http://www.gamersquad.com/category/I...ss-Effect-Q-A/First off Casey, please let our readers know a little about yourself and your role at BioWare, and also about Mass Effect in terms of its story outline, history, and ongoing evolution.
I’m the Project Director on Mass Effect. It basically means I’m responsible for guiding the creative vision of the project, and I work closely with our development team, our publisher, and others to make sure the game gets completed and achieves the high-level idea of the game we originally envisioned. The last project I led at Bioware was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Mass Effect takes place in the year 2183. You are Commander Shepard, an elite military agent called a Spectre – responsible for protecting the galaxy from its gravest threats. And as the first Human Spectre, you really are the tip of the spear for humanity, as we emerge on the galactic stage. You’ll command an impressive starship as you reveal a mystery that threatens to destroy all civilization in the galaxy. And during that adventure you’ll explore alien worlds, lead an elite squad through spectacular tactical battles, and experience an amazingly deep story full of weird and wonderful science-fiction moments.
Mass Effect is labeled as a "Revolutionary Action RPG", how exactly does BioWare define the word "Revolutionary" in terms of what the game will offer the RPG genre?
It goes back to the origins of the project, where we really started from first principles. We devised new technology, new gameplay ideas, new approaches to character interactions – all with the goal of achieving an unprecedented level of cinematic story immersion.
One example of these innovations is the new conversation system, which for the first time ever will allow players to have fully real-time conversations with in-game characters. Not only does everyone (including your character) have full voice, but the new interface is based more on types of emotional reactions, allowing you to react faster and more intuitively. That immediate and fluid interactivity, in combination with extremely advanced digital actors, means that conversations in Mass Effect take on the incredible feeling of simultaneously watching and being inside a dramatic scene from a movie.
It’s these kinds of completely new gameplay experiences that add up to something that we think feels more like revolution than evolution in terms of advancing the interactive storytelling medium.
Seeing as Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire effectively raised the bar on videogame RPGs, has BioWare felt any pressure to pull out all the stops in order to ensure Mass Effect transcends the studio's own stratospheric benchmark?
With every one of our games, we try to look at ways that we can improve the experience for players in exciting new ways. Mass Effect presented us with some new opportunities and challenges for doing that.
Firstly, Mass Effect is the first game that we’ve taken into the new generation of consoles. And with the nearly photo-real quality of our characters and environments, we knew that our level of immersion, character interaction, and storytelling would have to be much more sophisticated than ever before.
And since Mass Effect is based on an original, BioWare-created science-fiction universe, we have an opportunity to create a setting that gives players the biggest possible opportunities for adventure and for having major choices that affect an epic story.
These kinds of things create a lot of challenges, so it takes a team of around 130 extremely talented developers to build this kind of experience, especially when it’s an experience that spans many worlds across the galaxy!
How will Mass Effect's character and party-based evolution differ in terms of the established parameters gamers are accustomed to seeing in RPGs?
In this area as well, we’ve gone back to the original reasons why players like this feature. What kind of character do you want to be? What’s amazing about your character when he or she is in battle on some hostile alien world, or during tough personal negotiations with the most powerful officials in the galaxy? These are the things we wanted to let players have fun with, but without having to deal with the complicated stats and exceptions that you find in rules systems that were originally meant for other media (like pen-and-paper roleplaying).
So in Mass Effect, players will actually have as much (if not more) control over the detailed development and customization of their characters, but through an interface that just makes a lot more sense. Doing things successfully in the game gives you experience points, and at any time you can spend those points to improve in a chosen ability. And since there are lots of different things you can improve, and each one can open up new fields of expertise, you’ve got a very deep yet straightforward way to develop each of your characters towards the kinds of specializations you prefer.
And as always, we offer automatic options for these kinds of choices as well, in case you want to let the game make some good decisions for you so you can jump right back into the action.
Role-playing games are a dime a dozen these days, with the majority failing to impress. What next-gen qualities does BioWare hope Mass Effect will introduce or improve upon to prevent it from merely slipping into the RPG ether?
One way to look at it would be quality times quantity. Some games have a huge, free-form scope to their game world. Other games may provide a very rich story and world interactions. What will blow people away about Mass Effect is how it is able to achieve both of these at the same time in a way that they’ve never experienced before.
And ultimately, I find that what makes a game truly memorable isn’t ever about bullet points and feature lists. It’s really about the quality of the experience - and even more difficult to quantify, it comes down to falling in love with the game on some level. The great games are able to create an intangible feeling that fires the imagination, and continues to build your interest and excitement the further you go in the story. And it’s on that level that I think players will find that Mass Effect to be a very special experience that can’t be described with hard facts – you’ll need to experience it for yourself!
Is the action aspect of Mass Effect built around a similar structure to that seen in Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, or has the studio created a new system especially?
