Sources: here and here.
Thursday, 30 July 2009
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Hero to Zero, Vortex Throws, and Goodbye Mako in Mass Effect 2 - Casey Hudson part 4
In part four we cover Commander Shepard's level drop, the game's updated abilities, new vehicle attributes, the overhauled interface, and Casey explains why storytelling in at least some games doesn't suck.
Game On: In Mass Effect 2 we play as Commander Shepard again, a guy who finished up the first game with some pretty advanced abilities. As I understand it, you're resetting the character back to ability basics. How are you dealing with that retrograde motion story-wise?
Casey Hudson: There's something that's happening with the story that explains what happens with your abilities. It's something we can't go into detail about for obvious reasons, but it actually happens the other way around. Our goal with the story, in terms of getting the game started quickly and players into really compelling story situations…that dictated and allowed us to do certain things including changing the way that your abilities work and the way you develop your character.
Part of it, too, is the fact that we've gone in and improved literally every system in the game, your powers, the controls, aiming, the way that your character stats work and how you build a character, the inventory system, weapons, and so on. All of those things have been dramatically improved, so there's no direct way to map the stuff you had in Mass Effect over to Mass Effect 2 anyway.
That said, we're taking into account all of your accomplishments in terms of building a character from the first game. So things you'd expect to be acknowledged, like if you were a level 60 character, or you were highly Renegade and don't want to start out at the middle again. If you import your save game from Mass Effect, these kinds of things will be acknowledged in ways that map across to the new system. You will feel, even in terms of the character that you build, that you are continuing as that character.
GO: Has the attribute and developmental pathing changed at all? Is it still essentially soldier/weapons, engineer/tech, and biotics/magic based? Have the special upgrades that occurred along each attribute's development line been changed or altered to reflect the character's maturation?
CH: The attribute and leveling system is similar, in that we have the same character classes [Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel, and Vanguard]. Some of the abilities are the same in name and in their basic function, but they've been improved substantially in terms of how you can use them and your mastery over them.
Take the throw ability. It's a biotics power that was in the first game and it's back in Mass Effect 2. Before it would just push the enemy back from your position. That's interesting, but it's not as useful as the way we've adapted it to Mass Effect 2, where throw is kind of a vortex that you fling at an enemy. When it hits them, it throws them in the direction at which it strikes them. If you're looking at an enemy that's standing on a bridge with drop-offs on either side, previously a throw would have knocked him back along the bridge and he wouldn't have fallen off. Now you can angle your throw power to the left, for instance, and it will hook around, hit him from the side, and he'll go flying to the right. It's a more advanced version of the same power that you knew from the first game.
GO: So you've essentially iterated the last game's abilities?
CH: Yeah.
GO: Turning to first game quirks, I know everyone cranks about Mass Effect's slow elevators, but what bugged me was exploring with the Mako. It didn't seem to scale well with the rest of the game. At one point I recall hopping over projectiles spit by an alien sandworm and feeling this Super Mario vibe that clashed with the seriousness of everything else.
CH: We have a completely new vehicle in Mass Effect 2, and it's a similar idea, but the way it works and the controls are fundamentally different. We're not talking too much about it yet, in part because it's one of the things that's just gone in and we want to make sure that it's going to stay the way it is in the final game before we talk too much about it. But it's definitely a different design.
It's a similar idea, in that it's a vehicle about the size of the Mako that you can use to explore these really rough alien worlds. The difference is, it moves fundamentally differently from the first Mako, where now…it basically moves similar to the way your character moves. You can strafe from left to right, you can shoot wherever you want, it's easier to target enemies that are standing right in front of you or directly overhead, and it just navigates the terrain a lot better.
Part of the issue with the first Mako was that it literally, in a way that I don't think anyone knows or will ever fully appreciate, it was probably I'll bet the first and only physics-simulated skid-steer vehicle in games. Not that that's a… [laughs] …not that that's a bullet point we'd put on the box, but the amazing thing about it is that it was actually physically simulated. In doing that, it incurred a lot of control difficulties. You couldn’t just strafe to the side and hide behind a rock and then pop out.
The new vehicle fundamentally addresses all the stuff we wanted to improve with the Mako, and that's part of the value of really just…instead of moving ahead and just continuing into the sequel, the fact that we stopped, we looked at everything about the way people were experiencing the first game, and then designed things that were fundamental solutions. We could've made incremental improvements to certain things like the Mako, but by going back to first principles and thinking about the way the worlds actually ended up, how rough the terrain was, the kind of fighting that you'd want to do there, the kind of exploring, then designing a vehicle that captured exactly those things...knowing all that we know from the first game, we now have a vehicle that's right out of the box so much easier and intuitive to play with.
GO: Mass Effect's inventory system was missing options like "leave" or "take this, not that" which made item management and character outfitting a bit of a struggle. How has Mass Effect 2's inventory interface been improved?
CH: The inventory system is completely different. Nothing about inventory management from the first game is in Mass Effect 2, though all of the actual functionality it provided remains. Basically we took the whole thing out and replaced it with a bunch of different systems that do the same thing. Part of the problem is that, in that first inventory system you could do a huge number of things. You could manage the load-out of your team, you could customize your weapons, you could do all of this stuff through that interface. Now we have separate ways to do these things.
So you can very intuitively manage the load-out of your team, then go to a different system where now you're upgrading your weapons and that feels more intuitive. We've essentially spread things out over several different areas where you can actually do these things in a more natural way and it's a lot more fun.
The other thing that allows us to do, is that each of those aspects can go a lot deeper. For instance, the way that you customize your armor and your appearance and your weapons is a lot deeper than we could've gone before, when it was all managed by one interface.
GO: Last question. Gameplay and auto-narrative closure aside, today's video game stories seem incredibly shallow. Even the best bits of BioShock, which seem genius next to the D-list riffing in a game like Doom 3, feel a bit superficial when scaled against books like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Neil Stephenson's Anathem or Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire. Your reaction?
CH: It's a complex issue with lots of factors. I think part of it is that in books and movies, and I'm sure someone can Google this and see if I'm right, but I think there are just many, many more books that come out per year, and many, many more movies, relative to the big games that get played. I think the fewer works you have in a medium, the more mainstream or accessible they have to be. If games were consumed in tenfold numbers, then you’d have more opportunities to find different genres and niches in terms of the story, and more exploration into really personal and small-scale stuff.
If you look at the entire spectrum of games made, there are definitely some that veer off the beaten path, but they often don't do well enough commercially. They just don't capture the huge mainstream audience that's required to make back the money necessary to put together a triple-A, really high-quality game. Unlike a movie, we can't go on location and have actors show up and film them. Even if you want to make a small private game, if you want to have actors and sets to comprise a story of the caliber you're talking about, you still have to build those actors in your game, you have to build the sets, and you have to build out the overlying technology in general. That's still very expensive. So I think that's one factor, the fact that ultimately a game has to be able to appeal to a broad enough audience.
But I think there's maybe a bigger factor, which is…gaming's just a different medium. I think we have to acknowledge the fact that it's a different medium, that the way a game affects players' emotions in terms of narrative is fundamentally different. If you compare the same elements from a game story to a movie story on paper, certain things won't match up, but I can tell you, I've had a number of game-story experiences that were as profound as any movie I've seen, one of them being ICO.
[SPOILER]
For me, ICO was about a nine-hour game, and you play for about eight hours leading a little girl through dangerous situations. As you move around, she's holding your hand, and you feel the tug of her hand on your controller for eight hours. But then in the ninth hour, you lose her, and suddenly, you don't feel the tug of her hand on your controller anymore.
[/SPOILER]
The way that ICO ends, it affected me more powerfully because of that emotional rollercoaster they put me on than I think maybe any movie that I've seen. And it's because, in an interactive way, they tapped into something about how I connect with a human being in a way that a movie can't. So I think that if a comparison's to be made between games and other mediums, it has to be made in terms of the result of the experience.
GO: Mass Effect 2 release dates...still on track for an early 2010 release?
CH: Yep, absolutely.
GO: Thanks Casey.
Game On: In Mass Effect 2 we play as Commander Shepard again, a guy who finished up the first game with some pretty advanced abilities. As I understand it, you're resetting the character back to ability basics. How are you dealing with that retrograde motion story-wise?
Casey Hudson: There's something that's happening with the story that explains what happens with your abilities. It's something we can't go into detail about for obvious reasons, but it actually happens the other way around. Our goal with the story, in terms of getting the game started quickly and players into really compelling story situations…that dictated and allowed us to do certain things including changing the way that your abilities work and the way you develop your character.
Part of it, too, is the fact that we've gone in and improved literally every system in the game, your powers, the controls, aiming, the way that your character stats work and how you build a character, the inventory system, weapons, and so on. All of those things have been dramatically improved, so there's no direct way to map the stuff you had in Mass Effect over to Mass Effect 2 anyway.
That said, we're taking into account all of your accomplishments in terms of building a character from the first game. So things you'd expect to be acknowledged, like if you were a level 60 character, or you were highly Renegade and don't want to start out at the middle again. If you import your save game from Mass Effect, these kinds of things will be acknowledged in ways that map across to the new system. You will feel, even in terms of the character that you build, that you are continuing as that character.
GO: Has the attribute and developmental pathing changed at all? Is it still essentially soldier/weapons, engineer/tech, and biotics/magic based? Have the special upgrades that occurred along each attribute's development line been changed or altered to reflect the character's maturation?
CH: The attribute and leveling system is similar, in that we have the same character classes [Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel, and Vanguard]. Some of the abilities are the same in name and in their basic function, but they've been improved substantially in terms of how you can use them and your mastery over them.
Take the throw ability. It's a biotics power that was in the first game and it's back in Mass Effect 2. Before it would just push the enemy back from your position. That's interesting, but it's not as useful as the way we've adapted it to Mass Effect 2, where throw is kind of a vortex that you fling at an enemy. When it hits them, it throws them in the direction at which it strikes them. If you're looking at an enemy that's standing on a bridge with drop-offs on either side, previously a throw would have knocked him back along the bridge and he wouldn't have fallen off. Now you can angle your throw power to the left, for instance, and it will hook around, hit him from the side, and he'll go flying to the right. It's a more advanced version of the same power that you knew from the first game.
GO: So you've essentially iterated the last game's abilities?
CH: Yeah.
GO: Turning to first game quirks, I know everyone cranks about Mass Effect's slow elevators, but what bugged me was exploring with the Mako. It didn't seem to scale well with the rest of the game. At one point I recall hopping over projectiles spit by an alien sandworm and feeling this Super Mario vibe that clashed with the seriousness of everything else.
CH: We have a completely new vehicle in Mass Effect 2, and it's a similar idea, but the way it works and the controls are fundamentally different. We're not talking too much about it yet, in part because it's one of the things that's just gone in and we want to make sure that it's going to stay the way it is in the final game before we talk too much about it. But it's definitely a different design.
It's a similar idea, in that it's a vehicle about the size of the Mako that you can use to explore these really rough alien worlds. The difference is, it moves fundamentally differently from the first Mako, where now…it basically moves similar to the way your character moves. You can strafe from left to right, you can shoot wherever you want, it's easier to target enemies that are standing right in front of you or directly overhead, and it just navigates the terrain a lot better.
Part of the issue with the first Mako was that it literally, in a way that I don't think anyone knows or will ever fully appreciate, it was probably I'll bet the first and only physics-simulated skid-steer vehicle in games. Not that that's a… [laughs] …not that that's a bullet point we'd put on the box, but the amazing thing about it is that it was actually physically simulated. In doing that, it incurred a lot of control difficulties. You couldn’t just strafe to the side and hide behind a rock and then pop out.
The new vehicle fundamentally addresses all the stuff we wanted to improve with the Mako, and that's part of the value of really just…instead of moving ahead and just continuing into the sequel, the fact that we stopped, we looked at everything about the way people were experiencing the first game, and then designed things that were fundamental solutions. We could've made incremental improvements to certain things like the Mako, but by going back to first principles and thinking about the way the worlds actually ended up, how rough the terrain was, the kind of fighting that you'd want to do there, the kind of exploring, then designing a vehicle that captured exactly those things...knowing all that we know from the first game, we now have a vehicle that's right out of the box so much easier and intuitive to play with.
GO: Mass Effect's inventory system was missing options like "leave" or "take this, not that" which made item management and character outfitting a bit of a struggle. How has Mass Effect 2's inventory interface been improved?
CH: The inventory system is completely different. Nothing about inventory management from the first game is in Mass Effect 2, though all of the actual functionality it provided remains. Basically we took the whole thing out and replaced it with a bunch of different systems that do the same thing. Part of the problem is that, in that first inventory system you could do a huge number of things. You could manage the load-out of your team, you could customize your weapons, you could do all of this stuff through that interface. Now we have separate ways to do these things.
So you can very intuitively manage the load-out of your team, then go to a different system where now you're upgrading your weapons and that feels more intuitive. We've essentially spread things out over several different areas where you can actually do these things in a more natural way and it's a lot more fun.
The other thing that allows us to do, is that each of those aspects can go a lot deeper. For instance, the way that you customize your armor and your appearance and your weapons is a lot deeper than we could've gone before, when it was all managed by one interface.
GO: Last question. Gameplay and auto-narrative closure aside, today's video game stories seem incredibly shallow. Even the best bits of BioShock, which seem genius next to the D-list riffing in a game like Doom 3, feel a bit superficial when scaled against books like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Neil Stephenson's Anathem or Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire. Your reaction?
CH: It's a complex issue with lots of factors. I think part of it is that in books and movies, and I'm sure someone can Google this and see if I'm right, but I think there are just many, many more books that come out per year, and many, many more movies, relative to the big games that get played. I think the fewer works you have in a medium, the more mainstream or accessible they have to be. If games were consumed in tenfold numbers, then you’d have more opportunities to find different genres and niches in terms of the story, and more exploration into really personal and small-scale stuff.
If you look at the entire spectrum of games made, there are definitely some that veer off the beaten path, but they often don't do well enough commercially. They just don't capture the huge mainstream audience that's required to make back the money necessary to put together a triple-A, really high-quality game. Unlike a movie, we can't go on location and have actors show up and film them. Even if you want to make a small private game, if you want to have actors and sets to comprise a story of the caliber you're talking about, you still have to build those actors in your game, you have to build the sets, and you have to build out the overlying technology in general. That's still very expensive. So I think that's one factor, the fact that ultimately a game has to be able to appeal to a broad enough audience.
But I think there's maybe a bigger factor, which is…gaming's just a different medium. I think we have to acknowledge the fact that it's a different medium, that the way a game affects players' emotions in terms of narrative is fundamentally different. If you compare the same elements from a game story to a movie story on paper, certain things won't match up, but I can tell you, I've had a number of game-story experiences that were as profound as any movie I've seen, one of them being ICO.
[SPOILER]
For me, ICO was about a nine-hour game, and you play for about eight hours leading a little girl through dangerous situations. As you move around, she's holding your hand, and you feel the tug of her hand on your controller for eight hours. But then in the ninth hour, you lose her, and suddenly, you don't feel the tug of her hand on your controller anymore.
[/SPOILER]
The way that ICO ends, it affected me more powerfully because of that emotional rollercoaster they put me on than I think maybe any movie that I've seen. And it's because, in an interactive way, they tapped into something about how I connect with a human being in a way that a movie can't. So I think that if a comparison's to be made between games and other mediums, it has to be made in terms of the result of the experience.
GO: Mass Effect 2 release dates...still on track for an early 2010 release?
