at the current climate of the world, that's unlikely.
@Rotom0479 it is
Episode 1, just ME1.
Episode 2, collector attack, lazarus project, start recruiting the team, end in hell on Horizon, maybe combine the "dead" collector ship.
Episode 3, Finish preparing, raid the derelict reaper, and launch the suicide mission.
Episode 4, The invasion begins. Probably up to Udina's coup.
Episode 5, finish gathering the galaxy and end it. Lord of the Rings' ending 2.0
It's less that people forget LOTR exists and more that they recognize what a fluke it was in the history of filmmaking. There just haven't been many projects of that scope that resulted in so much success and acclaim, and it's not like the film industry hasn't tried. Conversely, there have been many examples of high-quality "TV" productions that worked in fantastical settings with large casts of characters and complex, long-running stories.
A thing I’ve always liked about your videos is that you talk about budgets and production when giving your thoughts. Often I see people with ideas and criticisms that completely ignore the reality of filming constraints. These criticisms are especially prevalent when people are talking about adaptations.
The only show that's tried anything close to this was B5 and, while it looked great in its day, those aliens had to be designed with practical effects in mind and haven't universally aged well. Moreover, the like of Kosh didn't need to be in almost every episode, could glide around, and there were rarely many Vorlons on screen at once. If Kosh had been more humanoid, he'd have been and would now still be hugely expensive to include.
Fun thing I heard somewhere. You will never see Kosh pass through a doorway as the suit could not fit through them. On one hand you do not really notice it as scenes are near doorways, but once you know about it then imagining what life would be like day to day on B5 for a Vorlon is amusing.
Now imagine if Kosh was supposed to be a warrior badass like Grunt or Wrex.
All I have to say about even the suggestion of live action adaptation of Mass Effect is to quote the great Dr. Ian Malcolm: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Mass Effect should never be adapted for live action. Any attempt would inevitably be at the expense of the trilogy itself. Simply because an adaptation would have to script MET and canonize all the choices that represent player's agency. Which Shepard would be canonized? Jane or John? What companion would get the romance subplot, which one the role of the best friend? Which big or small choices are going to be elevated to canon and which are not? These sort of things: a woman or a man for a lead role, representation in the romantic subplot, removal of agency and choice will have rippling effect (no pun intended) on the existing fandom, and even bigger one on the new people this adaptation would bring into the fandom. Aside from complete inability of such a movie/tv show/animated show to capture the magic of playing the game and making all these choices yourself, the possible toxicity wave that'll result from canonizing any of choices in the games... is just not worth it. It's making me nauseous just thinking about it now. Some things should stay games, where they belong.
I totally agree. I'd be down for a 'Mass Effect' Universe tv/anime series filling in the lore and history of things that we saw hinted at or mentioned, but accessable enough for those who just love good SF. Just, avoid the present day or main characters who we've made our own by our choices.
Exactly - fandom gets bad enough when their favourite characters make choices they don't like, imagine when it's not just opinion that 'they wouldn't do that' but objective fact because we've played the story already and decided they didn't. I mean I'd watch a Mass Effect movie anyway, and I'm sure a lot of us would forgive the necessity of picking one version of Shepard just to see our favourite galaxy on the big screen, but there'd be enough disgruntled fans jumping on twitter the next day screaming how 'they got it all wrong' to sour the first impression for everyone else who doesn't know Mass Effect from Space Invaders and just knows it's some video game thing that "fans are saying" is horrible. No studio in its right mind would want to walk into that minefield.
Now a movie or series about someone other than Shepard, that'd work - like that Vega animated film, only ideally better written - but can you imagine pitching that to the producers? "We want a couple hundred million to make a movie about this well-regarded but (let's be honest) not famous outside gaming circles video game, only we won't be using the game's plot or any of its characters, we just think people will be really into this unrelated story that happens to have some krogan and turians in it." Don't get me wrong, I'd love five seasons episodes of a CGI animated series about a Justicar stalking a renegade huntress war criminal through the middle of the Krogan Rebellions, but nobody's going to make the equivalent of The Bad Batch before a single Star Wars movie has been made.
I just made a similar comment before I read yours, but I totally agree. Perhaps a series which is separate from the main storyline but still mass effect could be a solution, something like The Mandalorian.
A mass effect movie won't cannonise shit.
A mass effect movie is secondary material,the games are canon, since they are the original material. Like lotr,elfs showing up in two towers isn't canon , because it doesn't happen in the books.
