Mass Effect 2 E3 Previews

While we’re on the subject of BioWare, we might as well dive into the latest E3 previews of Mass Effect 2, too.

The first is at Ars Technica:

The cinematic experience is certainly back. In one of the scenes, Shepard that’s right, he’s far from dead and a companion are flying around in an airborne vehicle, chatting about their quest for a particularly effective assassin. You see, in this game, every scene is building towards a battle, and your job is to create a team with the single goal of helping you to survive that confrontation. It’s the middle story of a trilogy, so we’re to expecting the game to go to some dark places.

Hudson followed the conversation tree, shaping the dialog and tone of the scene on the fly. Later that day, I spoke with the founders of Bioware, and they told me just how much work has gone into the dialog system… it has taken much more than one game to get it this smooth. “The dialog system itself?” they said. “We’ve worked on it, and we can show you how we’ve gotten to Mass Effect 2 over five or six years, and multiple games… Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, it took a long time to figure out the technology to deliver it.”

While the other is at RPGamer:

In this system a mention of one NPC who thought Shepard may be trying to extort money from them brought up an exclamation point tied to the left trigger, which when pressed, gave Shepard the option to interrupt the conversation and inquire how many credits would be offered. This looks to be a very clever expansion of the standard conversation system of most of BioWare’s games, opening up a lot of additional choices to think about during the dialog scenes.

And Mass Effect 2 really loves your choices. So much so that every choice you made in Mass Effect 1 is coming over. So not only do you have your stats from the first game, you have all the consequences, recruited party members, and lost comrades from the first game following you over. And while Mass Effect 2 will be accessible for newcomers to the series, this will surely help contribute to the epic feel of this trilogy for players of the first title.