CH: Yep, absolutely.
GO: Thanks Casey.
Source.
Other Worlds, Artificial Minds, and Death in BioWare's Mass Effect 2 - Casey hudson Part 3
In the following interview, we range from Mass Effect 2's galaxy and making every world unique to artificial intelligence, squad behavior, and permanent death in the universe.
Game On: Let's talk about influences. Anything in particular that inspired your approach to Mass Effect 2's design and story this time around?
Casey Hudson: Well actually, I guess the nice thing about having an established IP is that now our reference can mainly be the first game in terms of differences that we want to establish from it. We're talking less about movie or other references with Mass Effect 2 and more about where we want to go relative to the first one.
That stuff's mainly driven by a combination of what we want to do with the high-level story and features, but also what the feedback was on the first game from everyone. We looked at every review that we read and all the forum feedback that we could find. Every point of reference we could find, we literally cut and paste into a huge document and categorized every point and perspective. That became a picture for us of what players and fans wanted to see next. Features, improvements to systems, places they'd like to go, people that they wanted to see coming back, things like that. That became our blueprint of what we wanted to do, and then we created a game designed to fundamentally capture those things in a natural way.
GO: Besides its trunk story, Mass Effect had a galaxy of optional planets you could explore. Of those, about 90% were represented with superficial text descriptions, while the remaining 10% you could actually land on tended to be mechanically and visually generic. How distinctive are the planets and optional locations this time? What can we expect from planetary exploration?
CH: It's completely different. It's based on an approach that's 180-degrees different. Much of what we were trying to do with the first game was to accomplish this experience of enormous scope, and that involved creating a new IP and all of that stuff. Now we're able to look at the feedback, what people wanted, what we want to do differently, and yeah, dealing with planetary uniqueness was one of the big points of feedback.
With Mass Effect 2, we actually looked at whether we should simply abandon additional worlds outside of the core ones. We seriously evaluated that, because with the first game, we had all these rich core-story-based worlds, and then we added to that a large number of other worlds you could explore and conduct missions on. But in general, there was a lot of feedback, as you say, from people wanting the optional planets to be more distinctive or unique. So we thought, should we even have this extra expanded universe portion of the game?
What we found in evaluating what people were saying, was that they loved the idea that you could look at a galaxy map and find a planet, go out there and find something amazing and explore it. They just wanted more substance and for the whole enterprise to be more interesting.
So we've kept all those additional worlds in Mass Effect 2, but we took a completely different tack, which is that every area has to be…every planet that you find out in the uncharted worlds has to be based on its own unique hook. There has to be something different there, an opportunity for you to play with something in terms of gameplay or the story content or whatever's going on at a given location that's different from what you're able to do in the core story.
With the first one, we built lighter content but were able to deliver a large number of worlds. In Mass Effect 2's case, by contrast, it's about every area being something amazing and special, so that you see one and you go wow, that was a really cool and different experience. But then the next one is completely different from that, and changes your expectations again about what you'll find. The more you do it, the more you realize that anything can happen in the outer parts of the exploration experience.
GO: Turning to Mass Effect 2's artificial intelligence, watching some of the E3 2009 combat videos I was struck by how agile Shepard himself seemed to be, but how slow and cover-ignorant the enemy AI was. Will the oppositional AI in the final be more shrewd and self-preservationist?
CH: As you hinted, being a demo we've got a short period to get across as many features and moments as possible to describe what the experience is going to be like. We gave the demo operators something like 30 missiles for their heavy weapons, so they could blast through the latter part of the level, whereas in the game those missiles will be a very precious commodity hat you might save to use as the peacemaker at the end of a boss fight.
Just to be clear, the AI in the demo wasn't as defensive as it'll be in the final game, but the other thing is, AI's been a huge focus for us. It's already huge improvement, where we are right now with the game, and it'll continue to be something that we tweak. Bear in mind that many of the systems in the E3 demo were actually new additions to the game experience. As such there was no opportunity to tune them so that enemies were more tactically aware. So we'd just added new weapons and abilities in terms of taking cover and so on, but when those things are initially introduced, we haven't had a chance to tune much. The demo's point was to convey some of the things you'll get to do, what the game's going to look and play like. Between now and when we release, the tuning of the AI…it's already a lot more sophisticated than it was in the E3 demo.
GO: Speaking of weapons, the demo highlighted something like a gravity missile launcher?
CH: It's a fairly conventional guided missile launcher, but when you combine that with the biotic abilities…what happened a lot in the demo, was someone would lift a character and they'd kind of float helplessly up on a zero-G field. Then you hit them witih the missie launcher, which is guided so it tracks in on them. It may hit them from the side or the bottom, and the impact blasts them, because they're floating in zero-G, it blasts them in one direction or another. So that's an example of the combination of these powers and of how it's a lot more physics based this time.
GO: When squad members lose health, will they use cover more effectively? When they go down, will they stay down and then automatically "rise up" at the end of battle as in the original? Are they ever in life or death jeopardy beyond narrative scripting?
CH: The squad recovery mechanism is similar to the first game. Being able to have squad members knocked out but not dead is one of the fun things about having a squad in the sense that, when you have…it's the difference between a single-character game, where either you're dead or you're not, and then you have to come up with grades for bleeding out and so on, so that you know when you're in trouble and your back's actually against the wall.
Similarly here, when one character's down, you know it's time to be really careful. When you're fighting on your own and both of your character's are out, then it creates an even more interesting narrative in combat. We've preserved that, but there's also an IP explanation in the Mass Effect universe. The idea is that your battle suit will make sure you're unconscious if you fall below a certain level of health so that you can be revived versus allowing you to actually be killed.
In terms of permanent death, your squad mates don't die in normal combat, because that'd be artificial anyway. If it happened, you'd just reload and play the fight again, because it's too big a deal to lose a major character in the course of combat. That said, the story itself is fundamentally meant to involve the life and death of your entire team and individual team members. That's where the main characters you recruit, including Commander Shepard, can die as part of the main story and you can't just reload and play a short stretch of gameplay to change things. How death works, who dies and who doesn't, is an intrinsic part of the way you play the entire game.
Game On: Let's talk about influences. Anything in particular that inspired your approach to Mass Effect 2's design and story this time around?
Casey Hudson: Well actually, I guess the nice thing about having an established IP is that now our reference can mainly be the first game in terms of differences that we want to establish from it. We're talking less about movie or other references with Mass Effect 2 and more about where we want to go relative to the first one.
That stuff's mainly driven by a combination of what we want to do with the high-level story and features, but also what the feedback was on the first game from everyone. We looked at every review that we read and all the forum feedback that we could find. Every point of reference we could find, we literally cut and paste into a huge document and categorized every point and perspective. That became a picture for us of what players and fans wanted to see next. Features, improvements to systems, places they'd like to go, people that they wanted to see coming back, things like that. That became our blueprint of what we wanted to do, and then we created a game designed to fundamentally capture those things in a natural way.
GO: Besides its trunk story, Mass Effect had a galaxy of optional planets you could explore. Of those, about 90% were represented with superficial text descriptions, while the remaining 10% you could actually land on tended to be mechanically and visually generic. How distinctive are the planets and optional locations this time? What can we expect from planetary exploration?
CH: It's completely different. It's based on an approach that's 180-degrees different. Much of what we were trying to do with the first game was to accomplish this experience of enormous scope, and that involved creating a new IP and all of that stuff. Now we're able to look at the feedback, what people wanted, what we want to do differently, and yeah, dealing with planetary uniqueness was one of the big points of feedback.
With Mass Effect 2, we actually looked at whether we should simply abandon additional worlds outside of the core ones. We seriously evaluated that, because with the first game, we had all these rich core-story-based worlds, and then we added to that a large number of other worlds you could explore and conduct missions on. But in general, there was a lot of feedback, as you say, from people wanting the optional planets to be more distinctive or unique. So we thought, should we even have this extra expanded universe portion of the game?
What we found in evaluating what people were saying, was that they loved the idea that you could look at a galaxy map and find a planet, go out there and find something amazing and explore it. They just wanted more substance and for the whole enterprise to be more interesting.
So we've kept all those additional worlds in Mass Effect 2, but we took a completely different tack, which is that every area has to be…every planet that you find out in the uncharted worlds has to be based on its own unique hook. There has to be something different there, an opportunity for you to play with something in terms of gameplay or the story content or whatever's going on at a given location that's different from what you're able to do in the core story.
With the first one, we built lighter content but were able to deliver a large number of worlds. In Mass Effect 2's case, by contrast, it's about every area being something amazing and special, so that you see one and you go wow, that was a really cool and different experience. But then the next one is completely different from that, and changes your expectations again about what you'll find. The more you do it, the more you realize that anything can happen in the outer parts of the exploration experience.
GO: Turning to Mass Effect 2's artificial intelligence, watching some of the E3 2009 combat videos I was struck by how agile Shepard himself seemed to be, but how slow and cover-ignorant the enemy AI was. Will the oppositional AI in the final be more shrewd and self-preservationist?
CH: As you hinted, being a demo we've got a short period to get across as many features and moments as possible to describe what the experience is going to be like. We gave the demo operators something like 30 missiles for their heavy weapons, so they could blast through the latter part of the level, whereas in the game those missiles will be a very precious commodity hat you might save to use as the peacemaker at the end of a boss fight.
Just to be clear, the AI in the demo wasn't as defensive as it'll be in the final game, but the other thing is, AI's been a huge focus for us. It's already huge improvement, where we are right now with the game, and it'll continue to be something that we tweak. Bear in mind that many of the systems in the E3 demo were actually new additions to the game experience. As such there was no opportunity to tune them so that enemies were more tactically aware. So we'd just added new weapons and abilities in terms of taking cover and so on, but when those things are initially introduced, we haven't had a chance to tune much. The demo's point was to convey some of the things you'll get to do, what the game's going to look and play like. Between now and when we release, the tuning of the AI…it's already a lot more sophisticated than it was in the E3 demo.
GO: Speaking of weapons, the demo highlighted something like a gravity missile launcher?
CH: It's a fairly conventional guided missile launcher, but when you combine that with the biotic abilities…what happened a lot in the demo, was someone would lift a character and they'd kind of float helplessly up on a zero-G field. Then you hit them witih the missie launcher, which is guided so it tracks in on them. It may hit them from the side or the bottom, and the impact blasts them, because they're floating in zero-G, it blasts them in one direction or another. So that's an example of the combination of these powers and of how it's a lot more physics based this time.
GO: When squad members lose health, will they use cover more effectively? When they go down, will they stay down and then automatically "rise up" at the end of battle as in the original? Are they ever in life or death jeopardy beyond narrative scripting?
CH: The squad recovery mechanism is similar to the first game. Being able to have squad members knocked out but not dead is one of the fun things about having a squad in the sense that, when you have…it's the difference between a single-character game, where either you're dead or you're not, and then you have to come up with grades for bleeding out and so on, so that you know when you're in trouble and your back's actually against the wall.
Similarly here, when one character's down, you know it's time to be really careful. When you're fighting on your own and both of your character's are out, then it creates an even more interesting narrative in combat. We've preserved that, but there's also an IP explanation in the Mass Effect universe. The idea is that your battle suit will make sure you're unconscious if you fall below a certain level of health so that you can be revived versus allowing you to actually be killed.
In terms of permanent death, your squad mates don't die in normal combat, because that'd be artificial anyway. If it happened, you'd just reload and play the fight again, because it's too big a deal to lose a major character in the course of combat. That said, the story itself is fundamentally meant to involve the life and death of your entire team and individual team members. That's where the main characters you recruit, including Commander Shepard, can die as part of the main story and you can't just reload and play a short stretch of gameplay to change things. How death works, who dies and who doesn't, is an intrinsic part of the way you play the entire game.
Source.
Interrupting Characters, Ethical Choices, and Story Pacing in Mass Effect 2 - Casey Hudson Part 2
In the following interview, we range from Mass Effect 2's revamped dialogue system and getting 'physical' in conversations to ethical nuances and maintaining emotional intensity.
Game On: Mass Effect originally touted the option to interrupt conversations with other characters, but the feature was dropped and instead resurrected for Mass Effect 2. Is interrupting really dynamic though? Or is it for all intents and purpose just another "off-camera" dialogue option?
Casey Hudson: Interruptible dialogue was meant to be a feature in the original Mass Effect, and in a sense it actually was a feature. This is where you can hit the X button to interrupt someone and talk over them, but the thing that happened was, it was one of the things that in the context of developing an incredibly ambitious game we weren't able to fully support.
So you can interrupt people, but to fully support it, we would've had to build the content that was different for every time you interrupt. Likewise, we would've had to do more to tell the player when that variable content was available. Take the reporter that accosts Shepard on the Citadel. There's a line you can choose to actually punch her out. It's the interrupt option, and if you elect to, it's satisfying because Shepard cuts her off and literally knocks her out. But because you don't know that particular option is going to be any more satisfying than the others where you could also cut her off, you know, yeah, interrupting just wasn't fully supported and didn't come through as much.
In Mass Effect 2, we're able to look at partially realized features like this and say, how do you perfect what we were trying to do there? We've put the time into really getting it right this time and into establishing the kind of content that fully supports it. At certain points in the game, not every conversation necessarily, because conversation is not just conversation, it happens in dynamic situations now, and you're ducking under gunfire or you're flying in a car or whatever it may be and there just happens to be conversation going on. So it's more dynamic to begin with. But there are situations or moments where we've given the player the opportunity to be physical in a particular situation. When it happens, you'll see an icon, either for the right-trigger, where it's blue and it's a paragon interrupt, or it's the left trigger and red for a renegade interrupt. That signifies a moment where you can take action. You can allow the dialogue to continue uninterrupted, of course, but you'll know that if you want to, you can physically seize control and change the course of events.
We pepper the game with moments like these. They're in every level, so it's a system that's fully supported. It's also something that maintains the dynamism of conversation or dialogue situations. It's not even really an interrupt system, it's more of a "take action" system. In Mass Effect it was more about dialogue and could you interrupt somebody verbally. Now it's more like you're talking to somebody because you think they're in danger and you see they're about to get shot by a sniper and for a moment you have the ability to push them out of the way. That'd be an example of a paragon interrupt. Or like we showed at E3, there's a guy that's hassling you, and you have a moment where you can push him over a ledge. That moment can pass, and if it does, you have to deal with the situation in other ways.
So it's about more physical elements, with the dialogue being more physical and dynamic to make it blend better with the rest of the action in the game.
GO: Speaking of ethical actions, in Knights of the Old Republic your morality system was scalar with "light side" versus "dark side" points distributed along a single axis. In Mass Effect it was represented by paragon, i.e. "balanced/systemic" versus renegade, i.e. "anarchic" actions, and you could see both separately at the same time. How does it work in Mass Effect 2?
CH: It works similarly in terms of accumulating paragon and renegade points separately. That said, we're always working on improving the decisions that feed the system so they're less about being good or evil and more about the agonizing choice between sacrifices. For example, sacrifices that are personal or selfless versus more brutal choices that might accomplish something more quickly but at significant cost to someone else.
Part of it's that people will play these games multiple times, the first time generally making the choices they think they'd personally make, the second time maybe taking strictly paragon choices, a third time just to see all the renegade permutations. We're always trying to make the decisions a little more sophisticated and agonizing so there's never a right choice. It comes down to your personal values. The trick is that, when you have a meter that shows all of your accumulated decisions, that's where it ultimately seems gamier than the actual decisions are. At the same time, it's helpful to give player something to look at to gauge what their tendencies have been over the course of the game.