Unless bioware announces a canon shephard, no canon Shepard exists
81% less but 532% more. Saying "81% more" made my brain reboot.
You'd need a writer with the strength and vision of a J. Michael Straczynski to make it work as tv over years. Someone familiar with the story from the game. Where these movie studios fail when adapting computer games to film is they never hire the original writers of the games to work the script :)
Even when they do include the writer of the game it doesn't always work out (i.e. Prince of Persia). Even Warcraft proved that the director being familiar with the story and lore is not enough.
@@jarjared3522 Yeah, a director who's a 'fan' of the material hardly ever works, but if you had a solid script true to the IP then maybe the director, whether he knew the work or not, could still give us a half decent movie. I think the main problem is studio interference. They continue to believe they know best when adapting computer games or books, failing to realise that if you change the core of the IP to fit it to screen you gut what made it great in the first place.
This. And Straczynski lost years of his life bring B5 to the screen. And it was not really appreciated at it's time.
The guy who made the Wing Commander games also made the movie version. Bringing the original people doesn't always work since games and movies are two different mediums.
@@Michael_ORourke Yeah, thats a good point. I mean it was 22 years ago and computer games have come a long way since then in the terms of story not only with Mass Effect but also such titles as Dragon Age and even Call of Duty. I mean Call of Duty Black Ops would make an incredible movie, but I still think having the original writers has got to help in the long run. You are right, movie and games are two different mediums which seems to be the problem with video game movies so far. Hollywood tries to force them into what they think the consumers want and so alienate the fans. On the point of Wing Commander, it may simply be that Chris Roberts let the money and power go to his head, it happens. He suddenly had the means to stretch out with visuals etc and it just blew his mind as from what I heard back then he was never happy with what ended up on screen.
The problem is the "live action" element of the question. Animation! Wouldn't even need to be state of the art photorealistic - go for some retro style 2d. A good story well written will transcend it's media.
This! People always overlook animation when it can do so much more than live action with a quarter of the budget!
The closest thing we have to a mass effect movie, is the criminally underrated Valerian the city of a thousand planets
The armors the main characters wear look very Mass Effect too!
@@ArchOfWinter i wonder who "borrowed" from who
I'd really love to hear from someone in the VFX business about this. There have been great strides in recent years with mo-cap and computer-controlled/recorded camera positions, and using computer game tech for live-rendering CGI characters, which allow them to take an actor's performance out of the picture, replace it with background and overlay a CGI character (or CGI elements) on top. Given past events in the tech pipeline from movies to TV shows (remember about 5 years after the matrix when every TV show suddenly did bullet time effects?), I'd expect something that's been working well im Marvel movies for about a decade to finally be cheap enough and fast enough for use on TV.
Also, keep in mind that Garrus is still surprisingly human. I'm not in the VFX biz, but I don't think you need a full CGI Garrus. You could go for practical effects (mask and a costume with some greenscreen cutouts), not unlike the limb removal CGI in Stargate SG-1's TV movies, and then maybe animate some parts with extra animatronics/CGI in the mask (like Andorian antennae on Enterprise decades ago). Combine that with the usual creative camera angles and lighting to avoid showing the difficult parts most of the time, I think Garrus has come down a lot in cost since the movies and TV shows you use as an example.
Add to that the likelihood of most wide-frame space and combat scenes will probably be CGI anyway, you'd probably need convincing CGI versions of the entire cast either way, and those would cost the same whether Garrus had human proportions or not. So basically Garrus is a slightly more expensive case of Tali, where a convincing spacesuit with three-fingered gloves and avoiding to film her knees or lower legs basically gets the illusion across in 90% of the scenes. Then a few special-case CGI or model inserts, some of which could probably be reusablestock footage that just reminds you Garrus or Tali are not human.
We may not get a Mass Effect tv show any time soon, but in Valens name, we'll always have Babylon 5.
Adding my voice to the go animated crowd. Costs just as much to animate an alien race as it does a human and you can go big on the space effects too.
I hadn't even considered a saga rather than a trilogy. Great idea.
The proportionally larger budget for a movie also means it has to make more money and over a shorter time frame.
There will also be a greater focus on pulling as many people as possible into the theaters; which more often than not; means trying to appeal to a low common denominator -beyond ME fans, and the wider scifi and action-adventure fans.
If Star Trek Discovery can pull off Saru as a main cast member and The Mandalorian can manage Grogu, then it's entirely practical to include 1-2 main cast members who require significant CGI support in a TV show.
