Other Worlds, Artificial Minds in Mass Effect 2

PC World - 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 galaxy, making every world unique, artificial intelligence, squad behavior, and permanent death in the universe.

This is Part Three. (Part One, Part Two, Part Four.)

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.