GO: At Leipzig GCDC 2007, I hit a session with Ken Rolston and Bob Bates about storytelling in games. Ralston said he hated the way some game stories tease deep subtext, then fall apart when you call their bluff. At one point he actually rose to physically illustrate the way dialogue currently works in games, waving his arms up and down rapidly to suggest sawtooth-style input/output during action sequences that switches to a flat line when dialogue interrupts. That was part of what didn't work as well for me in Mass Effect, those long periods of wandering and talking, snapping to non-dialogic action sequence, back to wandering and talking again, etc. Does Mass Effect 2 approach that interplay differently?
CH: I think it's about tuning the pacing so it all feels like one experience. Obviously in good storytelling, you need some alternation between action and times for reflection. Star Wars opens with what's probably still the most intense space battles in movies, and then a few minutes later, you're watching Luke Skywalker as a farm boy gazing at those two suns and think about his life. The movie calms way down before it turns back to creating more action.
I think the issue is, when games are telling a story that alternates in the way Rolston's describing, sometimes games end up descending too low into something where the drama leaks out of it. Whereas in a movie, in a well done movie, when it's time for reflection, there's an emotional intensity to it. There's still drama and really great complementary aspects like camera and lighting effects.
That's where in Mass Effect 2, we've tried to ensure we're maintaining the emotional intensity, even during the more reflective moments that play out between more intensely active ones. In terms of pacing, if you have conversations inside an action scene or story development or something cinematic inside an action scene, and then it's framed by action, i.e. it's not actually meant to be a point of reflection, then the dialogue itself needs to maintain that intensity. That's definitely something we're doing in Mass Effect 2, because frankly we've built the systems to support it this time. These are systems we just didn't have before.
Before, you'd have characters talking with over the shoulder cameras, or interrupting the middle of combat if that's where you wanted it. Now we can have them ducking behind cover and you're interactively having a conversation about what you're going to do, but you're yelling over gunfire and you see tracers going over your head. You move up to the next position of cover, and you're yelling and interacting dialogically. There are scenes that we have in this really crazy bar, for instance, where the music is so loud you actually can't hear the conversation and it's all subtitled. It's like in a John Woo movie, where you've got the intensity of the bar and this crazy futuristic rave that's going on, and the conversation simply becomes a fluid means to express this amazing location.
Game On: Mass Effect originally touted the option to interrupt conversations with other characters, but the feature was dropped and instead resurrected for Mass Effect 2. Is interrupting really dynamic though? Or is it for all intents and purpose just another "off-camera" dialogue option?
Casey Hudson: Interruptible dialogue was meant to be a feature in the original Mass Effect, and in a sense it actually was a feature. This is where you can hit the X button to interrupt someone and talk over them, but the thing that happened was, it was one of the things that in the context of developing an incredibly ambitious game we weren't able to fully support.
So you can interrupt people, but to fully support it, we would've had to build the content that was different for every time you interrupt. Likewise, we would've had to do more to tell the player when that variable content was available. Take the reporter that accosts Shepard on the Citadel. There's a line you can choose to actually punch her out. It's the interrupt option, and if you elect to, it's satisfying because Shepard cuts her off and literally knocks her out. But because you don't know that particular option is going to be any more satisfying than the others where you could also cut her off, you know, yeah, interrupting just wasn't fully supported and didn't come through as much.
In Mass Effect 2, we're able to look at partially realized features like this and say, how do you perfect what we were trying to do there? We've put the time into really getting it right this time and into establishing the kind of content that fully supports it. At certain points in the game, not every conversation necessarily, because conversation is not just conversation, it happens in dynamic situations now, and you're ducking under gunfire or you're flying in a car or whatever it may be and there just happens to be conversation going on. So it's more dynamic to begin with. But there are situations or moments where we've given the player the opportunity to be physical in a particular situation. When it happens, you'll see an icon, either for the right-trigger, where it's blue and it's a paragon interrupt, or it's the left trigger and red for a renegade interrupt. That signifies a moment where you can take action. You can allow the dialogue to continue uninterrupted, of course, but you'll know that if you want to, you can physically seize control and change the course of events.
We pepper the game with moments like these. They're in every level, so it's a system that's fully supported. It's also something that maintains the dynamism of conversation or dialogue situations. It's not even really an interrupt system, it's more of a "take action" system. In Mass Effect it was more about dialogue and could you interrupt somebody verbally. Now it's more like you're talking to somebody because you think they're in danger and you see they're about to get shot by a sniper and for a moment you have the ability to push them out of the way. That'd be an example of a paragon interrupt. Or like we showed at E3, there's a guy that's hassling you, and you have a moment where you can push him over a ledge. That moment can pass, and if it does, you have to deal with the situation in other ways.
So it's about more physical elements, with the dialogue being more physical and dynamic to make it blend better with the rest of the action in the game.
GO: Speaking of ethical actions, in Knights of the Old Republic your morality system was scalar with "light side" versus "dark side" points distributed along a single axis. In Mass Effect it was represented by paragon, i.e. "balanced/systemic" versus renegade, i.e. "anarchic" actions, and you could see both separately at the same time. How does it work in Mass Effect 2?
CH: It works similarly in terms of accumulating paragon and renegade points separately. That said, we're always working on improving the decisions that feed the system so they're less about being good or evil and more about the agonizing choice between sacrifices. For example, sacrifices that are personal or selfless versus more brutal choices that might accomplish something more quickly but at significant cost to someone else.
Part of it's that people will play these games multiple times, the first time generally making the choices they think they'd personally make, the second time maybe taking strictly paragon choices, a third time just to see all the renegade permutations. We're always trying to make the decisions a little more sophisticated and agonizing so there's never a right choice. It comes down to your personal values. The trick is that, when you have a meter that shows all of your accumulated decisions, that's where it ultimately seems gamier than the actual decisions are. At the same time, it's helpful to give player something to look at to gauge what their tendencies have been over the course of the game.
GO: At Leipzig GCDC 2007, I hit a session with Ken Rolston and Bob Bates about storytelling in games. Ralston said he hated the way some game stories tease deep subtext, then fall apart when you call their bluff. At one point he actually rose to physically illustrate the way dialogue currently works in games, waving his arms up and down rapidly to suggest sawtooth-style input/output during action sequences that switches to a flat line when dialogue interrupts. That was part of what didn't work as well for me in Mass Effect, those long periods of wandering and talking, snapping to non-dialogic action sequence, back to wandering and talking again, etc. Does Mass Effect 2 approach that interplay differently?
CH: I think it's about tuning the pacing so it all feels like one experience. Obviously in good storytelling, you need some alternation between action and times for reflection. Star Wars opens with what's probably still the most intense space battles in movies, and then a few minutes later, you're watching Luke Skywalker as a farm boy gazing at those two suns and think about his life. The movie calms way down before it turns back to creating more action.
I think the issue is, when games are telling a story that alternates in the way Rolston's describing, sometimes games end up descending too low into something where the drama leaks out of it. Whereas in a movie, in a well done movie, when it's time for reflection, there's an emotional intensity to it. There's still drama and really great complementary aspects like camera and lighting effects.
That's where in Mass Effect 2, we've tried to ensure we're maintaining the emotional intensity, even during the more reflective moments that play out between more intensely active ones. In terms of pacing, if you have conversations inside an action scene or story development or something cinematic inside an action scene, and then it's framed by action, i.e. it's not actually meant to be a point of reflection, then the dialogue itself needs to maintain that intensity. That's definitely something we're doing in Mass Effect 2, because frankly we've built the systems to support it this time. These are systems we just didn't have before.
Before, you'd have characters talking with over the shoulder cameras, or interrupting the middle of combat if that's where you wanted it. Now we can have them ducking behind cover and you're interactively having a conversation about what you're going to do, but you're yelling over gunfire and you see tracers going over your head. You move up to the next position of cover, and you're yelling and interacting dialogically. There are scenes that we have in this really crazy bar, for instance, where the music is so loud you actually can't hear the conversation and it's all subtitled. It's like in a John Woo movie, where you've got the intensity of the bar and this crazy futuristic rave that's going on, and the conversation simply becomes a fluid means to express this amazing location.
Source.
Peter Jackson Explains How Fate Killed Halo And Gave Birth To District 9
Peter Jackson has been a gamer his entire life, so when Microsoft hired him to produce the movie version of Halo, there was genuine excitement in the air.
The buzz grew as fans, and Hollywood, questioned Jackson's choice of first-time director Neill Blomkamp to helm the big-budget project. But that ultimately became a moot point. As the movie budget escalated and the demands by Microsoft increased, not even a pair of giant Hollywood studios could afford to foot the bill for the big screen version of Halo. But fate stepped in and Jackson ended up creating an original sci-fi film with District 9.
Gamers will get to see a sci-fi collaboration between producer Jackson and co-writer/director Blomkamp this summer with Tristar Pictures' District 9. Rather than basing the film on a hit game, the duo created an original alien story and filmed it documentary-style. Jackson was on hand at Comic-Con to screen the film and talk about how Halo begat District 9.
Jackson and Blomkamp were going to bring Microsoft's Halo videogame franchise to the big screen, but when Hollywood bailed on Microsoft's demands, the duo ended up creating District 9, which opens August 14.
"Well, I believe in fate. And a lot of times in my career I've just let fate decide what happens," said Jackson. "I don't try to influence things too much. ‘Cause I kind of believe in some weird force that's out there, sort of deciding what happens in your life. And I just look back on it and think, well fate made a decision that it wasn't gonna be Halo that we made, it was gonna be District 9. 'Cause it literally happened within 24 hours. I mean, we woke up one morning thinking we were making Halo. That day we got the news that the studios, Fox and Universal, didn't want to make the film anymore."
When asked exactly what happened with the Halo film, Jackson replied, "It wasn't like the studios didn't want to make it with us, they just didn't want to make Halo anymore because they were arguing amongst themselves and with Microsoft and the rights and the deals and everything else. It was all these little politics that were kicking in."
District 9 is set in South Africa and focuses on a quarantined area where aliens have been kept for 30 years. The film literally took shape the same day that Jackson's Halo was scrapped.
"During the course of that day, 'cause we were all in New Zealand together…Neill had been working on Halo for five or six months, we decided to take control of our own lives a little bit and we thought, ‘Well, let's make an original movie. Let's keep it low budget. Let's try to finance it independently so we don't have to get involved with studio politics,'" explained Jackson. "It's sort of, do something that we can control without putting ourselves into a Halo situation again. And that's what happened. And so by the end of that day, we had lost Halo but we had started District 9."
The buzz grew as fans, and Hollywood, questioned Jackson's choice of first-time director Neill Blomkamp to helm the big-budget project. But that ultimately became a moot point. As the movie budget escalated and the demands by Microsoft increased, not even a pair of giant Hollywood studios could afford to foot the bill for the big screen version of Halo. But fate stepped in and Jackson ended up creating an original sci-fi film with District 9.
Gamers will get to see a sci-fi collaboration between producer Jackson and co-writer/director Blomkamp this summer with Tristar Pictures' District 9. Rather than basing the film on a hit game, the duo created an original alien story and filmed it documentary-style. Jackson was on hand at Comic-Con to screen the film and talk about how Halo begat District 9.
Jackson and Blomkamp were going to bring Microsoft's Halo videogame franchise to the big screen, but when Hollywood bailed on Microsoft's demands, the duo ended up creating District 9, which opens August 14.
"Well, I believe in fate. And a lot of times in my career I've just let fate decide what happens," said Jackson. "I don't try to influence things too much. ‘Cause I kind of believe in some weird force that's out there, sort of deciding what happens in your life. And I just look back on it and think, well fate made a decision that it wasn't gonna be Halo that we made, it was gonna be District 9. 'Cause it literally happened within 24 hours. I mean, we woke up one morning thinking we were making Halo. That day we got the news that the studios, Fox and Universal, didn't want to make the film anymore."
When asked exactly what happened with the Halo film, Jackson replied, "It wasn't like the studios didn't want to make it with us, they just didn't want to make Halo anymore because they were arguing amongst themselves and with Microsoft and the rights and the deals and everything else. It was all these little politics that were kicking in."
District 9 is set in South Africa and focuses on a quarantined area where aliens have been kept for 30 years. The film literally took shape the same day that Jackson's Halo was scrapped.
"During the course of that day, 'cause we were all in New Zealand together…Neill had been working on Halo for five or six months, we decided to take control of our own lives a little bit and we thought, ‘Well, let's make an original movie. Let's keep it low budget. Let's try to finance it independently so we don't have to get involved with studio politics,'" explained Jackson. "It's sort of, do something that we can control without putting ourselves into a Halo situation again. And that's what happened. And so by the end of that day, we had lost Halo but we had started District 9."
Source.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Building Bridges: Casey Hudson Talks Mass Effect 2
BioWare's Xbox 360 and Windows interactive space opera Mass Effect 2 is still half a year away for most of us, but for lead producer Casey Hudson it's happening right now. Busy as he is, I managed to grab him away from dotting i's and crossing t's as his team moves into the sequel's final feature beats to make its planned early 2010 debut. In the following interview, we range from Mass Effect 2's development cycle to lessons learned about narrative pacing to the mystery of what's tucked away in your original Mass Effect save game and poised to introduce all the choices you made from the first game into the sequel like a psychological payload.
This is Part One.
Game On: How would you describe the Mass Effect series to someone who's never played it?
Casey Hudson: To me, it's a huge science fiction universe in the style of the big science fiction properties like Star Trek and Star Wars, though more targeted at an adult experience. We're trying to create something that's an entire universe people can immerse themselves in, but also something for the mature demographic that wants an adult story. That's why we've take a Jack Bauer approach to Commander Shepard [the series protagonist]. We've tried to present you with agonizing choices as you navigate your way through the sequel and built that into a bigger, much darker story.
GO: Mass Effect hit for Xbox 360 and Windows in late 2007 and early 2008. How long has Mass Effect 2 been in development?
CH: We started at the end of working on Mass Effect, so slightly before Mass Effect hit shelves. When all's said and done, we'll have roughly two years invested in Mass Effect 2 total, so right now we're about a year and a half into it. We had a terrific starting point to build from, by which I mean all the work that went into Mass Effect's world building, and now after a year and a half of designing tons of new content and perfecting new features we have a pretty complete next game in the series.
GO: Did things ramp up faster as you turned to Mass Effect 2 given what you've been able to carry over in lessons learned and shared technology?
CH: Yeah, it did, though I think one thing people are going to be surprised about is that we didn't take the easy way out. We didn't just make a sequel where the same features and the same characters and environments move around differently to tell a different story. Mass Effect 2 is a game that's absolutely packed with new ideas and places. In fact I actually can't think of an aspect of the game that we haven't overhauled and made 100% better. I think it's going to surprise people how much we've improved things. In fact I think it'll be a game that gets talked about simply on the basis of how much we've gone in and touched, including things that already worked well in the first one.
GO: I'm currently replaying Mass Effect, and it's taken me almost 10 hours to get off the Citadel [the starter space station] and out exploring the universe. It feels slow, story-wise, in part because I'm rolling through all the optional stuff to avoid missing anything. Can you get out and about earlier in Mass Effect 2?
CH: I think it has more to do with tuning the pacing and how the rewards are structured throughout the game, because the inverse of what you're describing is also true. Some people find the main story so compelling that even though they want to wander off the beaten path, they end up clawing as fast as they can through the core story. Then they'll say the game was only 12 hours or 15 hours and that it was shorter than they wanted.