The combat in Mass Effect is an entirely new real-time system, but is surprisingly similar to what was fun about KOTOR in that you are able to fight as a squad of 3 characters, either letting them fight on their own or giving them very specific tactical commands. It’s not a twitchy kind of combat like in a first-person-shooter, but it does have a familiar third-person feel to it where you can aim anywhere and fire at any time.
Your squad members each have their own unique skills and abilities – as chosen by you when you develop them over the course of the game. And since their special abilities (along with weapon mods etc.) have amazing physics and visual effects, your squad can co-operate in ways that just aren’t possible in other games.
For example, one thing we showed at X06 this year was how you can throw a steel barrier out of the way using telekinetics so the enemy is exposed to an attack from your squad members. Then, you can hit the floating barrier with a shotgun blast to throw it into the enemy and cause further damage. You can also pause the game at any time to issue very specific tactical orders to pull of incredible feats of coordination. At X06 we demonstrated this against a huge machine-like enemy. One character provided cover fire, another character ran up and fired an EMP burst that took down the enemy’s shields, then our lead character fired an attack that overloads the shotgun for a massive short-range attack. These kinds of incredible co-operations are possible in this system, allowing the characters you’ve developed to reach their full potential in combat.
Based on the idea that the player covers every inch of Mass Effect's vast game world, how many subsequent gameplay hours can he/she hope to harvest from their time with the game's single-player storyline, and are there any restrictions to a player's movement within the game?
Whereas KOTOR was mainly focused on the core storyline, Mass Effect has the story set within a larger galaxy of exploration. So the main story in Mass Effect will likely be around 25 hours to complete, but pursuing exploration and other adventures in the galaxy will probably at least double that.
How has working on a next-generation console platform (Xbox 360) opened up BioWare's development process to allow for creativity that was hitherto impossible on the Xbox?
The 360 has been a great system to work with. It’s a relatively straightforward development environment, and it gives us the kind of hardware power we need to make Mass Effect a truly premium HD experience for your home theatre. And having access to Xbox Live and the Marketplace features will also open up some exciting opportunities for Mass Effect.
Bearing in mind the current furore surrounding the supposed difficulties of developing for Sony's PlayStation 3, how has Mass Effect's development for the new Xbox 360 faired?
The biggest challenges of this generation really come from the massive leap in fidelity (not just graphics, but animation, sound, etc.) and the detail required of the assets and systems that are required to fully use a system like the 360. Our characters start out at several million polygons, with textures that have many layers to create effects that were never possible before like subsurface scattering on skin (the red glow inside brightly lit ears etc).
Obviously it requires that much more work to create characters and environments on that level of detail, but this then has to carry through to the quality of the camerawork, character animations – everything in the game. Our camera behavior alone is extremely sophisticated, adjusting to keep the character cinematically framed, and moving organically as though the entire game was filmed by a Hollywood camera operator. So all of this adds up to keeping our large team very busy for several years!
Aesthetically, Mass Effect looks truly astounding, but most next-gen titles are reaching toward a similar level of 'wow factor' these days, does BioWare believe there's much more to glean from pursuing bigger and better graphics, or does the future of videogames lie elsewhere?
Beautiful graphics are really a side benefit of what we’re trying to achieve with Mass Effect on a larger scale. Creating an immersive world where you can become wrapped up in a storyline, building characters that seem to be alive with real emotion, and creating environments so futuristic or alien that you feel like you’re truly transported to somewhere special – it’s these kinds of goals that result in some amazing art and graphics techniques.
Ultimately though, the visuals are only there to serve the core experience of Mass Effect, which is to give you the powerful story and emotional drama of a great movie, projected on the scope of a galaxy that you’re free to explore.
Will Mass Effect's universe also expand into the realms of Xbox Live and create an MMORPG community, or is it strictly a single-player experience?
There are some cool things we’ll be doing with Live, especially through a very ambitious downloadable content plan where you’ll be able to continue playing new adventures in Mass Effect long after you complete the main storyline. But, that’s all we can say for now.
Has Mass Effect's creation resulted in any notable artistic and/or production challenges that BioWare has tackled and can learn from to further expand its upcoming titles—which you may plug if you so wish?
In general, I think this generation of games represents the biggest technological leap since the advent of 3D graphics. It results from a combination of things, from new graphics technologies like normal mapping and depth of field, to simply having 8 times as much system memory to fill with juicy details.
And when you combine that with the enormous scope of Mass Effect – and the innovations we’ve made to the gameplay itself – we’re definitely breaking a lot of new ground in areas that will hopefully be easier on future titles.
And we do have some amazing projects in development right now. Most are unannounced (but I can say that they’re extremely exciting projects and are looking amazing), but we are well underway on our huge new PC RPG, Dragon Age. It’s set in a completely new BioWare-created dark fantasy world, and is going to be an incredible game – especially for fans of the Baldur’s Gate series and Neverwinter Nights.
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