That said, I think three movies would work just fine. You can cover the essentials of each game in a single movie.
Grogu is mostly a non human language speaking puppet that mostly needs to look cute doing stuff, and Saru is mostly humanoid. While make up and puppetry could arguably get away with maybe minor characters, I don’t think budget and resources are at a point where we could render all the important alien characters in Mass Effect in a TV show and have them truly come to life the way people may feel to the games. I think it creates a really difficult situation for make up and VFX folks, especially for an extended TV format. There is a reason that Saru’s original more alien design never came to be because it was just impractical, and it’s also one of the reasons that even the Picard show had to forgo making certain characters alien based due to budget restrictions and that was for just a minor guest star role. I think a Mass Effect TV show in today’s landscape might actually diminish the actual world experienced in the games because it will have to scale down a lot. Honestly even for a movie, I would still be concerned how it might look and how the alien designs will be.
Eh, single movie can work for me1 and me2(although they would have to compress stuff),but me3 would definitely need to be split in 2 parts
I would go with either a Live action movie series of 3-5 movies. Or an animated TV/Streaming series.
Should have Yvonne strahovski reprise her role too👈🖖
I don't know anything about Mass Effect so I don't know the requirements for characters or sets but I have a counter example. Farscape managed to have multiple non-human and more importantly non-humanoid main characters as well as weekly side characters. This was done using late 90's, early 2000's technology with a roughly 14 day turnaround time between episodes at only about $1,000,000 per episode. I don't see anything in the Mass Effect pictures in this video that I didn't see similar creatures made for Farscape over 17 years ago on a TV budget and schedule.
I must admit I was on the tv bandwagon but you've convinced me. The comparison to the Lord of the Rings sold it for me. A 5 film mass effect saga would be great to see if executed well
I am subbed to the RUclipsr who either pitched or is actually doing the adaptation.
i'd rather see it split into movies primarily because like you said the bigger budget would help bring it to life better than a TV series, but also because even if you had five 3 hour movies, that's only 15 hours. assuming you split the games into roughly that many seasons of 10 1-hour episodes, that balloons to 50 hours. i'm genuinely terrible at watching longer form episodic content and find that even though movies are often hard to pay attention to thanks to my ADHD it's easier for me to sit and enjoy 15 hours spread across a small number of (hopefully well paced) films as opposed to 50 hours spread across as many episodes.
"Cut that Garrus scene" considering how popular he is that sentence is like a guaranteed death sentence. As Mass Effect without Garrus is just.... wrong in my eyes. Heck I was baffled when I learned he's acually an optional companion in the first game. The same goes fore the other Aliens, there overall the most popular karakters so cutting there screen time would ruin any ME TV show. And that gets even worse if we fracture in that most of the enemies in the first game are Geth. That would probably make it even harder
Look at what they did to Halo. I have zero confidence in any writer or production studio today doing Mass Effect credit.
ME2 definitely would need to be cut into 2 movies, especley when they wanna cover the Loyalty missions fore each Krewmember, wich in my eyes they have to as there essential fore each karakters development and in some cases even plot relevant, as with Miranda's sister ore Thanes son. Sure there minor plot elements in ME3 but still important.
I'd prefer movies over a TV show as well. I like TV shows but I find that I rarely want to spend the time to actually watch them (or especially rewatch).
I can watch the Lord of the Rings movies repeatedly but Game of Thrones I have no interest in spending 75 hours rewatching (and not just because of the ending).
As a comparison, the movie Iron Sky cost ”only” about 7 million €. And it looks great. Think about that for a moment.
Iron Sky was written to a budget, and while it's impressive, it still shows. You can't do that with Mass Effect, as the world is already designed, and that world is not designed for a low-budget live-action adaptation.
@@talideon I agree. A budget... cgi would hurt. Maybe if this was made in the 90s or early 2000s it would have been acceptable. But today, when you have the effort of Expanse and Picard, you will need good sets, and better then just average cgi to do it justice.
Great professional breakdown. Thanks for pointing out the long hours in the business and the effort in detail that has to be considered. People seem to forget the value of creativity and manpower amongst all the technology.
ME has a perfct marriage of a great plot along with deep character relationships. A movie could pull off covering the storyline but I don't think there's enough runtime to get the latter. GoT is a better reference than LotR. Not to mention LotR had a far larger fanbase than ME would have behind it. I don't see a studio throwing that much money at a video game IP.
I initially thought television series too (and stated so in a comment when you announced this video), but I have to say you have made several excellent points here that I didn't consider or thinking of. Definitely have to think about it.