So it's kind of interesting, because in your case, your play style, you want to look around, you want to find everything, and the Citadel at the beginning feels too long. In the alternate case, they're trying to get through the story as fast as possible and so it feels too short. I think that actually highlights the way choice is supported in the first game. You can play around the periphery and try to see everything or you can play through the story quickly. It's all down to choice.
On the other hand, in your case, the reward and pacing in the Citadel probably shouldn't have made you feel like the real story hadn't gotten started yet, or that it hadn't opened up as much as you wanted. I think those kinds of things, like how fast do you get a ship that lets you travel where you want, or broader things like do you feel the story's offering you freedom and enticing rewards and that things are progressing fast enough...those are all things we're addressing significantly in Mass Effect 2.
GO: So I'm probably inadvertently paying the game a compliment?
CH: That's why I think it comes down to pacing. It's like in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, where even though Star Wars was an established universe, in our game we still had a patch of real estate inside that property that required a certain amount of explanation. Similarly with Mass Effect, we had a new universe to get people acclimated to before we blew the whole thing wide open.
Looking at those two games and the way people played them, it was a major component of what we did before we started working on Mass Effect 2. We looked at the way people play some of very things you're talking about. That, and we gauged whether people felt their choice to either play in a very detailed way or get through things quickly was being rewarded.
So we've done a lot to adjust the tuning, especially in the opening. Getting you into the action faster, getting you making decisions and really moving through the story faster, so that as the world opens up around you, you feel like you're still quickly advancing the high-level story.
GO: Just to be clear, you can either start from scratch with a brand new character in Mass Effect 2, or import your character from your Mass Effect save game, right?
CH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean firstly, Mass Effect 2 is just a much better game than Mass Effect in virtually every way. We've made a lot of improvements, such that I think it'll have a broader audience and broader appeal. The combat plays better, the graphics are better, it has a better tutorial, all the things that make a game like this more accessible.
To support that, obviously we needed to make sure it's a game people can jump into knowing nothing about the Mass Effect universe, or even that there was a first game. At the same time, one of the really big things we're trying to do that I think has never been done in this way before is tie together a trilogy of huge games where the entire story is one thread that's told by the player. All of your decisions and choices really start to snowball over the course of the trilogy because it's picking up the entire record of how you've played, from the first moments of the first game all the way through to the ending of the third game. In that instance, we want to make sure we're really rewarding people who've played the first Mass Effect.
Likewise, if Mass Effect 2 is your entry point and you're really getting into the story, you can still back up, pop in Mass Effect, play through, get your end save game, and come back to the trilogy from that angle.
GO: How significant are the variables being indexed in the save games, and how threaded throughout the Mass Effect 2 experience are they?
CH: It's completely different from anything you've played before, because it's literally, potentially threaded into everything that happens. When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things. Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information.
When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information. And it's not just what your ending was, or a couple of the big choices, you know, where we could have stuck a conversation at the beginning and asked you what you did and moved on. This is literally hundreds of things.
Anytime we have a plot or a character or situation in Mass Effect 2, we think about what you did, potentially, in the first game that might affect said plot or character or situation in the second. We can look at each variable and dynamically change what happens in the moment. It ranges from small things like, by way of example, Conrad Verner was a fan of Commander Shepard's that you met in the first game, and it's like you meet this guy in an alley and you can be nice to him or you can be a jerk to him, and at the time you might have been thinking of it as just a trite role-playing convention, good-guy bad-guy, and that's that.
Jump forward two years. Now you're playing Mass Effect 2, and oh my god, who's this, it's Conrad Verner! And based on what you've done, you realize that while the moment in the first game maybe seemed throwaway, now Conrad's back and involved in another plot in a game you're playing two years later...and what you did two years ago is meaningfully affecting what's happening. That's a small example.
[SPOILER WARNING]
The larger examples are things like...take the way you navigate through the ending of Mass Effect, how you left the galaxy in a certain state with humans, whether they were in control of the Galactic Council or not, things like that. In Mass Effect 2, when you walk around, you'll see all the areas affected by your decisions, including large scale stuff like the Citadel. You'll see signs all over the place that either humans are in control or that they're working more with the aliens and the Citadel is more like it was in the first game.
[END SPOILER]
It's also part of dialogues, part of signs that you see, even reflected in PA announcements that you'll hear. So it's woven through the entire experience, from beginning to end.
GO: You've had that level of continuous granularity planned from the beginning then?
CH: Yeah, it was always the plan to be able to import your character, therefore we included all those variables in the save game. We try and work the trilogy story from both the high level and the detail level. We've always known where the trilogy was going on the highest level, thematically speaking, through all three stories. But then as we get into developing each game, that's when we get down to the mid-level, like what are the actual workings of the plot and major characters and such.
The save game has every variable that you've set as a player, and as we delve into the detail levels of things like actual words that are spoken, art that appears in levels, sounds and music and subtle things as such...those can all be looked at, and how they comprise the world of each sequel can be affected by your choices in the prior ones.
This is Part One.
Game On: How would you describe the Mass Effect series to someone who's never played it?
Casey Hudson: To me, it's a huge science fiction universe in the style of the big science fiction properties like Star Trek and Star Wars, though more targeted at an adult experience. We're trying to create something that's an entire universe people can immerse themselves in, but also something for the mature demographic that wants an adult story. That's why we've take a Jack Bauer approach to Commander Shepard [the series protagonist]. We've tried to present you with agonizing choices as you navigate your way through the sequel and built that into a bigger, much darker story.
GO: Mass Effect hit for Xbox 360 and Windows in late 2007 and early 2008. How long has Mass Effect 2 been in development?
CH: We started at the end of working on Mass Effect, so slightly before Mass Effect hit shelves. When all's said and done, we'll have roughly two years invested in Mass Effect 2 total, so right now we're about a year and a half into it. We had a terrific starting point to build from, by which I mean all the work that went into Mass Effect's world building, and now after a year and a half of designing tons of new content and perfecting new features we have a pretty complete next game in the series.
GO: Did things ramp up faster as you turned to Mass Effect 2 given what you've been able to carry over in lessons learned and shared technology?
CH: Yeah, it did, though I think one thing people are going to be surprised about is that we didn't take the easy way out. We didn't just make a sequel where the same features and the same characters and environments move around differently to tell a different story. Mass Effect 2 is a game that's absolutely packed with new ideas and places. In fact I actually can't think of an aspect of the game that we haven't overhauled and made 100% better. I think it's going to surprise people how much we've improved things. In fact I think it'll be a game that gets talked about simply on the basis of how much we've gone in and touched, including things that already worked well in the first one.
GO: I'm currently replaying Mass Effect, and it's taken me almost 10 hours to get off the Citadel [the starter space station] and out exploring the universe. It feels slow, story-wise, in part because I'm rolling through all the optional stuff to avoid missing anything. Can you get out and about earlier in Mass Effect 2?
CH: I think it has more to do with tuning the pacing and how the rewards are structured throughout the game, because the inverse of what you're describing is also true. Some people find the main story so compelling that even though they want to wander off the beaten path, they end up clawing as fast as they can through the core story. Then they'll say the game was only 12 hours or 15 hours and that it was shorter than they wanted.
So it's kind of interesting, because in your case, your play style, you want to look around, you want to find everything, and the Citadel at the beginning feels too long. In the alternate case, they're trying to get through the story as fast as possible and so it feels too short. I think that actually highlights the way choice is supported in the first game. You can play around the periphery and try to see everything or you can play through the story quickly. It's all down to choice.
On the other hand, in your case, the reward and pacing in the Citadel probably shouldn't have made you feel like the real story hadn't gotten started yet, or that it hadn't opened up as much as you wanted. I think those kinds of things, like how fast do you get a ship that lets you travel where you want, or broader things like do you feel the story's offering you freedom and enticing rewards and that things are progressing fast enough...those are all things we're addressing significantly in Mass Effect 2.
GO: So I'm probably inadvertently paying the game a compliment?
CH: That's why I think it comes down to pacing. It's like in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, where even though Star Wars was an established universe, in our game we still had a patch of real estate inside that property that required a certain amount of explanation. Similarly with Mass Effect, we had a new universe to get people acclimated to before we blew the whole thing wide open.
Looking at those two games and the way people played them, it was a major component of what we did before we started working on Mass Effect 2. We looked at the way people play some of very things you're talking about. That, and we gauged whether people felt their choice to either play in a very detailed way or get through things quickly was being rewarded.
So we've done a lot to adjust the tuning, especially in the opening. Getting you into the action faster, getting you making decisions and really moving through the story faster, so that as the world opens up around you, you feel like you're still quickly advancing the high-level story.
GO: Just to be clear, you can either start from scratch with a brand new character in Mass Effect 2, or import your character from your Mass Effect save game, right?
CH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean firstly, Mass Effect 2 is just a much better game than Mass Effect in virtually every way. We've made a lot of improvements, such that I think it'll have a broader audience and broader appeal. The combat plays better, the graphics are better, it has a better tutorial, all the things that make a game like this more accessible.
To support that, obviously we needed to make sure it's a game people can jump into knowing nothing about the Mass Effect universe, or even that there was a first game. At the same time, one of the really big things we're trying to do that I think has never been done in this way before is tie together a trilogy of huge games where the entire story is one thread that's told by the player. All of your decisions and choices really start to snowball over the course of the trilogy because it's picking up the entire record of how you've played, from the first moments of the first game all the way through to the ending of the third game. In that instance, we want to make sure we're really rewarding people who've played the first Mass Effect.
Likewise, if Mass Effect 2 is your entry point and you're really getting into the story, you can still back up, pop in Mass Effect, play through, get your end save game, and come back to the trilogy from that angle.
GO: How significant are the variables being indexed in the save games, and how threaded throughout the Mass Effect 2 experience are they?
CH: It's completely different from anything you've played before, because it's literally, potentially threaded into everything that happens. When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things. Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information.
When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information. And it's not just what your ending was, or a couple of the big choices, you know, where we could have stuck a conversation at the beginning and asked you what you did and moved on. This is literally hundreds of things.
Anytime we have a plot or a character or situation in Mass Effect 2, we think about what you did, potentially, in the first game that might affect said plot or character or situation in the second. We can look at each variable and dynamically change what happens in the moment. It ranges from small things like, by way of example, Conrad Verner was a fan of Commander Shepard's that you met in the first game, and it's like you meet this guy in an alley and you can be nice to him or you can be a jerk to him, and at the time you might have been thinking of it as just a trite role-playing convention, good-guy bad-guy, and that's that.
Jump forward two years. Now you're playing Mass Effect 2, and oh my god, who's this, it's Conrad Verner! And based on what you've done, you realize that while the moment in the first game maybe seemed throwaway, now Conrad's back and involved in another plot in a game you're playing two years later...and what you did two years ago is meaningfully affecting what's happening. That's a small example.
[SPOILER WARNING]
The larger examples are things like...take the way you navigate through the ending of Mass Effect, how you left the galaxy in a certain state with humans, whether they were in control of the Galactic Council or not, things like that. In Mass Effect 2, when you walk around, you'll see all the areas affected by your decisions, including large scale stuff like the Citadel. You'll see signs all over the place that either humans are in control or that they're working more with the aliens and the Citadel is more like it was in the first game.
[END SPOILER]
It's also part of dialogues, part of signs that you see, even reflected in PA announcements that you'll hear. So it's woven through the entire experience, from beginning to end.
GO: You've had that level of continuous granularity planned from the beginning then?
CH: Yeah, it was always the plan to be able to import your character, therefore we included all those variables in the save game. We try and work the trilogy story from both the high level and the detail level. We've always known where the trilogy was going on the highest level, thematically speaking, through all three stories. But then as we get into developing each game, that's when we get down to the mid-level, like what are the actual workings of the plot and major characters and such.
The save game has every variable that you've set as a player, and as we delve into the detail levels of things like actual words that are spoken, art that appears in levels, sounds and music and subtle things as such...those can all be looked at, and how they comprise the world of each sequel can be affected by your choices in the prior ones.
Part 2 to follow. Source.
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Mass Effect 2 Comic Cover & IGN Interview
Mass Effect 2 writer Mac Walters discusses Mass Effect: Redemption, a new mini-series that ties into the upcoming game.
Videogames and comics are becoming increasingly familiar bedfellows these days. This SDCC alone has brought about several new announcements of videogame-related comic book projects. And while not all of these comics turn out well, easily one of the most successful has been the long-running Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series at Dark Horse. Thanks in part to the close cooperation between Dark Horse and KOTOR developer Bioware, the comic continues to appeal to fans of the games and Star Wars in general.
Bioware fans now have a new comic to look out for. Mass Effect, the growing RPG franchise and spiritual successor to KOTOR, is going to make the transition to comics soon. Early next January, Mass Effect: Redemption will hit stands. The collaboration between both companies is only growing, too. The story behind this four-issue mini-series was crafted by Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters. That story is then being scripted by KOTOR write John Jackson Miller. Joining Miller on art will be artist Omar Francia.
We had the chance to chat with Walters over the phone. We mined for details on Redemption and how it connects to the first game and its upcoming sequel. Walters also explained how the project came about and discussed some of the challenges of moving from writing games to comics.
IGN Comics: To start out, could you describe the collaboration between Bioware and Dark Horse on this project? Specifically, are you actually scripting this comic, or are you working with another writer?
Mac Walters: The collaboration from the get go has been very close. We've been working with Dark Horse on everything – art and writing. I actually wrote the story itself. I came up with the idea. I based it, obviously, on the Mass Effect 1 and 2 universe. And John Jackson Miller is going to be doing the actual scripting. But we're working very closely with him on that just to make sure it has that Mass Effect flavor and tone. He's been great so far in giving samples and ideas and helping us expand the universe in exciting ways.
IGN Comics: John has been writing the Knights of the Old Republic comic for the past few years. Do you know if that influenced Bioware's decision to bring him on board for Mass Effect?
Walters: I don't know if it influenced it. We definitely reviewed his work before we started, as well as the artist's work. We chose him because we really enjoyed what we saw him doing. He seemed like a really good fit for us. So maybe the style did help with that. But it really just came down to us feeling he would be a good fit for Mass Effect.
IGN Comics: We know that Bioware is going to be releasing some more downloadable content for the first Mass Effect that sort of bridges the gap between that game and the sequel. Is this comic connected in any way to those stories?
Walters: Actually, our goal right now is to have the story tie to some of the downloadable content for Mass Effect 2. That will probably be coming later next year. I don;t think we have specific dates yet. It's meant to be standalone in the sense that it explores something we don't necessarily see in the game, but it is connected to the game, and in the downloadable content we hope to follow through on some of the events in the comic.
IGN Comics: Where does this story actually fall in relation to the two games? Is it set in between the two?
Walters: It's shortly after the opening events of Mass Effect 2. I can't get into a lot of details on where that is specifically, but I think people will recognize it when they see it.
IGN Comics: What can you say about the plot of the comic right now? Does it still feature Captain Shephard and his crew as the main cast?
Walters: Shephard is always a key part in everything we're doing. He is the Mass Effect universe, as far as we're concerned, certainly in the media we're working in now. And there are people from the game you'll recognize, including some of the people from Mass Effect 1 and 2. And we're also giving you the opportunity to explore new characters and some of the species and aliens that haven't had a lot of time in the game. We're going to try to explore them as well.
