Welcome to part three of our roundtable interview with Mass Effect 2 Project Director Casey Hudson! With us and a few other journalists, Casey discussed a lot of what we can expect from Mass Effect 2, along with a few reflections on Mass Effect 1. Regarding the format, questions are in italics, and Casey’s answers are in plain text. With such a wealth of information, and in the interest of those with limited attention spans, the bold text represents, from our opinion, the more intriguing parts of what Casey had to say. However, it’s all great information, especially for fans of Mass Effect. Be sure and check out Part 1 and Part 2 as well.
Q) Have enhancements been made to some of the minor, more technical aspects of the game, including long-ish elevator load times?
A) That’s part of the feedback that we accumulated together. We just set out to make sure we hit every one of these points. One is the elevator, or the way we transition from once place to the other. In Mass Effect 1 I think we missed an opportunity in telling and showing people what’s actually happening when you’re in one of these elevators. You’re actually in this kind of tube that goes throughout a huge location like the Citadel and, even though it seems like you’re going up three or four floors and though it seems like it takes a long time. What’s actually happening there is you’re going from, essentially the equivalent of, you’re going from one end of Manhattan to the other. In Mass Effect 2, we have a different system for transitioning from one location to another, and it actually shows you a schematic of where you are, where you’re going, and how you’re getting there. Quite often these are spectacular. The Citadel [for example], you actually see now, for the first time, where you are, and what an amazing location it is in 3D, and how you move from one place to the other. The other side effect is, by doing this way, the actual load time ends up being much faster…it makes a seamless continuity to the narrative because you can see yourself moving from one place to the other, but, at the same time, it’s faster. On the Normandy it’s even better…you get schematics of the Normandy in each deck as you pass through it, but it’s so much faster.
A slow transition time seems like a minor thing, but it’s actually beyond that because that actually became a barrier for people to develop relationships with the characters who are too many floors away. Now, because it’s very fast and interesting to watch, it’s fun to move all around the Normandy and go between decks and go up and down from your quarters at the top to engineering at the bottom…there are a lot of activities there…
Texture loading and texture resolution, memory, frame rate, all of that stuff is much improved.
Q) The dialogue plays a large role in Bioware games, what other changes are in store for Mass Effect 2? Will we see more conversations, more natural and final closure, forcing a player to choose their words even more wisely than before? Where will the dialogue system fall in relation to the first Mass Effect and Dragon Age?
A) I think it’s an improvement over the first Mass Effect for a few reasons. One of them is that the technology was improved for how we portray the conversations. You’re able to see characters moving around a lot more. The actual situations are more dramatic, they can walk and talk at the same time, and you’re in quite a variety of different situations when you’re having a conversation.
Another subtle change is that, [thinking] back to when we were designing the first game, a lot of the dialogue was written before we could really prove to ourselves how good the game would look and how cinematic it would be. Coming from game’s like Knights of the Old Republic or even Baldur’s Gate, or Neverwinter Nights, where you’re essentially writing dialogue for sprites, if you don’t write the dialogue, if you didn’t write the words then, to some degree, it didn’t happen. You had to write everything. We were trying to go for a more movie-like or TV-like quality where an actor can give a response that is unspoken, with just a look [that] can tell you everything about how they feel. We had that as a goal, but we hadn’t proved to ourselves that we could do it. In Mass Effect 1, there were moments like that; when Ashley apologizes for ruining the first mission, and getting you hurt, you can say, “No, its okay,” or you can reprimand her. If you reprimand her, her response is just a look, and she looks hurt, like you’ve hurt her feelings, and you feel [that] as a player. Until we really saw those things in the first game, we didn’t know if we could pull that off. But now that we have, now we can go ahead and write it much more like it’s a movie with more concise dialogue and with more reliance on the acting performance…
The bigger, functional difference is we’ve added a new kind of dialogue response which we call “Interrupts.” Basically, it’s a way to seize physical control during a conversation, depending on what’s going on. You’ll either have Paragon Interrupts or Renegade Interrupts at certain times. And you can let them pass, if you’re a Paragon-style player and you see an opportunity to do a Renegade Interrupt, you can let it pass and it’s okay to keep playing. It’s more a part of role playing, as opposed to being a quick-time-event where you have to do something or you died. It’s not that at all, it’s more about, do you want to physically do something special at that moment as part of role playing that character. If somebody that is hostile to you wanders near a ledge over a steep drop off, you might see a [Renegade] Interrupt and know whether your character would be able to shove them off at that point. As a Paragon player you might see that and think, “No, I’m not going to push them off the building. Likewise, you might be talking to a character who’s dying right there in front of you from an illness, and you have the cure with you, and just as they start sputtering their last breathe, you could do a Paragon Interrupt and inject them with the cure right at that moment and save them. Again, if you don’t like that character you can let that pass, and then that character will die. It’s a way to instantly seize control, versus just a dialogue option that you choose and let it play out. Knowing that the conversations are peppered with these kind of Interrupts, it makes the whole experience just a more active experience. You’re more aware of what’s going on and ready to take action.
