We explore the universe of Mass Effect 2 with the game's executive producer Casey Hudson

With numerous plot line permutations and six possible endings, Mass Effect took narrative choice in games to a new level – with the sequel continuing the epic Sci-Fi saga from your Mass Effect 1 game save, we speak to Casey Hudson, executive producer on Mass Effect 2, to find out how the middle entry in the planned trilogy is shaping up.

How do you approach a sequel when people had such different experiences with the first game?
Well, for us we’ve been developing stories that have branching storylines for a long time. It’s pretty familiar to us and we’ve long since established an approach that allows us to do that in an interesting way. I guess the thing that ME2 does differently is that it’s kind of a multi-dimensional story because your game’s going to be totally different to someone else’s if you’ve played ME1 and you carry your save across.

Your game state consists of many, many different variables making it completely different from somebody else. And it’s not just the high-level, big choices; it’s all the other little things that you did that we can mine from to make the second game different. And so even from that very different starting point, the story continues to branch inside your game, but it’s in a different space than in someone else’s game. And that’s why we wanted to bring across the save games because there’s so much information in there outside of even just the big choices, which we can pull through and have those effects in Mass Effect 2.

How difficult is it to reconcile significant choices with realistic design goals?
It’s difficult to do, but it’s the focus of what we do when we develop the story. It’s beyond being a significant amount of work, it’s the whole idea: building an interactive story that includes choices you made in ME2 and also the ones you made in ME1. But given that, it’s actually pretty straightforward for us to build in a lot of these effects and really make your choices from the first game matter. That said we’re also trying to make it clear that even if you haven’t played ME1 then when you play ME2 you’ll still know what’s going on from the intro.

As a result of playing through the beginning of the game you’ll know everything that you need to know. It sets up a canon for what happened before and it’ll bring in new players. There’s so many improvements we’re making, and making the game generally more fun, more accessible, while still preserving the things people liked about the first one. I think a lot more people are going to play ME2 so we want to make sure that people can play this as the first game that they’ve played in the ME series and that it’s a designed for them as people that played the first one.

What were your goals when you started on Mass Effect 2? Was it just to expand the storyline, or was there a greater ambition behind the game?
Well, going back to what we set out to do with Mass Effect as a whole: we’re trying to create the definitive science-fiction space adventure experience and everything that that would cover. It’s more than you could ever do in a single game, but we can do it, by building a trilogy. So we wanted to create an interactive story that’s three games long and where your decisions from one game affect the second game, the third game, the endings and everything else.

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