IGN Comics: As I understand it, Mass Effect Galaxy for the iPhone is going to introduce a new character called Jacob who will go on to play a major role in Mass Effect 2. Would you say this comic is introducing any new characters along the same lines, who will have a big impact on either the game or the DLC?
Walters: The idea is that we're both expanding on characters that we didn't really explore in Mass Effect 1 and also looking at opportunities to expand on them even further in the DLC.
IGN Comics: One of the big appeals of the first game is that it allows you to completely customize the gender, appearance, and behavior of Captain Shephard. Obviously the comic can't do that, so how are you going about choosing to portray Shephard? Do Bioware have a sort of set idea of how he looks and how he acts?
Walters: What we've done with the marketing for Mass Effect from the get go is, if you look at any of the covers or posters, we have one version of Shephard that serves as the default Shephard. And whenever we get into a situation where we can't customize that, where you're not playing the game, that's the version of Shephard we're going to assume. So if you've played the game and you've created your female Shephard, that's different, obviously, than what we have on the cover. There is going to be a difference. But Shephard is always written with certain parameters in mind. As the writing team, we always try to stay within a certain set of values and behaviors that he or she would have. And that applies to the comic as well.
IGN Comics: In a larger sense, the game allows for some decision-making and gamers can alter the course of the universe based on their choices. Was their ever a worry that maybe they wouldn't take to the comic as readily since they didn't have that control over the story, or do you think it will appeal regardless?
Walters: Oh, I think it'll appeal. There's so much in the Mass Effect universe that's exciting and waiting to be explored. To hope to cover all of it in an interactive environment is just impossible. The universe is just huge. So whenever an opportunity like this comes along, whether it's a written novel or the comics, it's a chance to look at Mass Effect in a completely different way. I'm really excited. I'm starting to see some of the early concept art for the comic, and it's really fun to see Mass Effect growing in a new way that we maybe didn't have the opportunity to do within the game.
IGN Comics: Would you say that this comic will be accessible to new readers who haven't played the games before?
Walters: Yeah. I think right from the get-go it's got a great story that's going to draw them in and get them interested in the universe and the characters that are there. And we looked at it that way. We wanted something where, if you played the games, it's exciting to go in and explore the universe further in the comic. Or if you just want to read the comic because you heard about it or saw it on the shelf, it'll get you excited about the universe and make you say, "Wow, I want to run around in that place. I want to go and see more". That's part of the benefit of the collaboration and the really good teamwork we have with Dark Horse. We're able to create something that's very synergistic in that way.
IGN Comics: As a writer, is it difficult for you to put together story that both stands on its own and serves a larger purpose by tying into the games?
Walters: There are definitely challenges to it, for sure. It's a different medium, and whenever you tackle something in a different medium like that, even when it's source material you're really familiar with, there are always challenges that come up. But I thought that it was a lot of fun just to be able to write a story and be able to go with it in one direction. There's a sort of freedom that comes from being able to tell a purely linear story. Usually when I'm on a game, I'm writing a semi-linear story with multiple outcomes, which, of course, has it own challenges. So it was fun to be able to approach this as a story that I could tell and tell it in a specific way. Hopefully the fans will be excited by it. We all are.
IGN Comics: Bioware and Dark Horse are also collaborating on the Star Wars: The Old Republic tie-in, which is taking the form of a web comic. Was there any reason you decided to go with a more traditional mini-series format for Mass Effect rather than something like that?
Walters: I don't know what the specifics were behind that, actually. We're looking at all possible opportunities, so it's not that there never would be a web comic for Mass Effect. We just felt the the IP and the story we wanted to tell really fit the medium well. That's what Dark horse seemed to be excited about, and frankly, so were we. That was a large part of the decision-making process.
IGN Comics: There have been a lot of videogames adapted to comics over the years. Were there any specific adaptation you looked to for inspiration as you were crafting the story?
Walters: You brought it up before, and I think the KOTOR stuff – Bioware being the start of that way back when. What that's spawned into now, it's not just comics. We've seen a lot of different areas. We thought Mass Effect had that similar sort of appeal to it. It's an epic, sci-fi world that we thought would be fun to explore in new ways. Certainly, some of the work we've done before with Dark Horse helped spawn this.
IGN Comics: You've sort of hinted at this already, but would it be safe to assume that, if this project does well, you'd want to come back and do more Mass Effect comics in the future?
Walters: Oh, for sure. I love seeing what we're doing already. I get really excited when I see the art. I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it ties into the games. Given that, I think it will be successful, and I'm certainly hoping it will be. I'd love to continue doing it right through all future Mass Effect endeavors.
Source: IGN.
Videogames and comics are becoming increasingly familiar bedfellows these days. This SDCC alone has brought about several new announcements of videogame-related comic book projects. And while not all of these comics turn out well, easily one of the most successful has been the long-running Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series at Dark Horse. Thanks in part to the close cooperation between Dark Horse and KOTOR developer Bioware, the comic continues to appeal to fans of the games and Star Wars in general.
Bioware fans now have a new comic to look out for. Mass Effect, the growing RPG franchise and spiritual successor to KOTOR, is going to make the transition to comics soon. Early next January, Mass Effect: Redemption will hit stands. The collaboration between both companies is only growing, too. The story behind this four-issue mini-series was crafted by Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters. That story is then being scripted by KOTOR write John Jackson Miller. Joining Miller on art will be artist Omar Francia.
We had the chance to chat with Walters over the phone. We mined for details on Redemption and how it connects to the first game and its upcoming sequel. Walters also explained how the project came about and discussed some of the challenges of moving from writing games to comics.
IGN Comics: To start out, could you describe the collaboration between Bioware and Dark Horse on this project? Specifically, are you actually scripting this comic, or are you working with another writer?
Mac Walters: The collaboration from the get go has been very close. We've been working with Dark Horse on everything – art and writing. I actually wrote the story itself. I came up with the idea. I based it, obviously, on the Mass Effect 1 and 2 universe. And John Jackson Miller is going to be doing the actual scripting. But we're working very closely with him on that just to make sure it has that Mass Effect flavor and tone. He's been great so far in giving samples and ideas and helping us expand the universe in exciting ways.
IGN Comics: John has been writing the Knights of the Old Republic comic for the past few years. Do you know if that influenced Bioware's decision to bring him on board for Mass Effect?
Walters: I don't know if it influenced it. We definitely reviewed his work before we started, as well as the artist's work. We chose him because we really enjoyed what we saw him doing. He seemed like a really good fit for us. So maybe the style did help with that. But it really just came down to us feeling he would be a good fit for Mass Effect.
IGN Comics: We know that Bioware is going to be releasing some more downloadable content for the first Mass Effect that sort of bridges the gap between that game and the sequel. Is this comic connected in any way to those stories?
Walters: Actually, our goal right now is to have the story tie to some of the downloadable content for Mass Effect 2. That will probably be coming later next year. I don;t think we have specific dates yet. It's meant to be standalone in the sense that it explores something we don't necessarily see in the game, but it is connected to the game, and in the downloadable content we hope to follow through on some of the events in the comic.
IGN Comics: Where does this story actually fall in relation to the two games? Is it set in between the two?
Walters: It's shortly after the opening events of Mass Effect 2. I can't get into a lot of details on where that is specifically, but I think people will recognize it when they see it.
IGN Comics: What can you say about the plot of the comic right now? Does it still feature Captain Shephard and his crew as the main cast?
Walters: Shephard is always a key part in everything we're doing. He is the Mass Effect universe, as far as we're concerned, certainly in the media we're working in now. And there are people from the game you'll recognize, including some of the people from Mass Effect 1 and 2. And we're also giving you the opportunity to explore new characters and some of the species and aliens that haven't had a lot of time in the game. We're going to try to explore them as well.
IGN Comics: As I understand it, Mass Effect Galaxy for the iPhone is going to introduce a new character called Jacob who will go on to play a major role in Mass Effect 2. Would you say this comic is introducing any new characters along the same lines, who will have a big impact on either the game or the DLC?
Walters: The idea is that we're both expanding on characters that we didn't really explore in Mass Effect 1 and also looking at opportunities to expand on them even further in the DLC.
IGN Comics: One of the big appeals of the first game is that it allows you to completely customize the gender, appearance, and behavior of Captain Shephard. Obviously the comic can't do that, so how are you going about choosing to portray Shephard? Do Bioware have a sort of set idea of how he looks and how he acts?
Walters: What we've done with the marketing for Mass Effect from the get go is, if you look at any of the covers or posters, we have one version of Shephard that serves as the default Shephard. And whenever we get into a situation where we can't customize that, where you're not playing the game, that's the version of Shephard we're going to assume. So if you've played the game and you've created your female Shephard, that's different, obviously, than what we have on the cover. There is going to be a difference. But Shephard is always written with certain parameters in mind. As the writing team, we always try to stay within a certain set of values and behaviors that he or she would have. And that applies to the comic as well.
IGN Comics: In a larger sense, the game allows for some decision-making and gamers can alter the course of the universe based on their choices. Was their ever a worry that maybe they wouldn't take to the comic as readily since they didn't have that control over the story, or do you think it will appeal regardless?
Walters: Oh, I think it'll appeal. There's so much in the Mass Effect universe that's exciting and waiting to be explored. To hope to cover all of it in an interactive environment is just impossible. The universe is just huge. So whenever an opportunity like this comes along, whether it's a written novel or the comics, it's a chance to look at Mass Effect in a completely different way. I'm really excited. I'm starting to see some of the early concept art for the comic, and it's really fun to see Mass Effect growing in a new way that we maybe didn't have the opportunity to do within the game.
IGN Comics: Would you say that this comic will be accessible to new readers who haven't played the games before?
Walters: Yeah. I think right from the get-go it's got a great story that's going to draw them in and get them interested in the universe and the characters that are there. And we looked at it that way. We wanted something where, if you played the games, it's exciting to go in and explore the universe further in the comic. Or if you just want to read the comic because you heard about it or saw it on the shelf, it'll get you excited about the universe and make you say, "Wow, I want to run around in that place. I want to go and see more". That's part of the benefit of the collaboration and the really good teamwork we have with Dark Horse. We're able to create something that's very synergistic in that way.
IGN Comics: As a writer, is it difficult for you to put together story that both stands on its own and serves a larger purpose by tying into the games?
Walters: There are definitely challenges to it, for sure. It's a different medium, and whenever you tackle something in a different medium like that, even when it's source material you're really familiar with, there are always challenges that come up. But I thought that it was a lot of fun just to be able to write a story and be able to go with it in one direction. There's a sort of freedom that comes from being able to tell a purely linear story. Usually when I'm on a game, I'm writing a semi-linear story with multiple outcomes, which, of course, has it own challenges. So it was fun to be able to approach this as a story that I could tell and tell it in a specific way. Hopefully the fans will be excited by it. We all are.
IGN Comics: Bioware and Dark Horse are also collaborating on the Star Wars: The Old Republic tie-in, which is taking the form of a web comic. Was there any reason you decided to go with a more traditional mini-series format for Mass Effect rather than something like that?
Walters: I don't know what the specifics were behind that, actually. We're looking at all possible opportunities, so it's not that there never would be a web comic for Mass Effect. We just felt the the IP and the story we wanted to tell really fit the medium well. That's what Dark horse seemed to be excited about, and frankly, so were we. That was a large part of the decision-making process.
IGN Comics: There have been a lot of videogames adapted to comics over the years. Were there any specific adaptation you looked to for inspiration as you were crafting the story?
Walters: You brought it up before, and I think the KOTOR stuff – Bioware being the start of that way back when. What that's spawned into now, it's not just comics. We've seen a lot of different areas. We thought Mass Effect had that similar sort of appeal to it. It's an epic, sci-fi world that we thought would be fun to explore in new ways. Certainly, some of the work we've done before with Dark Horse helped spawn this.
IGN Comics: You've sort of hinted at this already, but would it be safe to assume that, if this project does well, you'd want to come back and do more Mass Effect comics in the future?
Walters: Oh, for sure. I love seeing what we're doing already. I get really excited when I see the art. I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it ties into the games. Given that, I think it will be successful, and I'm certainly hoping it will be. I'd love to continue doing it right through all future Mass Effect endeavors.
Source: IGN.
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Mass Effect Comic Announced
BioWare and Dark Horse Comics today announced a new comic book series based on the popular and rather freakin’ awesome RPG Mass Effect. The story in the series, which is titled Mass Effect: Redemption, deals with the events leading up to Mass Effect 2 which opens with galactic hero Commander Shepard having mysteriously gone missing and left to fight for survival. The comic series will expose readers to new locations, aliens and extended storyline in the Mass Effect universe. Mass Effect: Redemption is scheduled to launch in January 6, 2010.
The Redemption story is written by Lead Writer Mac Walters at BioWare., who is the script writer behind Mass Effect 2. He brings unique insight to the Mass Effect comic and nuance of the world within. The comic is scripted by John Jackson Miller (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, The Invincible Iron Man) and drawn by Omar Francia (Star Wars Legacy). This first four-part series explores the exotic and dangerous future Milky Way of Mass Effect, revealing previously unseen locations, aliens, and enemies of the ME landscape.
“Fans of Mass Effect are going to be pleasantly shocked by the events in these comics,” says Mac Walters. “We worked very closely with Dark Horse to make sure this story was built in to the Mass Effect 2 arc, right from the ground up. Reading the series won’t just add to your experience of the universe, it will change the way you look at Mass Effect 2… and beyond.”
“Those familiar with Mass Effect are aware that it offers one of the deepest and most compelling universes in the history of space adventure,” says Dark Horse President and Publisher Mike Richardson. “We have a long history of successfully adapting properties such as Aliens, Star Wars, and Serenity into comics, and we feel that Mass Effect has tremendous potential with regard to graphic storytelling.”
The narrative in Mass Effect: Redemption picks up just as Commander Shepard disappears and is left without the support of the crew on the Normandy in the lawless Terminus Systems. Shepard must fight for survival, and will be assisted by close companion, Dr. Liara T’Soni, to come home alive.
The Redemption story is written by Lead Writer Mac Walters at BioWare., who is the script writer behind Mass Effect 2. He brings unique insight to the Mass Effect comic and nuance of the world within. The comic is scripted by John Jackson Miller (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, The Invincible Iron Man) and drawn by Omar Francia (Star Wars Legacy). This first four-part series explores the exotic and dangerous future Milky Way of Mass Effect, revealing previously unseen locations, aliens, and enemies of the ME landscape.
“Fans of Mass Effect are going to be pleasantly shocked by the events in these comics,” says Mac Walters. “We worked very closely with Dark Horse to make sure this story was built in to the Mass Effect 2 arc, right from the ground up. Reading the series won’t just add to your experience of the universe, it will change the way you look at Mass Effect 2… and beyond.”
“Those familiar with Mass Effect are aware that it offers one of the deepest and most compelling universes in the history of space adventure,” says Dark Horse President and Publisher Mike Richardson. “We have a long history of successfully adapting properties such as Aliens, Star Wars, and Serenity into comics, and we feel that Mass Effect has tremendous potential with regard to graphic storytelling.”
The narrative in Mass Effect: Redemption picks up just as Commander Shepard disappears and is left without the support of the crew on the Normandy in the lawless Terminus Systems. Shepard must fight for survival, and will be assisted by close companion, Dr. Liara T’Soni, to come home alive.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Mass Effect 2 - New Characters
A lot of the new (party) characters are yet to be revealed, but if you look closely enough there is some information on the few that have been:
Thane
Thane is a member of a new species, called the Drell. Resembling something like a humaoid lizard - replete with scaly skin, large eyes and "fish-lips", Thane is also reputed to be the "best assassin in the galaxy" (wouldn't you just know it). Unlike most, he prefers to get up-close-and-personal with his target, and (if you've seen the E3 videos) recites a prayer for his own soul after a successful mission.