Q) Has the media response to the controversial sex scene in the first game had any affect toward how the team has approached relationships and similar mature content in Mass Effect 2?
A) Not at all…none of what was being discussed was actually based on the game itself. It was kind of a story being reported and discussed by people who had never seen the game. When they did, they themselves admitted, “yeah, it’s actually tasteful and it’s along the lines of what you’d see an action movie or evening TV.”
In terms of what we actually delivered, it was really well done and extremely tasteful. I’m personally extremely proud of the romance scene and the whole romance relationship…because you develop it over the course of a sixteen hour game. I’m just really proud of how it was done in Mass Effect 1. And so, similarly, we’re doing something along the same lines in Mass Effect 2. We think a love interest or a romance story you’d have in a PG-13 action movie or a great science fiction movie, the love interest adds an additional level of emotional attachment to characters. It adds meaning to the decisions you’re making in the game…I think we’re doing something similar, but just with…better skill and, as part of closing in on a really high quality cinematic experience, I think the romance options in Mass Effect 2 are even better.
Q) Have any changes been made to Subject Zero since the first video came out, and how does the team feel about the community’s lukewarm reception of the character?
A) That character is probably the best character in the game. We definitely wouldn’t make any changes based on reaction to the thirty second video, because, when people play the game, they’ll see that this character is really interesting character and…Personally, I think she’s the most interesting squad member that we’ve ever had in a Mass Effect game. The challenge is that, when we reveal a character, the most interesting characters are the ones we can show you the least. In the case of Subject Zero, her back story is incredibly interesting, and it’s full of a whole bunch of surprises. It is absolutely packed with twists and surprises, and a really amazing recruitment mission, and then further development of her back story that you learn later in the game. Of course, we can’t tell you any of that in the trailer because then that spoils that whole aspect of the story. We also can’t tell you the on-going development of her character, and that’s interesting because that is another story, and that story is packed with surprises. We can only give you this sliver in the middle as to what she’s like in a given moment, so that’s what people are reacting to. Some people love her, just from that video, and they think she’s awesome, and some don’t. It kind of gets back to the idea from before, where we know we have a good character when she’s loved and hated, and I think, so far, that’s very true of Subject Zero. I think when people actually play the game; they’ll see that all of these characters are so much more than what you see in a thirty second video.
Q) The first Mass Effect, and Bioware games in general, are all about the changes you make in the story. So, for the most part, the game focuses on different choices, not so much better or worse. Does Mass Effect 2 have any bad decisions that might affect how difficult the player’s mission might be? Or, in other words, does Mass Effect 2 give the player complete control over their actions, or does it protect them from making mistakes?
A) Ultimately…you want to have an entertaining experience, and you don’t want to find that you’ve wasted your time. One of the biggest concerns that we get from players, when we announce many different kinds of features, especially when we announce anything pertaining to the impact of your decisions, one of the biggest fears is that you can make a decision, and then have a terrible repercussion that ruins your game experience…it’s all about consequences, a consequence is part of an entertaining experience. For example, when you have a decision between, [for example in Mass Effect 1] Ashley and Kaiden, who dies in a nuclear blast? That actually has a repercussion on your game, that characters is no longer in your game, and it is a huge consequence, and it is a consequence that carries across the three games as you import your character from one to the next, along with Wrex and other decisions that you make. We want to make sure that your decisions not only have a huge impact, but also continue to be part of an entertaining story.
