Look, Black Isle had a pattern of derivativeness. The infinity engine was a lot more than just a graphics engine, it had a lot of stuff built into it really tightly. And Icewind dale reused much more than that from Baldur's Gate. And they kept doing D&D licenced games. And when they tried to get away from that with Torn, for which they only licensed a general purpose engine, the project fell apart.
The Icewind dale series was particularly bad in this respect. The main feature of heart of winter was that you could replay the original areas with enhanced and rebalanced classes(as the new areas were very short and were repetitive too), and then you could replay it again on heart of fury mode, which they took even further in IWD2, with things that could only be found in Heart of Fury mode.
Fallout was an exception to this, but even that was supposed to be based on GURPS, and I heard it still was mostly based on it, and then they made a sequel to it and tried to reuse the rulesystem for Torn.
Yes, technologically mass effect would be derivative. But the technological aspects of games get far too much attention.
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