Mass Effect 2 Interview, Part One

PC World is offering up the first half of an interview they recently conducted with Mass Effect 2 lead producer Casey Hudson.

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.