Aye, it is a tough question what would work best. A movie would be best for the over-the-top, galaxy-saving plot. While a TV series best for the world building and character content.
I am SOLD for Henry Cavil as Shepard!
Also I prefer guyshep over femshep and I know I'm probably in the minority there.
PS $222k is 18% of $1.18M not 81% 😊
I think a Mass Effect movies would be great. I would love to the battle for earth in on the big screen. A big hurdle for any adaption is which Shepherd do you use. Male for femShep, Paragon or Renegade. I think they will go with a Paragon Shepherd maybe with a Male Shepherd for largest appeal.
If I had control over a Mass Effect movies series. I would focus the first 3 movies on the crew and then world building up the found family aspect and letting some of the consequences play out with the Reapers as a looming threat. Movie four would really up the Reapers threat. Movie five is for all the spectacle i.e. large scale space battles that more a couple of scenes. I would go with destory ending.
As long as we are fantasizing... Could you imagine if they made two movies in parallel, where one Shepard was a Paragon and other was a Renegade? You could also then have one male Shepard and one female Shepard that way.
A beautiful dream, but a true pipe dream.
Well, actually not the craziest idea. First of all the marketing blitz would be bonkers awesome. Secondly the hubris to do that would be quads out amazing.
I think if you were going to do it, you'd have to have all the ensemble characters do their bits seperately then have male shep and femshep do their thing and composite together for each cut. Would it be a pain in the keister, yes. But if they wanted to be true to the source material and the fans, then doing this would break the mould. At the end of the day, it could and should be done and they'd reap (pun intended) the profits from both versions.
Personally, I'd love to show up to a theater and have that choice just so I could see my gender reflected properly... just as in the games. Though, respectfully I do request that Jen Hale gets first dibs at playing femshep live action or that, they really go for the fanservice and have jen hale and mark meer dub over the actor/actress lines for shepard.
It could be done, and with less difficulty than one might imagine, but it would take a solid focused commitment. Will they do it? I don't think they have the quads to do it. But if they did... well hello gorgeous!
You could easily get a Mass Effect movie out - just hire the director of Dune, I am sure he can do it justice...also you could always go the C.G route as well..
I don't think he would really want to...
But,they must hire someone like him: devis Villeneuve (dune's director) is a great director that loved dune and wanted to make an adaptation of it.. they should fine someone that is talented and also wants to adapt mass effect
I think your take makes sense. I agree.
i am looking for the dragon age series but netflix has some bad live actions of games other then the new resident evil one.
Mass effect should be a tv show not a movie
Not even to mention how a movie/TV show will rob the franchise of it's piece de resistance - players making choices that reverberate throughout the narrative. You can only do that in a video game - not in film.
To paraphrase Mr. Plinkett, "The first thing that should have been said is, 'We better not.'"
Also, why not an animated show?
No matter what direction this project takes, I'll be the first in line!
The main reason I want a show over a movie is because the only good Video Game to Film adaptation to-date is Castlevania, and it also happens to be the only anime* I like. And an animated show would get around the issues of CGI as well as allow the use of the original voice actors.
Also you could do something crazy like making two versions of the show feasibly, one with female Shepard and another with male Shepard. Avoid the romance stuff and it could actually be pulled off.
I gotta say I really like your reasoning in this video! Initially I preferred tv because I just felt like a movie trilogy couldn't do it justice, but I think if they market it well enough they can definitely get general audiences excited. As much as I love Mass Effect, imo its nowhere near the cultural touchstone of LOTR or Harry Potter (during the time period the books were coming out at least) and so would need to convince general audiences to get hyped for that many movies.
That being said I still prefer TV. I just think it would allow for more breathing room in the story, especially if they went back to a 20-episode format instead of 8 episodes a season so many do these days. It'd be especially good for covering the first Mass Effect, since so much needs to be established, and it'd give us those little character moments that make them so memorable.
Have two Shepards, there. Solved.
ME1 is to me the hardest to adapt because if people aren't invested, it will fail.
My idea had MaleShep already be an N7 and becomes the Spectre with FemShep becoming a Spectre and N7 by the end of the film.
ME2 is the easiest to adapt for me.
Have FemShep die at the beginning and have her go against the collectors with her team. MaleShep and Liara try to find the Shadow Broker because she found out that the Shadow Broker found a Prothean Relic of significant importance, which turns out to be Javik.
ME3 is tricky but I think I got a good idea.
