People keep making this comparison. Mass Effect is a video game, right? I am totally not a gamer, so this is basically lost on me. Care to elaborate a bit? How are they similar?
Mass Effect established a certain kind of design aesthetic that melded
Trek curves with
Galactica grit and its own flavor of hologram-based computer interface. You can definitely see its influence on
Discovery, especially in set design, but also in smaller details like uniforms.
Take a look at this video, which is simply a walkthrough of the main player ship, the
Normandy SR-2:
Half the rooms on the
Normandy feel like they could be just behind those black doors on the
Discovery, right down to the lighting scheme and lens flare.
(Thing is, you can see
Mass Effect's influence in practically everything SF these days, so there's not necessarily a direct lineage. When it came out,
Mass Effect felt like something really very fresh and new, which was remarkable, given all the other space-SF stuff that had come out in the previous ten years, from
Enterprise to
Farscape. But it's really suffered from the Seinfeld Effect, and doesn't seem fresh anymore because of its many imitators.)
I don't think
Mass Effect's influence on
Discovery goes beyond that, though.
Mass Effect has a very different feel to it than
Discovery, particularly in its first two, when you really felt like you were exploring a brand new galaxy.* Frankly,
Mass Effect regularly feels more like
Star Trek than
Discovery does. In the early 2010s, I thought
ME would be a good source of inspiration for a new
Trek series, but
Disco didn't really take from
ME what I think it should have -- and put my design sense into permanent revolt when it decided to set the whole thing in the 2250s, when things were supposed to look quite different (and much brighter) than this.
*(Ironically, the final game in the series,
Andromeda, which actually
did claim to send you to explore a brand new galaxy, feels much smaller and more cramped than its predecessors.)