…complete freedom is, of course, impossible, because, then, that is a game that, obviously by definition, would be infinitely large, but we want to make sure that you have the freedom of really interesting choice that is very impactful on your story, but also where it’s just become a different path, a really interesting experience. That’s what [we did] with Mass Effect 1, and I think you’ll see that even more with Mass Effect 2. However, Mass Effect 2 does flirt with the more brutal aspect of consequence, because the whole point of the story is that it’s a suicide mission. So, you’re building up your team, you’re making them loyal to you, getting them equipped, building up your ship, and then, at the end…you’ll decide to go on this mission and you’ll decide that you’re ready. Then, the consequences really start flying. For a lot of players, it’s going to be a total bloodbath, because you’ll go in with some characters who aren’t loyal and some upgrades you didn’t do to your ship. These characters that you recruited will start dying and, [some players] may have their whole squad die and Commander Shepard as well. There’s a very serious repercussion to that because everybody gets to continue playing after the end of the game and, after the credits roll you’re able to come back and finish missions and explore the galaxy import that character [back?] into Mass Effect 2. But, obviously, since this is a story about Commander Shepard, and you can die at the end, the result is that, if you die at the end, then there is no post-game play for your character, and you can’t bring that character into Mass Effect 2.
That’s an example of the more brutal version of consequence that we have in Mass Effect 2, but it is really thematic of the idea that we have with the suicide mission. When I say that, a lot of people worry, “what can I do?” and “can my play as some other character?” and “how can I keep player after the credits?” or “how does this play into Mass Effect 3? Your character is dead, and that’s the consequence of having freedom that really results in choices that lead to powerful consequences. We do do that at the end of Mass Effect 2 and, of course, if you really don’t want that, all you have to do is go back to somewhere in the middle of the game, make different choices, and [it’s] about one or two choice, it’s not a surprise thing. You’ll know that your team is not ready but, if you want to go back and build your team up a little bit more and upgrade your ship…then you’ll survive the ending.
Q) Has the graphic engine been enhanced for character creation, if so, how?
A) The graphics engine has been enhanced overall. The character creation is similar because we need to make sure that your character, when we import your character from Mass Effect 1, will look the way that you expect them to. We have improved a number of things, we’ve gone back and improved some of the hair and the skin shaders and stuff like that. Overall, the lighting system and the shadows, everything…we’re using higher resolutions, but also we’ve gone back and improved the lighting model as well. So the graphics engine itself is much improved. Those are the high points.
Q) Does Mass Effect 2 add any finality to the player’s actions and decisions, or can players just quick load and continue to play until they get their desired results?
A) If you’re referring to the end-game, it is more about the total package of how you’ve played the game and, then, that combined with decisions that you make throughout the end-game. It is very much a Dirty-Dozen style mission…it’s a full court press where you have your entire team of however many characters that you’ve recruited, not just you and two other characters…it really is all your characters pushing through this final mission. You’re making decisions about who does what, planning and things like that. Those decisions are part of it, but it also ties back into things that you did earlier in the game where you may not have done someone’s loyalty mission, or you might have done a mission with them to earn their loyalty, but made a decision where they end up not being loyal to you. Or maybe there was a conflict in the ship between two characters…and it ended up with one of them being not loyal to you and you never resolved it before you had to do the end game. All of these things play some role in what happens to you, whether it results in someone dying and then your team’s overall survivability in the end. So, therefore, it’s not something that you can make “decision A,” and then get a result, then reload from five minutes ago with “decision B” and get a different result. It’s more like, play to the end, and, if you want to try a different result, you’ll load from maybe a few hours earlier and then try and build up your team differently, make a few tweaks to who you’ve got and whether they’re loyal and how they’re equipped…and then head back into the end-game.
Q) People are intrigued by the ability to transfer your save from the original Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. From a technical standpoint, has this proven to be a difficult task for the development team?
A) It has, actually. Part of the trick is that we’ve moved from Microsoft to EA as our publisher and there’s a lot of security stuff regarding games from one publisher being able to [leave] those from a different publisher, [which is] one of the technical hurdles that we’ve had. Beyond that, just the fact that it’s a very complex process because one game’s save file format working with that of a different game, and then bringing in all of those decisions. It’s not just a few of them. If it was a few decisions, we could have a conversation at the beginning of game and you’d tell the game what your decisions were, but it actually is so many more decisions. It’s more than you’d ever want to go through, it’s literally your saved game with all different plot variables…therefore we need to pull all of that stuff in and make sure that it works in Mass Effect 2 – and that’s just the technical side.
The creative side, weaving all of those decisions into the story, is the other hard part. If you walk around the Citadel, for example, many of the details that give the environment flavor are different based on the way that you left the Citadel and the council in the end of the first game. It’s all of those things that we had to tie in, and it’s possibly the hardest thing we’ve had to do in this project…make sure that that’s working and that people are going to be happy with how fully we’ve supported it.
Mass Effect 2 sounds like it’s shaping up to be something quite special, especially for fans of the first game. Check back for our full review at the end of January!