Have Part 1 be about the curing of the genophage and act 3 of the film would be the Cerberus attack on the Citadel.
Part 2 would have MaleShep find Leviathan with FemShep resolving the Quarian/Geth conflict with act 3 being the battle of Earth which I would change to have the other members of the team and races shown fighting on Earth.
I think a series which each season covers a different race and main character from that race with flashbacks to the history of each race eventually each character coming together or crossing paths building to a few final seasons where they are all teamed together like a quarians pilgrimage would make a good season or a turian bareface shunned from his hierarchy facing racism would also be interesting to watch
Is good
Make it animated like invincible.
Great video man you have my support, with the sequel I would like them to put new races in the franchise and not leave the quarians aside like in the andromeda disaster, I have a question, you plan to make a video about star wars animated shows like bad batch or clone wars?
I could actually see garrus and wrex done practically, with suits and animatronics. Action scenes would require CGI but conversations could, it would probably be easier work in the long run.
And since its speculation i would actually like FemShep to happen rather then male shep, i know that would be a dream but i think it would make the show more interesting.
Big agree
Could Mass Effect work if the same crew who did Farscape made the aliens races? Are puppets and prosthetics to goofy for Mass Effect?
If i could choose i'd go for a farscape level tv show (if possible with the mandalorian tech for sets).
If they gave me in Mass Effect likeable/hateable characters like farscape i'd be more than happy .
I think there're a few tricks you could play to make the more extreme alien characters work. For Garrus, for example, you could shoot a lot of his scenes with him only in shot from the waist up. Any shot where he's sitting at a console, laying prone with his sniper rifle, or otherwise not running about could just lose the actor's legs somewhere else in the scenery. The Krogan aren't all that far from Dr Who's Judoon physically, and those were practical effects IIRC.
The most obvious way that a TV version could save production money would be to literally re-use the game assets. Extra post-processing on the ship models would probably allow you to make space scenes that passed muster, and certainly would prevent fans complaining it 'didn't look like the game'.
Anyway, whatever approach they take we'd better get the Sir Isaac Newton rant at some point, or I riot.
I do think that some species in mass effect could be handled with practical effects. I'm not typically the kind to shout "CGI is evil and practical effects are the only pure medium in film", but more that I think it would be far cheaper to produce a small number of krogan "heads" that can be practically animated and worn by an actor. Turians would be a lot harder, but outside of them the aliens in mass effect are about as alien as Saru from Star Trek Discovery. Farscape's aliens still hold up from where I'm sitting, but then I haven't looked at them in a while.
I’ve got it. All the aliens are invisible...but can still talk!
It’ll be invasion of the incredibly terrifying utterly invisible Reapers who use invisible death rays.
While I love aliens that actually look alien, this is why you need to keep you ‘bad guys of the week’ and garden variety mooks humanoid.
Mass Effect works best as a game. That's it
Sadly I think this is true! Only in Video Game Logic can you combine the pacing of racing to save the galaxy, not a second to lose, with nattering away with the ship's doctor for hours about space brandy!
Well no shit,is the original material, ofcourse. Sane with lotr books
That doesn't mean the adaptations can't be preety good too
I'd almost rather see a pure animated series than going live action if they do go the episodic show route. If that much of the show is going to be animated anyway, may as well go all the way with it. Though I guess that runs the risk of turning it into the most elaborate and expensive Let's Play ever created.
They could also move toward adapting other stories in the universe where they wouldn't need such a diverse alien cast. Maybe a miniseries about the First Contact War fully from the human perspective where you wouldn't need too many named alien characters to be involved until the end? I
Initially when you announced this video, I was really part of the TV show crowd, I personally enjoyed the Shadowhunters TV series way more than I did the movie. But with what you laid out in this, I can see why you said a movie would work better. Lord of the Rings is epic, and its brilliantly done. But to be honest, I don't think this is the kind of game that anyone could ever really adapt in TV or film and do it justice. The choice of who played Shepherd alone would be a huge point of controversy. Its just got too many choices to pick one single way to do it. Even when I play it through I do some things differently each time just because I can, even if its just the love interest. (Though personally team Garrus all the way for female shep). And don't even get me started on the kind of uproar that would come from whichever of the endings got chosen. You just couldn't do it, Mass Effect should stay a game in my opinion, anything else will ruin it.
I wonder if there might be room for something more like Star Wars Rebels or Roughnecks, Starship Troopers Chronicles for Mass Effect? Hell, Star Trek Lower Decks meets Mass Effect? We still seem too locked into the idea of animation means kids show as far as TV is concerned unless it is going comedy.
