I don’t think you should be worried about that. In fact, you hate/are bored of mainstream scifi. Like most of the people into Scifi.
The anomaly, problem and ridiculous thing we see here, are the same all the other genre are facing.
I mean, the first time you see something like star wars or star trek, it’s the coolest thing in the world (or not). But when you start stumbling on the hundred of other rip off/inspired by/variation/episode it get old fast.
Mainstream Scifi is exactly like mainstream music (I don’t want to play the hipster, but I really will sound like one). It’s pretty much alway the same thing, based on previous successful title, and it is extremely popular. And except some rare exception, it’s not good, nor interesting (in an artistic way).
I’m not a fan of star trek, yet, I have enjoyed really much the 2009 movie. Maybe I should feel this mild shame, the same you feel when you can’t get that catchy tune out of your head

Maybe because I have seen or played less Scifi title, I have enjoyed Mass Effect a lot (even with all the problem with it’s interface).
I like it when they sound technical even when it’s a complete bullshit everywhere (although I do get pissed by stupid hacking scene in game/movie).
I like it when you travel the galaxy in a blink of an eye thank to an amazing technology.
I like it when you speak to different race (but they all speak your language, whatever)
I want to believe to it. It’s like a role-playing with reality.
Metroid Prime is, in my opinion, the best scifi game on the game cube and it hold a better place in my heart than Mass Effect. Yet it is also full of incoherence and all.

Anyway, I’m kind of loosing my point, so let’s wrap thing up.
Mainstream is mostly shitty. But thank to it we can have some gems like 2001, Moon, etc.
Without this overabundance of the same stuff, some director/scenarist would not try something different once in a while, and without the money put into mainstream [insert genre] we would not have producer putting money into a less mainstream [insert genre] movie.
I wish for a world of always new and different contents of premium quality, alas mainstream shitty stuff will alway rule.
Thank you for your time

We could produce some kind of complex space opera where the absurd timescales considered for interstellar travel would be solved by the fact that humans would only be awake 1% of the time.
And yes, I am aware that this would induce huge logistic problems, but I did use the word “complex” in my previous sentence.

And this post is a huge necro…

Well, I’m not suggesting COMPLETELY replacing anything. The fact of the matter is that this unrealistic brand of Science Fiction became pretty much the ONLY KIND of space Science Fiction we have nowadays. Even Star Trek turned into a copy of Star Wars. And it’s the worst in games.

And it’s NOT creative at all. It’s all blind repetition of the same tropes. Space ships all behave like planes, they all go into some form of “hyperspace”, passengers go into cryosleep even if the trip just takes a few weeks. A comparison to the real world reveals how a specific, simplified, narrow-minded way of thinking this is.

Welcome to my Interweb. Always nice to read polite, well-articulated comments like yours.

No respectable Sci-Fi universe treats the distances between planets and stars as if they were nothing, not even Star Wars!

In the opening sequence of Mass Effect it takes commander Shepard longer to go from the back of the ship to the bridge than it takes the ship to go from Jupiter past Neptune. And that’s BEFORE they make the jump through the Mass Effect relay.

You know (or at least SHOULD KNOW) that all of the system clusters in the game are connected via such Mass Relays, and their existence is connected to the main plot.

Fist of all, no such thing as the Mass Effect exists. If it existed, it would violate a lot of physical rules such as the preservation of energy. That’s what I mean by “the universe is not built that way”.

Second, Mass Effect is very fuzzy about what propulsion technology is used when. As far as I understand, each ship is able to fly FTL on it’s own? So what are the Mass Effect relays for? Also, the game allows you to go from planet to planet in with no significant delay. If you go from star to star, there seems to be a delay. In Mass Effect 1 they use a loading screen that suggests you go FTL (Redshift / Blueshift etc…). In Mass Effect 2 you end up using fuel. So you weren’t using FTL when you were flying in a system? The way fuel is used up is weird too. You use it as you go, you don’t make a burn and coast as in IRL. As if it was a plane or a ship and not a spacecraft. When you run out of fuel EDI says she made an FTL jump back to the nearest fuel depot. So what were you using all the time if not FTL?

There are numerous inconsistencies in Mass Effect alone. There are plenty of those in Star Wars and Star Trek. I recommend the Bad Astronomy blog if you want to get into details
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/08/ba-review-star-trek/

My point is that those games and movies represent a deeply flawed and misleading idea of how space is as how spaceflight works.

that further exploration IS occurring, but that it takes time and only happens in the systems in the vicinity of a Mass Relay.