The concept art picture above suggests that Thane was originally meant to be a lot more brightly-coloured than his final look (though the lighting in the video could be misleading), though given his occupation perhaps more muted colours are appropriate.... also interesting is the apparent lack of body-armour that, notably, Shepard & Party and mercs/soldiers wear throughout the game - in it's place a fancy styled suit.
Grunt
The whispers around suggest that, due to certains choices that could be made in Mass Effect, Wrex may not have a large role in Mas Effect 2, and will certainly not be a squad-member... so, in his place appears to be a new Krogan character, called Grunt.
Not appearing in any of the videos so far (except possibly hidden behind a helmet in an off-screen behind the scenes vid), Grunt is distinguished by his triangular head and lack of head-scarring. he also lacks Wrex's Crimson head-marking. Like most krogan, Grunt is not supposed to be particularly personable (although Wrex was by far the funniest character in Mass Effect), but probably quite formidable in combat.
Not appearing in any of the videos so far (except possibly hidden behind a helmet in an off-screen behind the scenes vid), Grunt is distinguished by his triangular head and lack of head-scarring. he also lacks Wrex's Crimson head-marking. Like most krogan, Grunt is not supposed to be particularly personable (although Wrex was by far the funniest character in Mass Effect), but probably quite formidable in combat.
Shadow of the Scorpion
Raised to adulthood during the end of the war between the human Polity and the vicious arthropoid race, the Prador, Ian Cormac is haunted by childhood memories of a sinister scorpion-shaped war drone and the burden of losses he doesn't remember.
In the years following the war, he signs up with Earth Central Security, and is sent out to help either restore or simply maintain order on worlds devastated by Prador bombardment. There he discovers that though the old enemy remains as murderous as ever, it is not anywhere near as perfidious or dangerous as some of his fellow humans, some of them closer to him than he would like.
Amidst the ruins left by wartime genocides, he discovers in himself a cold capacity for violence, learns some horrible truths about his own past and, set upon a course of vengeance, tries merely to stay alive.
This is another of the author's (Neal Asher) shorter books and set once again in the Polity universe, it takes the series' title character, Ian Cormac, and explores his back-story - including childhood, first missions and his relationship to one particular war-drone and Cormac's family.
Written after The Line War (the last in the polity series so far), this is an interesting journey into a heretofore relatively unknown backstory to the character: despite his apprearing as the title character in the Polity series, Cormac has always been the reader's window into the Polity world, with all of the events happening around him - being a/the primary Polity Agent, you kind of expect as much. in some respects it could be rather dangerous (i.e. spoil the mystique) to suddenly reveal so much about his early years, but as usual, Neal Asher handles it with aplomb.
Incorporating perhaps the best villains of the Universe - the Prador, as well as Separatist (terrorist) factions and devious plots, the usual Neal Asher science-fiction themes/action are well and truly present, and it was nice to see the hero really suffer before triumphing, in a particularly brutal sequence of events. In particular i like the way the author really thinks through his concepts so there is never a deus ex machina way out, or cheat - if you like., and important characters are very mortal. weapons in this universe are really deadly, the AIs really clever, the villains equally so and to succeed the hero will need all the technology and skill he can muster.
If there is a downside, it is that i saw where the back-story sequences from Cormac's childhood were going very early on, and they are never as interesting as his first missions for ECS and then subsequently, the Sparkind, are later - interwoven as they are through the story. Still, the climax builds-up nicely and ends with a fitting battle in an exotic weapons exhibit, where Cormac acquires a future-trademark exotic weapon...
once again highly recommended. amazon links here and here.
Written after The Line War (the last in the polity series so far), this is an interesting journey into a heretofore relatively unknown backstory to the character: despite his apprearing as the title character in the Polity series, Cormac has always been the reader's window into the Polity world, with all of the events happening around him - being a/the primary Polity Agent, you kind of expect as much. in some respects it could be rather dangerous (i.e. spoil the mystique) to suddenly reveal so much about his early years, but as usual, Neal Asher handles it with aplomb.
Incorporating perhaps the best villains of the Universe - the Prador, as well as Separatist (terrorist) factions and devious plots, the usual Neal Asher science-fiction themes/action are well and truly present, and it was nice to see the hero really suffer before triumphing, in a particularly brutal sequence of events. In particular i like the way the author really thinks through his concepts so there is never a deus ex machina way out, or cheat - if you like., and important characters are very mortal. weapons in this universe are really deadly, the AIs really clever, the villains equally so and to succeed the hero will need all the technology and skill he can muster.
If there is a downside, it is that i saw where the back-story sequences from Cormac's childhood were going very early on, and they are never as interesting as his first missions for ECS and then subsequently, the Sparkind, are later - interwoven as they are through the story. Still, the climax builds-up nicely and ends with a fitting battle in an exotic weapons exhibit, where Cormac acquires a future-trademark exotic weapon...
once again highly recommended. amazon links here and here.
Thursday, 16 July 2009
BioWare: Mass Effect may be 'more' than a trilogy
They haven't even got the second one out the door yet, but already BioWare are talking about what the future may hold for Mass Effect.
Talking to us in an exclusive interview, BioWare VP Greg Zeschuk has revealed that Mass Effect may become more than just a trilogy "if everything goes well".
When asked whether BioWare would play a key role in EA's plan to roll out two to three new IPs a year, Zeschuk replied:
"We have one of them (Dragon Age) this year, but our job is to both create new property and take advantage of existing ones.
"We've said Mass Effect is supposed to be a trilogy," continued Zeshuck, "so you're going to see at least a third Mass Effect, and even more if everything goes well."
Even more Mass Effect? That can only be a good thing, right?
Encouragingly, BioWare obviously has a terrific amount of faith in their games, with Zeschuk going on to say that the company will "always be building more and more breadth into these properties."
As long as that doesn't lead to yearly sub-par spin-offs, Greg, we're with you all the way.
Original Source: Gamerzine.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Star Trek 2009 Trailer 3
I wouldn't normally post a trailer for an already-released film, but this is probably the greatest trailer i have seen since Batman Begins - the music is amazing (by the Freedom Fighters, called Two Steps from Hell).
Thankfully the film turned out great, too! Definitely the best film of 2009 (so far).
Thankfully the film turned out great, too! Definitely the best film of 2009 (so far).
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Direct download from apple trailers here.
Monday, 13 July 2009
Surrogates trailer
The Surrogates is an upcoming film starring Bruce Willis. set in a near-future, where everyone interacts with surrogate robotic versions of themselves (idealised apparently as some look... different); when several surrogates are killed (killing their biological selves in the process), Bruce Willis' surrogate cop is sent in to investigate and the whole thing turns into a big conspiracy (doesn't it always).
The trailer is chock full of some very exciting concepts and looks incredible, as is the premise, though perhaps unrealistic it is an interesting look at something like the "internet world" made into the real world, blurring the boundaries. Bruce Willis is always worth a watch, too.
HD version from apple trailers can be downloaded here.
Friday, 10 July 2009
District 9 theatrical trailer
Update: here is the 2nd and far better trailer:
District 9 is a new film by Neill Blomkamp (Peter Jackson's choice for the Halo movie, so far un-made).
Seemingly shot much like his Halo shorts, only with a bigger budget and story, this film look intriguing like a modern-day Alien-Nation, only you know the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point.
the aliens look cool, and some of the shots are incredible, well worth checking out.
the official site is here and the HD trailer can be downloaded from apple here.
Seemingly shot much like his Halo shorts, only with a bigger budget and story, this film look intriguing like a modern-day Alien-Nation, only you know the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point.
the aliens look cool, and some of the shots are incredible, well worth checking out.
the official site is here and the HD trailer can be downloaded from apple here.
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Prador Moon
Official Summary:
The Polity Collective is the pinnacle of space-faring civilization. Academic and insightful, its dominion stretches from Earth Central into the unfathomable reaches of the galactic void. But when the Polity finally encounters alien life in the form of massive, hostile, crablike carnivores known as the Prador, there can be only one outcome... total warfare.
Chaos reigns as the Polity, caught unawares, struggles to regain its foothold and transition itself into a military society. Starships clash, planets fall, and space stations are overrun, but for Jebel Krong and Moria Salem, two unlikely heroes trapped at the center of the action, this war is far more than a mere clash of cultures, far more than technology versus brute force... this war is personal.
Epic in scope, unrelenting in action, Prador Moon delivers the blistering battles and astounding literary pyrotechnics that fans of Neal Asher, author of Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, and The Skinner, have come to expect. Prador Moon is Asher's latest and most shocking excursion into the Polity's universe of over-the-top violence and explosive action. Asher delivers a vivid, visceral, brilliantly intense space opera that you won't soon forget.
The Polity Collective is the pinnacle of space-faring civilization. Academic and insightful, its dominion stretches from Earth Central into the unfathomable reaches of the galactic void. But when the Polity finally encounters alien life in the form of massive, hostile, crablike carnivores known as the Prador, there can be only one outcome... total warfare.
Chaos reigns as the Polity, caught unawares, struggles to regain its foothold and transition itself into a military society. Starships clash, planets fall, and space stations are overrun, but for Jebel Krong and Moria Salem, two unlikely heroes trapped at the center of the action, this war is far more than a mere clash of cultures, far more than technology versus brute force... this war is personal.
Epic in scope, unrelenting in action, Prador Moon delivers the blistering battles and astounding literary pyrotechnics that fans of Neal Asher, author of Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, and The Skinner, have come to expect. Prador Moon is Asher's latest and most shocking excursion into the Polity's universe of over-the-top violence and explosive action. Asher delivers a vivid, visceral, brilliantly intense space opera that you won't soon forget.
This is probably my favourite book ever. Set in the Polity Universe created by the author, Neal Asher, a hardcore science-fiction future, with humanity ruled by AI's (because they can do the job better than we mere humans), filled to the brim with future tech and cool weaponry. Chronologically this is set before the same author's Ian Cormac Series, which i will be posting about down the road, but was written more recently than the last few.
The plot concerns one Jebel Krong who is a C-Sec (security) officer assigned to a station where they are about to host the 1st contact with an (alive) alien species - the Prador. As you can imagine it does not go well, as the Prador turn out to be giant crabs with a fetish for human meat and carnage. The ensuing conflict does not go well for the Polity at first, and after a devastating personal loss, Jebel "UCAP" Krong (and how he gets that honorific/acronym is epic in nature) is hell-bent on gaining revenge on the certain Prador captain responsible.... teaming up with a scientist named Moria Salem, needless to say the climax builds up fantastically to an epic conclusion involving a certain moon. Along the way there are fantastically-written ground and space battles with railguns, gecko mines and all sorts of other exotic weaponry (CTDs or Contra-terrene Devices FTW!) and huge space-ships or both AI and Alien design.
Neal Asher writes descriptively - you can really imagine the future as one that is almost tangibly real, yet the plot races through to the end in almost the flash of an eye. i couldn't put it down the first time, and read it in one sitting: the action, setting, exotic locales and technology are incredibly realised and described, i just loved it (even though it was too short - ha!).
The plot concerns one Jebel Krong who is a C-Sec (security) officer assigned to a station where they are about to host the 1st contact with an (alive) alien species - the Prador. As you can imagine it does not go well, as the Prador turn out to be giant crabs with a fetish for human meat and carnage. The ensuing conflict does not go well for the Polity at first, and after a devastating personal loss, Jebel "UCAP" Krong (and how he gets that honorific/acronym is epic in nature) is hell-bent on gaining revenge on the certain Prador captain responsible.... teaming up with a scientist named Moria Salem, needless to say the climax builds up fantastically to an epic conclusion involving a certain moon. Along the way there are fantastically-written ground and space battles with railguns, gecko mines and all sorts of other exotic weaponry (CTDs or Contra-terrene Devices FTW!) and huge space-ships or both AI and Alien design.
Neal Asher writes descriptively - you can really imagine the future as one that is almost tangibly real, yet the plot races through to the end in almost the flash of an eye. i couldn't put it down the first time, and read it in one sitting: the action, setting, exotic locales and technology are incredibly realised and described, i just loved it (even though it was too short - ha!).
amazon.co.uk links here and here.
After Effect: Mass Effect 2
from OXM online:
Still A Tease
BioWare sure knows how to make an entrance. A few months ago, the first Mass Effect 2 teaser hit the Internet like a nuke. Could Shepard really be dead? Did that geth really murder the series’ main character? When peppered with those questions, Casey Hudson, project manager at BioWare, smiles like a cat with canary feathers between his teeth.
“We actually didn’t say anything overt with the teaser, and the fact that so many people know why those things are interesting speaks to how much of the story got through,” he replies. “That’s been a really satisfying part of working on Mass Effect because we are trying to build a bigger story than has ever been done before. It actually is an interactive story that spans three games, and your choices cascade between the first two games and into the third one.”
Sweet, he just confirmed Mass Effect 3! But, um, what about Shepard? BioWare’s keeping his exact fate a secret until E3, but we saw a lot of the early portion of Mass Effect 2 in our visit, and you definitely play as Shepard for at least a decent chunk of the game. We checked out some fascinating gameplay sequences with our hero (details in a moment), and as you may have noticed on page 43 (where he’s on a new krogan planet), “Shepard appears much bigger and more powerful, and he’s presented in a darker, grittier style,” says Hudson. “This is all part of [the game’s] high-action descent into the darkest, most brutal parts of the Mass Effect universe.”
Interesting…but we still had to fling a few guesses about Shep’s fate at Hudson. He promptly shot them down, adding “I’ve read a lot of good theories, and interestingly, none have guessed it accurately.” So we’ll have to leave that mystery unsolved for now and get on to the mother lode of Mass Effect 2 dirt we uncovered.
Naturally, Shepard’s the man (or woman) for that job, even though he’s told it’s a suicide mission. Maybe that’s how he ends up K.I.A. in the trailer? Hudson would only confirm that he has a good poker face, but he does tell us that the nefarious Cerberus organization and its head, the Illusive Man (both play starring roles in the Mass Effect: Ascension novel; read the sidebar on page 51 for a summary), will figure centrally in the game and its plot. You’re probably also wondering which characters and locations will be back, and while Hudson wouldn’t get too specific, we’re told key places like the Citadel and the Normandy definitely return.
In fact, Hudson hints that “a couple” of places in Mass Effect 2 will have the size and scale of the Citadel. One of them is Omega, which will be familiar to Ascension readers. If that’s not you, Hudson describes it as “the opposite of the Citadel — it’s a massive and really brutal, gritty mining station. It’s the bottom of society, the worst of crime and vice and all that good stuff.”
We also laid eyes on a handful of the game’s other new locations, and our favorite is an asari planet called Illium. It’s packed with elegant skyscrapers, dramatic vistas, and lines of flying-car traffic, so much so that art director Derek Watts likens it to a science-fiction version of Dubai. (We thought it looked more like Coruscant from The Phantom Menace.)
The main Cerberus outpost — a space station with gigantic curved engines on its underbelly — is also really striking, and so is Purgatory, a prison outpost where guards patrol in glass tubes overhead that separate them from the inmates. And two other outer-space locations that Watts showed us — one that gets ripped open and exposed to a glowing red nebula — suggest that you’ll be playing inside ships and stations a lot more than you were in the first game.