As a side idea. Animatrix/Halo Legends but Mass Effect universe?
Just focus on a Skyllian Blitz or first contact war prequel a 2hr movie, keep it simple, once you can pull that off, go bigger
No, no, no. These are background, world-building events that only exist to fill out of the history of the current universe. The Star Wars Prequels are what happens when you take a piece of throway dialog and try to grow into a full size story arc. The Hobbit trilogy was the same, not nearly enough source material to fill three movies. And we saw the same thing with Enterprise, another shitty prequel that didn't have enough original material to keep it interesting.
Assuming u watch star wars, could u review the bad batch season one when it concludes in two weeks?
I don't really do Star Wars content I'm afraid.
One thing I’m concerned about is how everyone is focusing on casting a male Shepard. I don’t mind a male Shepard but a big aspect of mass effect is choosing your characters gender and background and I can’t see any way for them to cast Shepard as one gender and not alienate people who wanted the opposite. The same applies to the characters background, if they focus on one background then they lose out on the others.
I personally would prefer a Anime. We already got a Anime movie with Vega in the main role and I would love seeing more of it. Preferably with Fem Shep as the main lead.
I’m in the crowd no; mainly because of those technical limitations and secondly, because I feel reapers don’t work as a tv antagonist. It’ll be the GOT white Walker problem all over again.
The Mass Effect would be more suited for a anime TV Show.
Anything animated would be great, especially for the anatomy of the aliens. Turian, Krogan, especially Yahg if they have one!
@@jack1701e Something done by Madhouse or Studio Bones would be a terrific fit for a project like this.
NO. Not "anime". I know why you suggested rather specifically "Anime", and it is a bad choice. Anime is way too stylized and the character are almost always completely off model from the source material. HALO, BATMAN, MARVEL, and so on do not look right (I'm being very diplomatic, they look wrong) in "anime". The shapes and details are lost or wrong. Character movement does not match the source material or expectations. And Anime is CHEAP not really effective. Eating hamburger when you could be having steak.
To be done right, Mass Effect as an animated series would need to be CGi, basically using spruced up and enhanced versions of the actual game assets.
@jack1701e 👍🏾🍾
@DocWolph That’s the way you feel OK but it’s my choice
Intriguing approach but I'd say, why not both?
Open with a movie depicting the first contact war between humans and turians. It's an unknown quantity so it's hard to screw up. If that does well, you know you have an audience. Follow that with a six episode miniseries between that war and the first Mass effect game, use it to do a lot of the introfuctory heavy lifting for Mass Effect 1. Do Mass Effect 1 as your next movie. The plot is simple enough to get the whole thing into one three hour flick with the worldbuilding already done. Next do a good chunk of Mass effect 2's side missions in an 8 episode mini series and then do the big stuff in the next film. Repeat the same process for Mass Effect 3 and you've got a cinematic universe of 4 movies and three TV shows following one story that is now ripe for spinning off into a whole bigger franchise like Star Trek or Star Wars.
Dammit. Now I want to watch that.
Motion capture must become a lot more common and cheaper in order to try a Mass Effect TV show!
What if its animated?
The only way I could see a TV show working is if it focused on the first contact war. That *might* help with the logistics and economics
I am new to your channel but have really enjoyed your work!! Hoping you will apply your skills to the best show I've watched since the S.T. series. It's called "The Expanse" and all seasons are found on Prime Video. Here's hoping...
👌👌👌👌👌 always a great prospective, let's get 5 movies yes!
as i have said for a long time, stuff like this, if done now, needs to be animated, mainly because of the scale, i agree the investment in live action sets needed to make it come off as a real set not projected...
if you re-watch mando, you can notice that they were careful where and how, for the most part, they used the virtual sets and set pieces, even with that...dear gods....
hell, they could re-make the games on UE5 or another modern FPS centric engine, and use like an 8k render of the story for the main line show, if its a hit, do side stories as well, hell...alot of gamers would endup clamoring for that im quite sure...
hell... they could use it as a launching point to get a mass effect MMO of some kind setup.... like NMS but... good :P
I think they should stick to movies for the main story and then potentially re use sets in a smaller scale show. Think STD and Short Treks.