Well that get us into all sorts of problems and discussions such as the Fermi Paradox and whatnot.

But what I mean with “drinking from the firehose” is that games like Mass Effect already fail at depicting even one single planet. Isn’t it weird that when you go to the Citadel or to Illium, you end up walking in an area no bigger than a block or so? And then you deal with minute bullshit like if there are fish in the citadel ponds or doing fetch-quests for some small time criminals. You had the same problem in Star Trek where they would scan an ENTIRE PLANET and immediately find just one anomaly? How many weird things have we found on Earth alone? That’s the equivalent of the nowadays laughable phrase “take me to your leader” – as if the complexity of an entire alien race could be dealt with by talking to just one representative.

And sure, this is a question of scope. There is just so much content you can depict in a modern game. You must simplify and abstract things eventually. But then my question is why choosing such a hoplessly upscaled setting anyway? That’s just cheap sensationalism that gets immediately disappointed by the execution. All the planets in Mass Effect 1 look deserted. And that’s still better than the vapid planet scanning game from Mass Effect 2.

Sometimes we indeed see good Sci-fi that’s more “realistic”, like the non-trippy half of 2001 and Moon. But while they are revered by most “nerds”, they simply aren’t as fun.

1. Genre is not an excuse to turn of your brain. Genres can and should evolve. Sci-Fi is a particular genre that suffers from an advanced from of Ghettoization. This is caused by over-reliance on tired old tropes.

2. Because the few examples (2001, Moon) are incredibly RARE. If the two sub-genres existed side-by-side with both being roughly equally prominent, I wouldn’t need to write articles like that.

3. Because in spite of being totally unrealistic, some Sci-Fi franchises still use a lot of scientific / technological explanations. Mass Effect being one of them. If a series is supposed to be unrealistic – go for it. Don’t make up excuses. That’s why I don’t mind Star Wars too much.

4. Because fun and plausibility are not mutually exclusive. A good example for a Sci-Fi series that does a good job at depicting a somewhat plausible scenario was Firefly. It all took place in one solar system and it was a pretty fun, awesome Sci-Fi series. It is possible. We can do better.

You talk about the impossibilities of FTL as if all Sci-Fi ships simply used super-duper ion engines. That’s simply not true. Everyone of them has an explanation to dogde E=mc^2. Star Wars, among others, has hyperspace. Star Trek has warp drives. And Mass Effect, from where you got that out-of-context screenshot, has Mass Relays, which reduce the mass of any object using it to zero, easily allowing FTL speeds.

But this is where you show that you only played Mass Effect to complain about the interface (which was indeed horrible):

” And why do you need to go that far anyway? You know, if you travel that far it kinda implies that you already know everything in-between. With around 400.000.000.000 Stars in the Milky Way, you are drinking from a firehose. We are already overwhelmed by our Solar System. ”

This may (or not) be a valid question for most Sci-fi universes, but putting it below that screenshot is just ridiculous. You know (or at least SHOULD KNOW) that all of the system clusters in the game are connected via such Mass Relays, and their existence is connected to the main plot.

It’s not like the races of the galaxy don’t know that there’s probably a lot of interesting stuff out there, it’s just that they know (wait for it…) that traveling across all of those systems takes time at the “standard”, non-Mass Relay FTL speeds. Who would have thought?! The game states AGAIN AND AGAIN, via the Codex and some sidequests, that further exploration IS occurring, but that it takes time and only happens in the systems in the vicinity of a Mass Relay.

Finally; it’s Sci-fi! Why be such an irritating nitpick? You think people don’t know how impossible most of Sci-fi is? Sometimes we indeed see good Sci-fi that’s more “realistic”, like the non-trippy half of 2001 and Moon. But while they are revered by most “nerds”, they simply aren’t as fun.

But I do agree that many games don’t even nearly approach a good sense of the scale of distance of space and Mass Effect is no exclusion. The only game I know of that does it borderline decent is EVE Online. Yes sure, it’s the same misleading vision over there that you could travel between worlds very quickly but at least they did a good job of how to portray it. In EVE traveling from one side of the ‘galaxy’ to the other is quite a bit of work as far as I remember from the few times I trialed EVE Online.