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In an exclusive interview, Ve3tro and Talking About Games had a chance to sit down with Casey Hudson, Project Director on the Mass Effect series. With just ten minutes to interrogate him, we took the chance to ask him about all our burning questions for Mass Effect 2.
Casey gives us answers on what's being improved in Mass Effect 2, what lessons they learned as a result of the first game, what we can expect out of Mass Effect 2 at E3 this year, and even gives us hints towards the final DLC pack for the original Mass Effect. It's a great interview that asks the questions you want to know the answers to, so hit the jump!
TAG & Ve3tro: For Mass Effect 2, what were the lessons learned from Mass Effect?
Casey Hudson: Well, the lessons learned were many. (laugh) With Mass Effect 1, the exercise was really to imagine the most ambitious game that we could conceive of, and then see if we could actually do it. And so we built this huge super structure of story and exploration and character customization and everything, and then millions of people played it. We looked at every bit of feedback we could, and we learned a ton about how people actually played Mass Effect, what they loved about it, what they wanted to see improved, and that actually became the blueprint for how we designed Mass Effect 2.
TAG & Ve3tro: So what were some of those things?
CH: What we did is, when we looked at the feedback, there were... basically in every aspect of the game, we wanted to make improvements, even just for ourselves, but also looking at the way people played it. One of the big ones was space exploration. We knew that people really loved the idea that even in the context of an intimate, very emotionally engaging story, that you'd still be able to go off and explore the galaxy and find interesting things, and people liked that aspect but they wanted more richness and more variety.
So that's an example where we've taken that whole portion of gameplay and added a level of interactivity to how you take your ship out and find a new star system. You go to a planet and figure out where's a good place to land there, what's going to be interesting to do. And then, when you're there on foot, much more interesting missions and really cool things that you find.... things always being different as you go from one place to another, and all of that stuff in the context of something that's extraneous to the main story but the other thing we wanted to do with the subplots and what not is to actually tie them in. Whereas in Mass Effect 1, you go off and it's a ... it's a really cool little side plot maybe, but then it terminates. In Mass Effect 2, we want to really bring these things back to the core thrust of what the story's about
TAG & Ve3tro: One question about the dialog tree. In the early E3 demos we saw before (Mass Effect 1's) release, there were options where if you chose selections prior to a person completing a conversation, it would affect their interaction with you. That didn't quite make it into the final build. Are we going to see that this time?
CH: Sorry, which aspect of the conversation?
TAG & Ve3tro: As far as stopping the conversation midway and making a selection, how it would affect (the NPC's) decisions and replies?
CH: Oh, yeah yeah yeah. It's funny, because when you look at Mass Effect 1 and the course of developing it, we literally had to go from not even knowing what the Xbox 360 was going to be in terms of hardware and not even being able to see what we could do with this technology, to something that's there and you can say "Wow.". Specifically, with the interrupt stuff, we would have liked to have done better, and in between that is the fact that we developed a new dialog system. It was something that required a lot of faith for our writers to believe that you could actually have something that has digital actors that are compelling enough that they can give you a look, and that's the line, and you go "Oh, I've hurt her feelings with what I said", You know, moments like that. They had to go on faith that we could even do that.
But one of the things that we did learn obviously is that we weren't able to get the interrupt aspect of simulating a conversation to the level that we wanted to. That's one of the things we've improved for Mass Effect 2. We'll be showing that at E3, like how really high impact those are now, because it's an actual system, we actually built that in there. Just as a player, you're starting to think "Well, I've had enough of this guy", that's where you can actually say as a character in the game "All right, grab control of this situation" and then you do something physical or something sudden and visceral. And then the conversation takes a completely different turn.
TAG & Ve3tro: Kind of going back to the technical aspects for a second: On my own personal level, playing Mass Effect 1, it originally came out and I stopped after a few weeks because of the texture pop in and the serious load times in the elevators. It really took me out of the experience. So what are you going to do for Mass Effect 2 to improve that?
CH: Well, I think that both of those things are examples of things that we listed in the category of "things that have to be fixed outright".
TAG & Ve3tro: Right
CH: Basically, those are not issues in Mass Effect 2. I think specifically, in terms of the transitions and what not, that's actually become of the really cool parts of Mass Effect 2. When we do have to do a transition... we have a challenge I guess, first of all, that you don't see in a lot of games because with most games, you know that the player is going to be moving a certain way to a level, and through the levels in a certain way. And of course, in Mass Effect 1 and 2, you can go halfway, turn around, go back, jump into your ship, you're across the galaxy, and it's completely non-linear. So because of that, this is a unique challenge, as far as how we get from one place to another. Part of what we didn't do as well as we wanted was to actually show you what was happening so that you know what's going on in the world.
So in the Citadel for example, people talked about long elevators, but the problem was that it really shouldn't have been an elevator, because it's like going from one end of Manhattan to the other. Lots of stuff happens. Now we'll be able to show you things like "Here's the amazing place that you're in, here's how you're moving through it", and at the same time, the loads are shorter, but they're more interesting and entertaining, and they're actually a part of the narrative. So now, it actually becomes a cool thing to look forward to as part of getting to the next thing. That's just an example of something that... we hear the feedback like that, we absolutely will have to fix it.
TAG & Ve3tro: That brings me to a follow up. Speaking of level design... exploration in the planets.. because I did go back and I have finished Mass Effect and it's a great game... when you're exploring out there in the vast galaxy, certain planets... they tend to start looking like the same planet over and over. Is that variety going to be mixed up?
CH: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a new level of interactivity for how you get there, and how you actually explore space, but then, once you're there, we really have a completely different approach to how we create. Because we still want it to be light content. We put a tremendous amount of work into a really polished main storyline, but we want this stuff to be light content, but also equally polished and really rich and varied.
We have a very different approach where basically, when you go off into these things that you're exploring at the edge of the galaxy, there has to be some really exciting hook that's different about that area than anything else you've seen. I guess one way to say that is in Mass Effect 1, after seeing one (planet), and then seeing the next one, you say "Oh, there's a similarity here. I wonder if they're going to start looking the same." Whereas in Mass Effect 2, you see one and you go "Wow, that was cool!" and then it's completely different in the next thing that you see, and you start saying "Wow, I wonder how different the next one is going to be", and you start looking forward. It's kind of the opposite effect.
TAG & Ve3tro: I know some games on the 360 are really improved by installing the selection on the hard drive. Obviously, with loading being a problem in the last game, with installation on the hard drive... is there going to be a significant advantage to installing to the drive as opposed to (running it on) the disc, or is that going to be insignificant?
CH: I think it will be along the lines of most games, maybe even more effective for Mass Effect 2. We do end up drawing a lot of information off the disc as you go, because of the fact that it's non-linear, you have choice about what squad members that you have, what you look like, what your weapons are, and all that kind of stuff. That's usually why a Bioware game ends up using the disc a lot more. You'll probably have a similar effect here.
TAG & Ve3tro: Can you talk a little bit about the final DLC of Mass Effect 1, and how that's going to tie into the story of Mass Effect 2?
CH: We haven't announced it, but I think people in general know that we've got another DLC pack coming. We'll be probably talking more about that later on this summer. But we are... we are planning to do something more, and again, we haven't talked much about DLC for ME2, but that is another thing where there's just so much great stuff that we want to be able to do in Mass Effect 2 beyond the first one.
TAG & Ve3tro: Thank you for your time!
CH: Thank you!
Editor's Note: This interview is a joint effort, and would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of Parris Lilly, as well as Sarkis Daglian of Ve3tro.com
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