I dunno my shepherd was damn harsh so I don’t know about seeing a self desicion driven series being adapted. Could see a lot of “that’s not my shepherd” getting thrown around
If it was up to me i would have a male paragon Shepard and integrate elements of a female renegad shepard into Ashley
Honestly, I think they are better off doing an animated TV show of the Mass Effect Universe. True it is not as popular, but a movie would be limited when using live characters that such a universe would be costly and hard press to support. Especially when going with a large number of certain species, like the krogan, hanar, turians, and geth. Also, animated would allow them to be more creative than even a videogame and flush out the world better than a videogame.
Honestly, this is a show whose material expanded for unlike Tolkien's Lord of the Ring, whose story can be condensed as large chunks looked at more than one front of the war. The Mass Effect main story is already condensed, so I don't think a movie would be possible, without cutting a lot of stuff unless they are going to three movies, and that is also not including spinoffs.
mass effect is one of my favorite franchises my favorite breeds are krogans and quarians. Not for nothing in Andromeda did people ask for quarians and not the rest of the simpler races such as the Hanar, the Volus or the Legion race.
I think its a case of do we simply take what we can get now, with the movies, or wait until the technology is advanced enough that we can do Garus and the other aliens justice on the small screen. Personally, I would prefer a tv show along the lines of GoT, one season for every game, or even two seasons per game so we get ALL of the incredible story rather than just pieces of it. That would be the issue with the movies I think, and although Peter Jackson did incredibly well adapting LotR's to three movies and keeping to the books story, I just don't have faith that Hollywood would do the same for a computer game. Which brings up another point. We talk about GoT's, LotR's, Star Wars, Star Trek, but we aren't considering the millions upon millions of fans those projects already had. Can we honestly say that Mass Effect has that many followers, or are we talking hundreds of thousands rather than millions? The studios will ask that question first so they know how much money to throw at the project.
Maybe the New dune movie will bring the change, of bringing to life large and deeps World in a movie
I'm sure it will, but it doesn't have weird aliens in it which was Rowans main point:)
Considering how big mass effect 1 is it's basically gonna have to be split into at least 3 movies.
I know how I would do a Mass Effect movie trilogy, but the inescapable issue is that with a game that is so personal in the way you choose how you play, no adaptation will ever satisfy all or likely even most fans.
I don't think mass effect would work very well outside of an interactive medium, since there are so many different choices to make.. Even coming down to the gender of the main character.
Regardless of what direction they take the film or TV show or whatever in, it will end up alienating a big part of the fanbase because it's not /their/ mass effect
I'm going to go with a comment that's more "duh" but I mean no disrespect. If they want to make a Mass Effect movie, go for it. If they want to make a serial show, go for it. Ultimately, it depends on the script and story being told. The ME trilogy, yeah, that's a movie trilogy right there. But maybe they want to do something different for the show, not just re-tell the story in live action. Maybe they had some ideas for Andromeda which would be fine to do as a show. I know people hate on that game but it was a good game despite the bugs. There were some neat concepts I'd love to see fleshed out (along with bugs being ironed) in a sequel or, if they want to forgo the ironing, you can have the ideas show up in a show.
Would prefer Femshep tbh.
They should stick to animation either cell or computer. They would make things a lot easier.
Here’s a thought how about an animated t.v show for mass effect instead
before even watching the video I can safely say neither as any attempt to make a mass effect show/film you take away the integral part of the whole trilogy Player Choice. Mass effect is a game built on the idea of individual player choice at hundreds of different points. No non-interactive media will ever do Mass Effect justice as it can never encompass the essence of that sense of choice.
In a way I agree, but also the game had to airbrush away a lot of the real consequences of any choice you made game to game (not counting character deaths). Save the Council or not? Doesn't matter, there will still be a Council next game. Who do you choose to be the human representative on the Council? Doesn't matter. It will still be Udina in ME3. What do you want to do with the Collector base? Does not matter! I think curing the Genophage and bringing peace to the Geth and Quarians are the main exceptions?
A TV show could really bring out the consequences of Shepard's choices in a way the games don't.
@@gerard4559 this does not negate the fact that when adapting an interactive medium into a non-interactive one you take away one of if not the most signifigant aspect of the expericance. This is my main point Mass Effect has a greater range of possible paths to get you from start to finish. Any game will suffer from such an adaptaion yet ME having so much that a player can experince one cant do so on a single playthrough. so which shepard male/female? which morals regenage/paragon? are we going to get two seperate ciniematc universes one for paragon and one for renegage?
There are better chioces for adaptions from games like I don't know one where the course of the narrative is not so heavily dependant on a players in-game choices?