The Import Business
New locations in the Mass Effect universe will grab us every time, but we reserved our most intense curiosity for the prospect of importing a save-game from the first Mass Effect — and our characters, stats, and decisions along with it. After all, no videogame series has ever attempted something like this before, but BioWare seems ready to bear the weight of those expectations.
“We’re able to track virtually every choice through save-games,” explains lead writer Drew Karpyshyn. “But we’ve focused on the decisions that matter most to players and to the story so we can craft a narrative that feels personalized and really resonates with the decisions you made.”
So yes, that means that if you didn’t buff your Charm enough to save Wrex at the end of Mass Effect, the lovably surly lizard is history for the rest of the series. “It’s important that choices have consequences, and part of what makes a choice compelling is knowing that you can’t go back,” offers Karpyshyn. And who can argue with that…aside from Fable II’s dog?
When asked if Mass Effect 2 resets your character’s skills to Level 1, Hudson gets evasive…but drops some tantalizing hints. “I can’t say exactly,” he laughs. “I can say that the answer won’t be a literal yes, that’s for sure. But I can’t say a definitive no because the way you start the game is different if you literally have a new character who starts at Level 1.”
So in other words, if you begin Mass Effect 2 without importing a save, your history will be drawn from a “canon version” of what previously happened (which you’ll see in the intro), and you interact with characters from the first game as though you played it that way. But what about that Intimidate skill we worked so hard on, our dastardly Renegade level, or that hawt omnitool we found at last?
“Without being specific, if you chose to make a specific type of character and get good at certain things, then it’ll be acknowledged in Mass Effect 2,” Hudson says cryptically. Before we could get exasperated, he went on to speak frankly about how Mass Effect 2’s endings will work.
Choose Your Own
But first, it’s important to understand two things: BioWare’s aiming for a much more replayable game, so they’re designing wider, branching paths that sprout from your choices. And they’re also trying to “push the boundaries on character interactions, making your squad and the relationships you develop (or don’t) with them into a much more important element of the narrative and gameplay,” says Karpyshyn.
Essentially, they want to make a game where you can’t just reload one key save and see most of the endings. Instead, Mass Effect 2 becomes a different experience depending on which characters you add to your party and what you do with them. To support all these story threads, the writers and audio team are creating 20 percent more dialogue than they did for last time, which is a pretty huge amount.
And now, let’s turn the floor over to Hudson: “The ending, I think, is going to blow people away. The scope of it goes far beyond what happened in Mass Effect 1. The things that are happening, the choices you get to make…it gets really dark. It all starts to diverge, and a lot more of your squad members can die for real, forever. You realize all bets are off; anything can happen. The scale of it just skyrockets.”
The difference is really striking. We checked out a conversation between Shepard and an asari named Seryna. Zipping across Illium in a flying car, they discuss whether Shepard should stop a planned assassination or let it go down. As they do, the camera flips to views from the back seat, shows their reflections in the windshield, and then blends seamlessly into a cutscene where the car peels out of traffic and touches down.
Hudson also described another interaction made possible by the more cinematic conversations: a firefight early in the game. “Previously, we would’ve had to do it before or after the fight,” he admits. “But now, when you’re fighting and you talk to someone, you’re in cover and the other guy’s in cover while bullets are whizzing over your head. As you’re ducking down, you see tracers coming in, and you’re yelling over the noise of battle.”
While you still make dialogue choices from the familiar wheel interface, you can also now snatch a brief chance to interrupt the conversation. In another conversation we saw, Shepard argues with a turian named Sidonis as a familiar squadmate (who must remain nameless) tracks Sidonis in his sights, barking at you over comms to get out of his line of fire. The perspective flits between a down-the-scope view of Shepard physically blocking the shot and a more traditional angle of him arguing with the turian. When Sidonis storms off, you have a brief chance to activate a Paragon interrupt by tapping RT, which makes Shepard accost him and attempt to reason with him some more. Or you can let him stride into the open and get smoked, quenching your party member’s thirst for revenge.
High Caliber
And since we’re in a firefight, what better way to wrap things up than Hudson’s impassioned assurances that improvements to the A.I. and the controls make Mass Effect 2’s battles way more entertaining? “When you pick up the controller,” Hudson says firmly, “it just feels like a better game.” More concretely, you can now issue individual orders to each squad member, you can mantle over barriers, your powers recharge faster so you can use them more often, and you actively control when you take or exit cover. We saw only a brief combat sequence, but those additions all sound wise.
And then, BioWare’s fearless leaders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, chime in with the last word on why Mass Effect 2 intensity of the combat situations, the dialogue, the emotional engagement, and the storyline,” says Muzyka, “[make] the moment-to-moment experience just bigger and better in every way.”
“And,” adds Zeschuk with a broad grin, “we guarantee faster elevators.”
Commander Shepard isn’t dead; we can tell you that much. At least, he doesn’t die —if in fact he croaks at all — until later on in Mass Effect 2. But first, let’s start at the beginning. It’s late April, still a chilly time of year at BioWare’s Edmonton HQ, and the Mass Effect team is deep in cloakand- dagger mode. As they hustled to prepare an E3 unveiling that’d launch Mass Effect 2 like a rocket, we spent a day with the team to bring you the world’s first look at this massive sequel, its improvements, and, yes, its secrets.
While our day up north raised plenty of questions that won’t be answered until E3, it also answered just as many of them. Frankly, even an elcor (the game’s adorably monotone elephant-like species) wouldn’t be able to contain its enthusiasm for all the details we uncovered — including the first news on Mass Effect 2’ s endings…
While our day up north raised plenty of questions that won’t be answered until E3, it also answered just as many of them. Frankly, even an elcor (the game’s adorably monotone elephant-like species) wouldn’t be able to contain its enthusiasm for all the details we uncovered — including the first news on Mass Effect 2’ s endings…
Still A Tease
BioWare sure knows how to make an entrance. A few months ago, the first Mass Effect 2 teaser hit the Internet like a nuke. Could Shepard really be dead? Did that geth really murder the series’ main character? When peppered with those questions, Casey Hudson, project manager at BioWare, smiles like a cat with canary feathers between his teeth.
“We actually didn’t say anything overt with the teaser, and the fact that so many people know why those things are interesting speaks to how much of the story got through,” he replies. “That’s been a really satisfying part of working on Mass Effect because we are trying to build a bigger story than has ever been done before. It actually is an interactive story that spans three games, and your choices cascade between the first two games and into the third one.”
Sweet, he just confirmed Mass Effect 3! But, um, what about Shepard? BioWare’s keeping his exact fate a secret until E3, but we saw a lot of the early portion of Mass Effect 2 in our visit, and you definitely play as Shepard for at least a decent chunk of the game. We checked out some fascinating gameplay sequences with our hero (details in a moment), and as you may have noticed on page 43 (where he’s on a new krogan planet), “Shepard appears much bigger and more powerful, and he’s presented in a darker, grittier style,” says Hudson. “This is all part of [the game’s] high-action descent into the darkest, most brutal parts of the Mass Effect universe.”
Interesting…but we still had to fling a few guesses about Shep’s fate at Hudson. He promptly shot them down, adding “I’ve read a lot of good theories, and interestingly, none have guessed it accurately.” So we’ll have to leave that mystery unsolved for now and get on to the mother lode of Mass Effect 2 dirt we uncovered.
In The Beginning
Some things haven’t changed: there’s still an ancient race of machines called reapers that harvest civilizations like a crop every 50,000 years — and kicking their ass is still your No. 1 priority. Hudson picks up that thread: “That’s always the main story of the trilogy, but in Mass Effect 2, you find out about a threat that might be associated with it. It’s really new to the galaxy, and it’s different from anything anyone has seen before. It might be behind [a rash of] disappearances — human colonies are literally just disappearing all around the galaxy.”
Some things haven’t changed: there’s still an ancient race of machines called reapers that harvest civilizations like a crop every 50,000 years — and kicking their ass is still your No. 1 priority. Hudson picks up that thread: “That’s always the main story of the trilogy, but in Mass Effect 2, you find out about a threat that might be associated with it. It’s really new to the galaxy, and it’s different from anything anyone has seen before. It might be behind [a rash of] disappearances — human colonies are literally just disappearing all around the galaxy.”
Naturally, Shepard’s the man (or woman) for that job, even though he’s told it’s a suicide mission. Maybe that’s how he ends up K.I.A. in the trailer? Hudson would only confirm that he has a good poker face, but he does tell us that the nefarious Cerberus organization and its head, the Illusive Man (both play starring roles in the Mass Effect: Ascension novel; read the sidebar on page 51 for a summary), will figure centrally in the game and its plot. You’re probably also wondering which characters and locations will be back, and while Hudson wouldn’t get too specific, we’re told key places like the Citadel and the Normandy definitely return.
In fact, Hudson hints that “a couple” of places in Mass Effect 2 will have the size and scale of the Citadel. One of them is Omega, which will be familiar to Ascension readers. If that’s not you, Hudson describes it as “the opposite of the Citadel — it’s a massive and really brutal, gritty mining station. It’s the bottom of society, the worst of crime and vice and all that good stuff.”
We also laid eyes on a handful of the game’s other new locations, and our favorite is an asari planet called Illium. It’s packed with elegant skyscrapers, dramatic vistas, and lines of flying-car traffic, so much so that art director Derek Watts likens it to a science-fiction version of Dubai. (We thought it looked more like Coruscant from The Phantom Menace.)
The main Cerberus outpost — a space station with gigantic curved engines on its underbelly — is also really striking, and so is Purgatory, a prison outpost where guards patrol in glass tubes overhead that separate them from the inmates. And two other outer-space locations that Watts showed us — one that gets ripped open and exposed to a glowing red nebula — suggest that you’ll be playing inside ships and stations a lot more than you were in the first game.
The Import Business
New locations in the Mass Effect universe will grab us every time, but we reserved our most intense curiosity for the prospect of importing a save-game from the first Mass Effect — and our characters, stats, and decisions along with it. After all, no videogame series has ever attempted something like this before, but BioWare seems ready to bear the weight of those expectations.
“We’re able to track virtually every choice through save-games,” explains lead writer Drew Karpyshyn. “But we’ve focused on the decisions that matter most to players and to the story so we can craft a narrative that feels personalized and really resonates with the decisions you made.”
So yes, that means that if you didn’t buff your Charm enough to save Wrex at the end of Mass Effect, the lovably surly lizard is history for the rest of the series. “It’s important that choices have consequences, and part of what makes a choice compelling is knowing that you can’t go back,” offers Karpyshyn. And who can argue with that…aside from Fable II’s dog?
When asked if Mass Effect 2 resets your character’s skills to Level 1, Hudson gets evasive…but drops some tantalizing hints. “I can’t say exactly,” he laughs. “I can say that the answer won’t be a literal yes, that’s for sure. But I can’t say a definitive no because the way you start the game is different if you literally have a new character who starts at Level 1.”
So in other words, if you begin Mass Effect 2 without importing a save, your history will be drawn from a “canon version” of what previously happened (which you’ll see in the intro), and you interact with characters from the first game as though you played it that way. But what about that Intimidate skill we worked so hard on, our dastardly Renegade level, or that hawt omnitool we found at last?
“Without being specific, if you chose to make a specific type of character and get good at certain things, then it’ll be acknowledged in Mass Effect 2,” Hudson says cryptically. Before we could get exasperated, he went on to speak frankly about how Mass Effect 2’s endings will work.
Choose Your Own
But first, it’s important to understand two things: BioWare’s aiming for a much more replayable game, so they’re designing wider, branching paths that sprout from your choices. And they’re also trying to “push the boundaries on character interactions, making your squad and the relationships you develop (or don’t) with them into a much more important element of the narrative and gameplay,” says Karpyshyn.
Essentially, they want to make a game where you can’t just reload one key save and see most of the endings. Instead, Mass Effect 2 becomes a different experience depending on which characters you add to your party and what you do with them. To support all these story threads, the writers and audio team are creating 20 percent more dialogue than they did for last time, which is a pretty huge amount.
And now, let’s turn the floor over to Hudson: “The ending, I think, is going to blow people away. The scope of it goes far beyond what happened in Mass Effect 1. The things that are happening, the choices you get to make…it gets really dark. It all starts to diverge, and a lot more of your squad members can die for real, forever. You realize all bets are off; anything can happen. The scale of it just skyrockets.”
“And,” he continues, “the ending is, by far, the hardest level we’ve ever designed. It takes a really large squad of characters and the things that happen to them, and all of that determines the outcome. Who’s going to live? Who’s going to die? What choice affects what and how? All of this stuff just snowballs, and there are so many [endings] that it’ll be really good water-cooler stuff. I think it’ll be almost impossible to actually decode the game logic. It just becomes relationships: I don’t want this person to die, so I’ll keep them with me, and will that actually help?” Somewhere, a strategy-guide editor just started sobbing.
Grab The Popcorn
Since much of that drama will go down in conversations and cutscenes, you’ll be pleased to learn that Mass Effect 2 takes big strides in making the talky bits more engaging. “We’re using a lot more Hollywood effects and camera language now,” offers lead cinematics animator Parrish Ley. “And we’re driving a lot of performances with more close-ups and more acting.”
Grab The Popcorn
Since much of that drama will go down in conversations and cutscenes, you’ll be pleased to learn that Mass Effect 2 takes big strides in making the talky bits more engaging. “We’re using a lot more Hollywood effects and camera language now,” offers lead cinematics animator Parrish Ley. “And we’re driving a lot of performances with more close-ups and more acting.”
The difference is really striking. We checked out a conversation between Shepard and an asari named Seryna. Zipping across Illium in a flying car, they discuss whether Shepard should stop a planned assassination or let it go down. As they do, the camera flips to views from the back seat, shows their reflections in the windshield, and then blends seamlessly into a cutscene where the car peels out of traffic and touches down.
Hudson also described another interaction made possible by the more cinematic conversations: a firefight early in the game. “Previously, we would’ve had to do it before or after the fight,” he admits. “But now, when you’re fighting and you talk to someone, you’re in cover and the other guy’s in cover while bullets are whizzing over your head. As you’re ducking down, you see tracers coming in, and you’re yelling over the noise of battle.”
While you still make dialogue choices from the familiar wheel interface, you can also now snatch a brief chance to interrupt the conversation. In another conversation we saw, Shepard argues with a turian named Sidonis as a familiar squadmate (who must remain nameless) tracks Sidonis in his sights, barking at you over comms to get out of his line of fire. The perspective flits between a down-the-scope view of Shepard physically blocking the shot and a more traditional angle of him arguing with the turian. When Sidonis storms off, you have a brief chance to activate a Paragon interrupt by tapping RT, which makes Shepard accost him and attempt to reason with him some more. Or you can let him stride into the open and get smoked, quenching your party member’s thirst for revenge.
High Caliber
And since we’re in a firefight, what better way to wrap things up than Hudson’s impassioned assurances that improvements to the A.I. and the controls make Mass Effect 2’s battles way more entertaining? “When you pick up the controller,” Hudson says firmly, “it just feels like a better game.” More concretely, you can now issue individual orders to each squad member, you can mantle over barriers, your powers recharge faster so you can use them more often, and you actively control when you take or exit cover. We saw only a brief combat sequence, but those additions all sound wise.
And then, BioWare’s fearless leaders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, chime in with the last word on why Mass Effect 2 intensity of the combat situations, the dialogue, the emotional engagement, and the storyline,” says Muzyka, “[make] the moment-to-moment experience just bigger and better in every way.”
