It’s all a bit shallow, though, with depth of field doing the kind of heavy lifting that was previously assigned to tight design.
It creates a bombastic picture of annihilation, with clever uses of perspective perfectly articulating the sheer size of the Reapers in comparison to the ravaged turian homeworld behind them.
I played through Garrus’ recruitment mission on Palaven’s moon yesterday and the backdrops are enormous. It’s not that the environmental design is bad. Mass Effect 3, despite being the most visually appealing game in the trilogy - at least in terms of bright colours and realistic faces, which aren’t half as important as certain people might lead you to believe - isn’t capable of evoking either atmosphere. It’s an exercise in futuristic urbanism that blends progress with ruin. The second one, despite having too many shooting galleries, excels in much narrower, more truncated set design.
The first game brilliantly articulates the enormous, unquantifiable scale of the universe by going hard on environmental scope - even if you don’t like the Mako, you can’t deny how gorgeous those views are. From snowscapes and shattered relics of an ancient civilization to plague-infested highrises and the Mass Effect equivalent of a gamified James Bond movie, the artistic shift from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 is stark, striking, and spectacular.