@@lordomacron3719 I get it. I think you are right the best medium for ME is as a game. It is only with Game World Logic can you balance the pacing of racing to save the galaxy, not a second to lose, with spending days and days taking about poetry and sourcing space brandy! Not to mention the moments where Shepard is like, 'Hey Joker, know this ship I'm commander off. Can you explain how it works to me again as if I was 5?'
As for player choice driving the narrative, in ME at least for me, it does feel that way as strongly. Male/Female Shepard really only effects which romance options are available. Bar one throwaway line from a merc in Omega all the dialogue is the same in how the game treats Shepard. Same with /paragon. As long as you commit to one or the other you can save Wrex either way. And as I said before, the big /paragon choices at the end on ME1&2 don't matter. My Shepard could be a genocidal monster and the game wouldn't treat them much different from a saint Shepard.
If Amazon can throw 465 Million on LoTR why wouldn't Mass Effect get a similar (massive) budget for a streaming show ?
Two reasons. Firstly, it's Mass Effect, no LotR. The built-in fan-base of the former is miniscule compared to the latter.
Secondly, that's still probably not enough money to create all those CGI characters and sets for just the first game.
Lotr is one of the most recognizable IPs-1000 times bigger and more well known than ME-and lotr is also a proven successful live action film franchise. ME is an unknown to film and tv productions and so is a massive risk for risk-averse studios.
Because LOTR is a proven onscreen live action IP. It’s been done before, it’s been done successfully, there is a basis to go on and tangible results that gets studios and producers to want to go ahead and put down that much money for an investment. Mass Effect is entirely unproven in the world of live action, yes the games are great but it’s not proven that it can translate well to live action, no tangible proven track record of successful live adaptations, a studio would hesitate a lot before putting down that kind of money.
Because:
1) lotr will require way less cgi,you can make most elfs orcs and dwarves practically
2) Lotr has a massive fan base that would bring instant money,even if it is less than stellar. Mass effect adaptation would have to win over the general audience who has now idea what it is
A Mass Effect TV Series would work more then a movie in my opinion
And a Streaming Service Original show would allow for more leeway for More intimate and graphic content.
@@eamonndeane587 Indeed
I disagree
I think the grandiose of mass effect can only be fully translated in the big screen
@@γιουργια Maybe but idk
I dunno, it seems like it works best as a video game. What would be the benefit to an adaptation?
look up unreal engine 5 and maybe rethink what you're saying... it truly is a game changer, before this I would agree with you but now I don't think this is the case
I'm very familiar with Unreal 5, I've even played around with it a bit. But as I said in the video, it's the character pipeline which is still a massive hurdle for TV productions. Compare the CG Tarkin from Rogue One to the Deep Fake Luke in The Mandalorian.
@@RowanJColeman what i mean is that they could make super high poly cgi characters for the aliens that would work and the sets can be made with those giant video walls they've started using, I mean would it be a challenge? absolutely but I think doable
An animated series would make more sense for Mass Effect..
I do not agree with the claim that the show would not be successful. It is enough if they follow the footsteps of Babylon 5. The creators of Mass Effect, moreover, in the construction of lore, modeled heavily on what was created in Babylon 5.
Moreover, the creator of Babylon 5 is still alive and probably hasn't been working out lately :)
Of course, the spoiled audience with the latest series expects the series for 100 million per episode, but only the series, written for 4-5 seasons, would make sense.
Of course, a full-length film is also an option, but all in all, the film could only show a short story from this universe and nothing else.
And one would have to go away in promoting a movie or TV series to emphasize over and over again that it is based on the game. Unfortunately, then it will probably be a failure. Let it stand on its feet.
81% more? You are 1 decimal position off. 1800K / 220K = 818% more per minute.
Animate that shit
I think if they made the characters practical, using make-up and puppets, like Farscape, a television series becomes more feasible.
Love me some Farscape, but that show was shot around the foibles of the puppets, and most of the episodes were bottle episodes. Tis not called a "corridor show" for nothing!
Make a Mass Effect anime.
I have not watched it, but on Hulu I do see an animated Mass Effect movie. (Just an FYI.)
Mass Effect: Paragon Lost, the prequel to best-selling Mass Effect 3, follows the early career of Alliance Marine, James Vega, as he leads an elite Special Forces squad into battle against mysterious aliens known as The Collectors.
www.imdb.com/title/tt2140141/
Or you know make it an animated series
Neither. They'll ruin it.
Just read mass affect instead.
I don't watch movies, there just isn't enough time for plot development.