“And,” adds Zeschuk with a broad grin, “we guarantee faster elevators.”
OXM (US) July 2009 - Mass Effect 2
OXM US got the goods from Bioware before e3 and put Mass Effect 2 on their cover for July. this is probably the best article i have seen so far, despite being the earliest, and is certainly the most accurate and comprehensive, i'll try and get the rest of it scanned in the next day or so, but in the meantime, here's the cover:
Update (16/06/09): and here's the rest! :-
Bonus - Games tm cover:
and the PC Gaming cover:
Casey Hudson Blogs about Mass Effect 2
Just the Facts, Man…
Casey Hudson
Executive Producer
BioWare
Well we’re back from E3, and I’ve been checking out some of the feedback on our first live demonstrations of Mass Effect 2. We showed some pretty dramatic stuff, and the response has been incredibly positive. The demo also inspired some passionate debate about what it all meant. There are some really good articles out there describing what we showed at E3, but I figured it might be useful if I clarified some points and answered a few questions people have asked here and on the BioWare forums since E3. I’ll won’t drop any real spoilers here - this is all just the basic premise of the game that we described for people at the show…
The Suicide Mission Concept In Mass Effect 2, you (as Commander Shepard) are faced with what appears to be a suicide mission: taking a team into the heart of enemy territory where you shouldn’t have any chance of coming back alive. Your survival therefore is based on how well you’ve built a team – who you recruited, how well-equipped they are, and whether they’re loyal to you. Loyalty (and the things you’ll do to earn it) is a central part of the game, and it is critical to Shepard surviving the final mission. Paragon / Renegade decisions affect a lot of things in the game - and will affect which how the game ends - but they are completely separate from your character’s readiness to survive the final mission. When we say that Shepard can die in Mass Effect 2, it’s not something that happens at points in the middle of the game. Yes, you can “die” in gameplay as normal but that’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s not a “Game Over” screen. It’s not a gimmicky thing where you make a choice, “die”, and reload to continue to the “real” ending. When you get to the very end of the story in Mass Effect 2, you will get one of a wide variety of climactic and satisfying endings. Depending on how prepared you were, your ending may involve Shepard making the ultimate sacrifice to accomplish the mission. If you do die in the ending of Mass Effect 2, it will not come as a surprise, nor will it be random. It will be pretty obvious that you headed into the final mission knowing that Shepard probably wouldn’t make it out alive. Throughout the middle of the game you are building up information, resources, a team, and a ship that will be able to do the job, and although you can jump straight to the final mission at a certain point, you’ll have a good feel for whether you’re likely to survive it. Part of what makes the final mission dangerous in a more profound way is that each squad member could potentially die a real, story-based death during that mission as well. You might have an ending where Shepard’s entire team survives, or where the entire mission is a bloodbath and everyone (including Shepard) is killed, or anything in between. And for all characters, death in Mass Effect 2 means they won’t show up in Mass Effect 3. One big reason you’ll want to be alive after the ending is that after the credits roll, you are returned to the game world - ready to head back out for more adventure. You can complete unfinished missions, explore the galaxy, and download new adventures to play. But Mass Effect is a trilogy about Commander Shepard’s journey - if your Shepard dies in the end of Mass Effect 2, that’s the end of him / her. In that case, you can play Mass Effect 3 as “a” Shepard – just not “your” Shepard. As in real life, not being able to keep living is really the main down-side of death. So if you care about playing the next game with your character, make sure you survive this one. If you die in the end but in retrospect you really wish you had lived, you can of course go back to a savegame from before you attempted the final mission. From there you can make the improvements required to survive and continue your character into the next game.
Importing your Mass Effect Savegame First, you do not need to have played Mass Effect to enjoy Mass Effect 2. The introduction is designed to introduce new players to the story and universe, and to recap the situation for previous players. If you have completed Mass Effect and you still have your savegames, you can view each playthrough you’ve completed, and choose the one you want to continue from. The Mass Effect savegame doesn’t just contain a couple of your big choices. It contains countless decisions you’ve made, both large and small. These things could each potentially carry forward and affect your story in Mass Effect 2. This has never been done before on this scale, and it means you’re actually continuing your own story from exactly where you left off. Some have asked “I built a level 60 character with lots of loot in Mass Effect – will it all carry over to Mass Effect 2?” We will definitely provide benefits for those who put time into developing their character in Mass Effect. But to support all the improvements made in combat and inventory, the skills and items are pretty much completely redone for Mass Effect 2. So if you import a character from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 will adapt the key assets of your character into starting benefits that work in the new system.
Answers to Other Popular Questions
• “You demonstrated feature X, so does that mean you’ve forgotten about feature Y?” Some worry that by emphasizing certain things in the E3 demo, it means we’ve forgotten about other elements. Not so of course. When you take a game to E3, you really have to focus the message down to something razor-sharp, to cut through all the noise of the show. In our case, it was the key differences between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 that we wanted to emphasize – and we didn’t even have enough time in our slot to show them all! Examples of things we did not show but are definitely in the game are: a completely new and beautifully-handling vehicle, richer and more diverse Uncharted World locations, new space exploration interactivity, systems for character progression, new weapon and armor customization, other cool characters (some new and some you know from the first game), and a ton of content and features.
• “Will Ashley/Garrus/Wrex/etc return in ME2?” Pretty much all the main characters from Mass Effect appear in Mass Effect 2 in one form or another (if they survived your decision-making), and some can join your squad. In general you can expect to continue relationships with these characters across the trilogy, unless you get them killed.
• "Why can't every squadmember from Mass Effect join my squad in Mass Effect 2?" Part of the answer is that the story of Mass Effect 2 is really about the characters - how you go about building a team of interesting individuals - and we wanted to provide some new characters for you to learn about. But beyond that, we're creating a story full of thrilling twists and turns, and while it may be frustrating to not have all the answers right now, these surprises will make the actual playing part really enjoyable. As part of that story, you'll discover what each of your original team members is up to, and why they will or won't join you. You wouldn't want us to spell out exactly who you team up with before you have a chance to discover it on your own, right? Once you're playing Mass Effect 2 and you're immersed in the story, you'll be glad we saved lots of juicy surprises and revelations that can only be found inside the game.
• “Was that a reload animation I saw in the demo?” Like in the first game, most of the futuristic weapons in Mass Effect 2 do not require ammo but they do overheat. The difference now is that instead of waiting for your weapon to cool, you can hit a button to eject a small heat sink to immediately cool the weapon and get back into firing. So it’s a similar system but now you are in control of the cooldown.
• “Do I need fast reflexes to use the Interrupt system?” Interrupts are not meant to be “quick time events”. They are additional options that can appear throughout an NPC’s line that allow you to take a more physical action versus one of the verbal responses. You don’t need to fixate on a part of the screen – a flashing icon will catch your attention in your peripheral vision when it is available. A red icon on the left of the conversation wheel means you can pull the left trigger to fire a hostile interrupt. A blue one on the right side means you can pull the right trigger to do a heroic interrupt. This system allows you to really throw your weight around and get involved in more dynamic interactions with other characters.
• “Did you remove pausing in combat?” No. We’ve made a bunch of changes that add up to the ability to fight without pausing. But you can still hold the powers screen up to pause the action and plan your next moves. One of the biggest improvements was the option to fire your powers in realtime by mapping your favorite ones to buttons – this is a lot of fun and really unlocks the real potential of the combat system. The other big improvement was separate, context-based squad commands on the d-pad. So with a single press of the d-pad you can send a specific squad member to exactly where you want him / her, or to hit an enemy with a special power. This means you can run around with the best powers of your team right at your fingertips and enjoy realtime tactical mayhem – or you can pause with the powers screen to really think about what you want to do next.
• And the two most common questions: “Did you fix the slow elevators?” and “Will there be alien love scenes?” Yes and yes. We actually had our new level transition system on display in the demo, which replaces elevators and other transitions from the first game. The new system did its job perfectly in the demo– it was a natural part of the visual narrative and went by fast enough that no one noticed it even happened. As for whether there will be alien love in an elevator, you’ll have to play to find out.
original post can be found at IGN here.
Casey Hudson
Executive Producer
BioWare
Well we’re back from E3, and I’ve been checking out some of the feedback on our first live demonstrations of Mass Effect 2. We showed some pretty dramatic stuff, and the response has been incredibly positive. The demo also inspired some passionate debate about what it all meant. There are some really good articles out there describing what we showed at E3, but I figured it might be useful if I clarified some points and answered a few questions people have asked here and on the BioWare forums since E3. I’ll won’t drop any real spoilers here - this is all just the basic premise of the game that we described for people at the show…
The Suicide Mission Concept In Mass Effect 2, you (as Commander Shepard) are faced with what appears to be a suicide mission: taking a team into the heart of enemy territory where you shouldn’t have any chance of coming back alive. Your survival therefore is based on how well you’ve built a team – who you recruited, how well-equipped they are, and whether they’re loyal to you. Loyalty (and the things you’ll do to earn it) is a central part of the game, and it is critical to Shepard surviving the final mission. Paragon / Renegade decisions affect a lot of things in the game - and will affect which how the game ends - but they are completely separate from your character’s readiness to survive the final mission. When we say that Shepard can die in Mass Effect 2, it’s not something that happens at points in the middle of the game. Yes, you can “die” in gameplay as normal but that’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s not a “Game Over” screen. It’s not a gimmicky thing where you make a choice, “die”, and reload to continue to the “real” ending. When you get to the very end of the story in Mass Effect 2, you will get one of a wide variety of climactic and satisfying endings. Depending on how prepared you were, your ending may involve Shepard making the ultimate sacrifice to accomplish the mission. If you do die in the ending of Mass Effect 2, it will not come as a surprise, nor will it be random. It will be pretty obvious that you headed into the final mission knowing that Shepard probably wouldn’t make it out alive. Throughout the middle of the game you are building up information, resources, a team, and a ship that will be able to do the job, and although you can jump straight to the final mission at a certain point, you’ll have a good feel for whether you’re likely to survive it. Part of what makes the final mission dangerous in a more profound way is that each squad member could potentially die a real, story-based death during that mission as well. You might have an ending where Shepard’s entire team survives, or where the entire mission is a bloodbath and everyone (including Shepard) is killed, or anything in between. And for all characters, death in Mass Effect 2 means they won’t show up in Mass Effect 3. One big reason you’ll want to be alive after the ending is that after the credits roll, you are returned to the game world - ready to head back out for more adventure. You can complete unfinished missions, explore the galaxy, and download new adventures to play. But Mass Effect is a trilogy about Commander Shepard’s journey - if your Shepard dies in the end of Mass Effect 2, that’s the end of him / her. In that case, you can play Mass Effect 3 as “a” Shepard – just not “your” Shepard. As in real life, not being able to keep living is really the main down-side of death. So if you care about playing the next game with your character, make sure you survive this one. If you die in the end but in retrospect you really wish you had lived, you can of course go back to a savegame from before you attempted the final mission. From there you can make the improvements required to survive and continue your character into the next game.
Importing your Mass Effect Savegame First, you do not need to have played Mass Effect to enjoy Mass Effect 2. The introduction is designed to introduce new players to the story and universe, and to recap the situation for previous players. If you have completed Mass Effect and you still have your savegames, you can view each playthrough you’ve completed, and choose the one you want to continue from. The Mass Effect savegame doesn’t just contain a couple of your big choices. It contains countless decisions you’ve made, both large and small. These things could each potentially carry forward and affect your story in Mass Effect 2. This has never been done before on this scale, and it means you’re actually continuing your own story from exactly where you left off. Some have asked “I built a level 60 character with lots of loot in Mass Effect – will it all carry over to Mass Effect 2?” We will definitely provide benefits for those who put time into developing their character in Mass Effect. But to support all the improvements made in combat and inventory, the skills and items are pretty much completely redone for Mass Effect 2. So if you import a character from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 will adapt the key assets of your character into starting benefits that work in the new system.
Answers to Other Popular Questions
• “You demonstrated feature X, so does that mean you’ve forgotten about feature Y?” Some worry that by emphasizing certain things in the E3 demo, it means we’ve forgotten about other elements. Not so of course. When you take a game to E3, you really have to focus the message down to something razor-sharp, to cut through all the noise of the show. In our case, it was the key differences between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 that we wanted to emphasize – and we didn’t even have enough time in our slot to show them all! Examples of things we did not show but are definitely in the game are: a completely new and beautifully-handling vehicle, richer and more diverse Uncharted World locations, new space exploration interactivity, systems for character progression, new weapon and armor customization, other cool characters (some new and some you know from the first game), and a ton of content and features.
• “Will Ashley/Garrus/Wrex/etc return in ME2?” Pretty much all the main characters from Mass Effect appear in Mass Effect 2 in one form or another (if they survived your decision-making), and some can join your squad. In general you can expect to continue relationships with these characters across the trilogy, unless you get them killed.
• "Why can't every squadmember from Mass Effect join my squad in Mass Effect 2?" Part of the answer is that the story of Mass Effect 2 is really about the characters - how you go about building a team of interesting individuals - and we wanted to provide some new characters for you to learn about. But beyond that, we're creating a story full of thrilling twists and turns, and while it may be frustrating to not have all the answers right now, these surprises will make the actual playing part really enjoyable. As part of that story, you'll discover what each of your original team members is up to, and why they will or won't join you. You wouldn't want us to spell out exactly who you team up with before you have a chance to discover it on your own, right? Once you're playing Mass Effect 2 and you're immersed in the story, you'll be glad we saved lots of juicy surprises and revelations that can only be found inside the game.
• “Was that a reload animation I saw in the demo?” Like in the first game, most of the futuristic weapons in Mass Effect 2 do not require ammo but they do overheat. The difference now is that instead of waiting for your weapon to cool, you can hit a button to eject a small heat sink to immediately cool the weapon and get back into firing. So it’s a similar system but now you are in control of the cooldown.
• “Do I need fast reflexes to use the Interrupt system?” Interrupts are not meant to be “quick time events”. They are additional options that can appear throughout an NPC’s line that allow you to take a more physical action versus one of the verbal responses. You don’t need to fixate on a part of the screen – a flashing icon will catch your attention in your peripheral vision when it is available. A red icon on the left of the conversation wheel means you can pull the left trigger to fire a hostile interrupt. A blue one on the right side means you can pull the right trigger to do a heroic interrupt. This system allows you to really throw your weight around and get involved in more dynamic interactions with other characters.
• “Did you remove pausing in combat?” No. We’ve made a bunch of changes that add up to the ability to fight without pausing. But you can still hold the powers screen up to pause the action and plan your next moves. One of the biggest improvements was the option to fire your powers in realtime by mapping your favorite ones to buttons – this is a lot of fun and really unlocks the real potential of the combat system. The other big improvement was separate, context-based squad commands on the d-pad. So with a single press of the d-pad you can send a specific squad member to exactly where you want him / her, or to hit an enemy with a special power. This means you can run around with the best powers of your team right at your fingertips and enjoy realtime tactical mayhem – or you can pause with the powers screen to really think about what you want to do next.
• And the two most common questions: “Did you fix the slow elevators?” and “Will there be alien love scenes?” Yes and yes. We actually had our new level transition system on display in the demo, which replaces elevators and other transitions from the first game. The new system did its job perfectly in the demo– it was a natural part of the visual narrative and went by fast enough that no one noticed it even happened. As for whether there will be alien love in an elevator, you’ll have to play to find out.
original post can be found at IGN here.
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