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Whoa, don’t know how I let this one slip by me. Game Informer conducted a Q&A with the Executive Producer of Mass Effect 2, Casey Hudson. I attached the full session below for those of you to lazy to click the hyper link. Most questions are answered, plus Casey goes into detail about everything from decision making, replay value, and even explained why space exploration is better this time around. Check it out below.

Your decisions have weight…seriously
“The thing that we decided from the very beginning—when we announced Mass Effect one—is that Mass Effect is designed as a trilogy,” began Hudson. “The story is a trilogy, and that it’s an interactive story where your decisions are actually going to change the story. If you take your save game from the end of the first one and pull that into the beginning of Mass Effect 2, then you’re going to see the effects of those decisions continuing to affect the way the story plays out. That’s absolutely going to come through in Mass Effect 2.

“It really is one huge game. As you can imagine, there’s really nothing like this happening in games, where it’s a story that’s affected by your decisions, but across three huge games. It’s the kind of thing where you may actually, if you play all three, you may want to play through all three in a completely different way, especially knowing what happens to certain characters or plots that you saw in the first one and seeing the effects in the second one. We talk about how your decisions matter, but I think people will realize in Mass Effect 2 how true that is when they come across a character, for example, in a subplot in Mass Effect 2 that you recognize from the first one. In the first one, you might have come across a situation where you see a character, you make a decision about a part of the story, and you think, ‘That was interesting, that was a neat thing, my decision had an impact, OK.’ But here’s this character again, and something really interesting has happened because of what you did in the first game.”

But don’t worry if you never played before…
“Obviously, not everyone has played Mass Effect one,” clarified Hudson. “We really want to bring a lot of people into this universe who haven’t played it before—or if you’ve played it and you’ve lost your save game or something or someone stole your Xbox. That’s extremely important, that someone can pick up Mass Effect 2 and from the second it starts, it’s designed to draw people in who haven’t played the first one, so they know what it’s about, but to also explain to people who have played the first one, how to get into this world and how the events of the first game affected the second one. And it kind of does both. That’s how the beginning of the game was designed, to bring everybody in, and to dovetail people who haven’t played before with people who have, so that as you get past the beginning of the story, everyone gets what’s going on in Mass Effect 2.”

You’ll want to go back when it’s over…
“That’s one thing that people were concerned about with the first Mass Effect: at the end, did you feel like you got a satisfying ending?” asked Hudson. “I think part of it is the caveat with anything that has a lot of replayability and different paths. There’s always going to be all of those things you didn’t do. However, a single playthrough still gives you a feeling of completion, a really epic ending to the story—even though it’s part of a larger trilogy—we think it’s really important to have a huge and definitive ending to the story. So it’s things like that that I think make it like, ‘Oh, I made a choice there. I wonder what would have happened differently. Maybe I’ll try that again next time and I’ll do it differently.’ But then you get to the end of certain missions, and you feel a real sense of accomplishment. Still, you definitely wonder what would have happened differently. We don’t make that feel like a penalty, where you missed out on all of those things and you have to keep on replaying. It’s more about the curiosity of facing an interesting situation and you make a choice and something great happens. You say, ‘Wow, that obviously was a result of a very specific thing that I did here. I wonder how different it would be…’ That’s quite often what people will do. They’ll play again, and they’ll remember what they did last time, and they’ll be able to choose something different. Quite often, people will play almost a completely different way the second time than they did the first time.

“We targeted something that would have about the same playthrough length, but it’s a much more replayable game, so it’s a wider game. It’s about the same length, but I think it’s wider. One indicator of that is we’ve got about 25 percent more dialog lines, which doesn’t mean it’s more wordy, just that it’s actually a way of looking at how many alternatives you have in the game. It’s quite a bit more replayable and wider, in terms of different ways you can branch through the story.”

Exploration is better this time around, too
“It turns out, that wasn’t enough. We thought, maybe the monkeys aren’t going to do it for us,” confessed Hudson. “That was an area that we improved for Mass Effect 2. We looked at all of the feedback that we got [from Mass Effect one], and that was one of the areas that, in thinking about what the Mass Effect experience is about, we even asked the question, ‘Do people like this? Do people even want it to be part of the experience? Do we even need it?’ And people did. People really liked the idea, even in a game that’s about a really personal, engaging, human story, you can grab your ship and go off into the edge of the galaxy and something waits there for you. But the problem was that things that were out there weren’t interesting enough. There wasn’t enough variety. That was an area that we’ve improved in a number of different ways. One of them is that, as you take your ship out there and you find a star and you get out there deeper into space, we’ve added a lot of levels of interactivity to that whole sequence. You really feel like you’re getting out further into space. It’s like, ‘Wow, I’m really out here on my own.’ And then you have interaction with how you find a star, finding a great place to land on a planet. That’s one big area of improvement.

“Another thing is that on the planets themselves, where before we tried to mix things together to make different things that could happen, but as you got to the second or third one you start to realize that there are these common elements that are going to make them the same. It’s kind of the opposite in Mass Effect 2, because our approach is that each of those things has to be a high-level science-fiction hook of its own—something different about it that you’ve never seen in Mass Effect before. So you see one and you say, ‘That paid off, and it’s different from what I’ve seen before in Mass Effect one,’ then you see the second one, and it’s different from the first one. Then you have the third one and the fourth one. They’re going to be iconic science-fiction moments that are unlike, by definition of our approach, they’re unlike anything else that we can do in Mass Effect. We’re treating it like in a game, you have all of these great systems that you can play with, but you have so much going on that you can’t go too crazy in one thing. What can you do with gravity? What can you do with a vehicle that’s really fun and wild? Or aliens or scales of things? Normally, because you have so much going on, you don’t want to go too far with things. In this case, we can say, ‘What’s the most fun you can have with zero gravity or light gravity or whatever?’ Knowing that that’s the hook for what’s going to happen on that planet, now we can give you fun that you can’t have anywhere else in the entire game. You go to the next place, and it’s completely different.

Some rough patches have been smoothed out
“Customization is something, along with the inventory system, that’s really completely new,” Concluded Hudson. “The inventory system that we just realized we wanted to do better. So we pulled out what was there before. We wanted to bring back all of this stuff [such as], the ability to have progression in the weapons, and progression in the types of armor that you get to wear. We kind of went back to first principles and though, in the context of a Mass Effect game, why do you want to do this stuff. You want different weapons, because they should have different behaviors and feel different and do different things. So we rebuilt the entire system so that you could have better customization of weapons, better customization of your armor and really change the way that you look and the way that your armor functions and works in combat.

“Yeah, and the inventory itself and the way that you interact with stores and stuff like that. Again, it goes back to the question of what are the ways that people interact and want to do and are rewarding in a Mass Effect game, and adding in all the things we have but in a more streamlined way. With the inventory, basically, there was too much there for the way that the interface was set up. On the PC, we were able to improve that in the PC version, but we wanted to go back and improve the system with the same depth that we had before but it just works a lot better.”

Written By A.B. Frasier

I don't think outside of the box. Because if I did then that would presume I was already in one. Co Founder Of The Koalition.

1. Jeff Effendi says:

   May 18, 2009 at 12:11 am

   What if you haven’t played ME1?

   *spoilers*

   Who then dies, Ashley or Kaidan?

   Reply
2. Silvia says:

   May 28, 2009 at 4:16 am

   I am so looking forward to this game. I loved the first part and what I have seen of the sequel makes me so anxious for it.

   Reply

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