Mass Effect 2 In-Depth

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.

We also wanted to create an ambitious feature set in the first game that becomes even greater in the second game, more polished, and then really comes full circle in the third game. So, being able to take players on this journey with us, and trying to build something you can never do in one game: that was the idea we started out with. The amazing thing is we’re here, five years later, and we’re doing all the things we set out to do, after the recession and everything else, we’re still coming through on all this stuff and that’s really the exciting part.

What is it about Mass Effect’s blend of sci-fi and RPG gameplay that’s made it so accepted by gamers?
I think, ultimately, it’s gotta be a good game, it’s gotta be fun. One thing we focus on is... there are the bullet points that a videogame can have that make it marketable, and make it good on paper, but there’s also a totally separate thing that makes people fall in love with it. You can’t really say what those things are, but we know how to pursue those moments, and those points of interactivity. All these little bits that help you fall in love with the setting and the characters and the overall experience. That, to me, is what’s really important.

There’s that aspect of fantasy fulfilment you get to have your own ship, you get to choose where you want to go, you get to make decisions that affect the people that you’re with on an emotional level. What might seem like a minor difference with other games is, in almost every other game you’re a single character and you run through hallways doing things by yourself. But, as we know from real-life experience, one of the best ways of doing something is being able to turn to your friend and say, “Oh my god, wasn’t that amazing?” and later to be able to say “hey remember when we did so and so?” It’s about the people that you’re with and how that shared experience makes it better.

That aspect we had in KotOR and Mass Effect, we’re taking it even further in Mass Effect 2, the idea that you have ‘friends’ inside the game that you share the experience with, and you have that feeling at being able to look over at somebody and know that you went through that together with them. When you make a choice, these choices affect these people that you’ve invested time in. It’s little things like that can help people fall in love with a game rather than just playing it, and it’s that which we try to develop.

How significant are the characters to the experience?
The first thing that we did with developing ME2 was we looked at all the things we wanted to improve, all the things we wanted to do with the story and took every bit of feedback and kind of put it together in a big pile. We looked at the shape of what ME2 had to be, and from the ground up we came up with the design for the mission structure and how it would play, so that it would be very similar to the first game, but it would have improvements on a more fundamental level. So, we have a more character-based mission structure now. Part of the idea is, at the beginning of the game, you start to get an idea of something really scary, really dangerous, that you’re going to have to do at the very end of the game.

To get ready for that you’re going to have to build up your crew, build the best team that you can, build up your ship, and then when you think you’re ready you’re gonna go in and do it. By that structure, everything that you do in the game can tie in to what happens in this ending. If you don’t do a lot of the stuff, or make the right kind of choices, the ending will be a bloodbath, and the people that you brought with you will die, and it’ll be a great ending, but it’ll be that kind of ending.

Conversely, if you do a lot of stuff, if you make your team members loyal and listen to what’s important to them and make choices that reflect that then you can bring all these people together around you, and then do an end mission that is successful. So it’s that kind of approach that we’re taking that’s very character based, and by that structure you care about what these people are about, and it impacts on the story of the game.

Is it still the same fundamental gameplay structure? Travelling the universe on the Normandy?
It’s very similar to that in the sense that you’ve got your ship; you’ve got the galaxy map; you can explore. It’s just that now, whereas in ME1 you might say, ‘I’m going to go completely off the core story and do a side-mission’, you might find something interesting on a planet way in the distance, but in ME1 that might be the end of that little subplot. In ME2, likely the reason that you’re going out to do that, is because someone in your squad has business that they need to take care of out there, and by doing that they’re now better equipped or they’re more loyal to you. In some of the cases this is how you get your squad members, is you go out to the edge of the galaxy and do something, and meet someone amazing and now they’re with you.

What can you tell us about your squad in Mass Effect 2?
It’s going to be larger, a lot more varied and very, very different kinds of characters. Everyone that you can take with you is a different character from before. The squad members that you had in the first game, and some of the other main characters, will show up in again in ME2 - if, of course, they lived in ME1. You may have done something and they got killed, but you’ll see characters from the first game in the second. The squad members that you pick up are completely new characters - some of them from races that have never been in your squad before. There’s a character from a new race that we have in ME2 and they’re very different kinds of characters.

How much were you thinking of ME3 when you were making the first one?
Well it’s a combination of knowing what the high level arc of the story is going to be, and what all the major forces are doing, what all the major story points are going to be from the beginning of ME1 to the end of ME3. And then within that being able to launch several threads of the story, through the first game, leave some loose ends in the second game and then maybe decide where they go in the second game, and into the third game. And some of the stuff we develop on the fly, because some characters may be more popular than we anticipated. People may have places in the story that they really want to go, and we can build those things in.

What can you tell us about combat?
We’ve improved pretty much every aspect of the combat and the way the gameplay actually works. Things like the camera behaviour and the aiming is refined, it incorporates a lot of new stuff that helps you aim better. The aiming feels and controls a lot better. The AI has been a big area for us, both in terms of the enemies you face and your squad members. Enemies do much more interesting things, and balancing them better - they’re not just tougher, but they fight with more logic.

Now you have more discreet control over your squad members. In ME1 you could only give group orders to go attack this guy or go to this location, but it didn’t actually help you to be tactical. What you really want to do is set up your people in the right places on the battlefield, and now you can do that. Just with the d-pad you can go you go here, you go there, and they’ll move off. That simple change means as you come up to a door, for example, you can have someone on either side of the door, or you can have somebody sitting across from a big chasm and if they have biotics you could get someone in position and command them to pull someone across the chasm.

Why do you think that big budget RPGs like Mass Effect are coming from so few developers?
I think because everybody else knows better. It’s the hardest thing that you can develop. When you look at what you have to do, it really is building many different games in one, and I think that’s the reason why most studios wouldn’t do it. Given the choice between developing one great game, or 27 different versions of the same game that give you all this choice and variety and exploration that you expect in a role-playing game...especially now when there’s not a lot of money to go around, and you have to guarantee you have a good game that’s going to sell.

The idea of building lots of extra content in for the sake of a better experience or more choice, you have to really, really believe in the importance of story and choice for players to be able to do that. We certainly feel that way at BioWare, and really the only way that we would make a game is based on those values. But it certainly makes it really hard.