While we still make the rounds turning up new habitats and environments in No Man’s Sky, I’m quick to remember the first time I made touchdown on an interstellar body in the original Mass Effect.

It might be hard to recall after BioWare took the sequels in a far more linear and streamlined direction, but much of what No Man’s Sky was promising over the last few years already appeared in the marketing for the first Mass Effect release. Planet hopping, vast expanses of alien terrain, various environments and atmospheric dangers, minerals to dig, treasures to uncover. It’s all right there, just on a much smaller scale.

Of course, when the hype began in 2006, such a feat still seemed enormous as nobody had ever pulled of a full-fledged explorable galaxy. BioWare’s title was ambitious and promised endless experiences as Commander Shepard danced across the stars.

And then it launched, and many gamers threw up their shoulders with a shrug at this element. Much like with No Man’s Sky, the promises of endless space didn’t impress anyone in practice, only on paper. Maybe it was because the story and characters were on a whole other level, but the planetary design came off as mundane, repetitive, and at its worst, downright “copy and paste.”

Who can forget the hundreds of fire-fights that erupted in those mass produced space bunkers?

In 2016, the comparison seems somewhat fit given that we have different expectations in the “size” of our video game worlds nowadays. It’s crazy to think that the original could be considered “small” after how many planets it provided, but we’ve come a long way over the last decade in what huge renderings, fast loading times, and procedural generation can accomplish.

However, Mass Effect’s exploration was able to provide one extra element that No Man’s Sky does not, and that is a specific purpose to visit each of these planets. Whenever Shepard and crew landed on the surface of an unpopulated alien world, players knew that anything could happen.