Mass Effect 2 Interviews

I have a busy weekend ahead of me, so before I step away for several hours I’ll leave you with a handful of Mass Effect 2 interviews to read through.

First up is IGN, where they get an exclusive scoop with lead combat designer Christina Norman on the engineer class:

IGN: What does the Mechanic power do?

Christina Norman: Tech mastery is the Engineer’s passive class power. It improves the Engineer’s health, power cooldowns, and adds a significant negotiation bonus that lets the Engineer access conversation options that would otherwise be unavailable.

When tech mastery reaches level 4, the Engineer can choose to evolve it into one of two powerful versions: Mechanic or Operative.

Operatives are direct damage specialists. They do more damage with all their powers, particularly incinerate and overload.

Mechanics are creature specialists. All their powers have a longer duration. This makes their summoned drones last longer before they despawn, and hacked enemies remain hacked for longer. Mechanics also receive an additional negotiation bonus, making them master negotiators.

All classes in Mass Effect 2 get a similar, cool, class power that also improves their ability to negotiate. We wanted to reward role players in Mass Effect 2 who invest in negotiation by giving them powerful combat benefits in addition to negotiation bonuses.

Then we move to VideoGamer for a massive eight-pager with project director Casey Hudson:

VideoGamer.com: How do your relationships with your party members change following dialogue decisions?

CH: This is a game that’s about the characters. Part of the idea of preparing your team for a suicide mission is it’s all about recruiting the characters you want to take with you, making them loyal, making sure they have everything they need to be equipped and ready to go into battle with you, building up your ship. So it’s all of these things that tie into the main storyline, but it comes back to those characters that you’re getting. You end up doing missions to go out and recruit them. First you have to talk with them once you have them and find out what makes them tick and understand them. Then you’ll figure out what mission you need to do to make them loyal. You have an ongoing relationship with each character. But loyalty is a huge factor in the overall concept of the game, and then that’s how it ties in with your relationships.

Maybe in previous games you would talk to characters and there’s a relationship there, but again, it might not tie back into the main storyline. Here, the reason you end up talking to your characters, outside of the fact that it’s interesting and there’s a relationship there, is that you can figure out what it is that’s going to make them loyal to you. And then you go and do a mission where you learn a lot about their back story. It unfolds in a way you can learn about and appreciate that character. So you’re developing their loyalty, you’re developing their relationship, and then we also have a number of romance options in this game where if you develop a relationship over the course of the game, some of them will become love interests. Whereas in Mass Effect 1 there was a love interest for male or female, and then Liara was another option, in this one, male and female characters each have several love interests.

It adds a further degree of conflict, actually, because you’re thinking about who’s more interesting as a love interest, but also it’s interesting that the loyalty system and the love interest aspect both involve conflict. You might make someone loyal to you and then you make someone else loyal to you, the next time you come back to the ship, they might be fighting. You go down to find out what’s going on, and now you have to decide or talk them down or come up with a way to try and keep them both loyal to you. And then likewise with the love interests, you might find yourself conflicted about who you find more interesting, and then if you pursue one, then that can block your ability to progress with the others. So there’s a lot more sophistication there. And there’s more character, too. There are ten characters you can get as part of your total team to draw from, versus the six in the original Mass Effect.

And then Gaming Target steps up with a quick Q&A with Ray Muzyka:

Patrick Mulhern: Various BioWare employees have eluded to a number of possible closing scenarios based on decisions made in the game. Care to put a concrete number on the amount of possible conclusions? Are they all radically different?

Ray Muzyka: There are many different endings in the game and they all reflect the choices you’ve made. It’s not even like one single point in time where you see an ending. Bam, you see this cut scene or that cut scene, (Congratulations the game is over.) It doesn’t work that way.

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t end when you finish the game. You can continue to explore the galaxy, walk around your ship, talk to all the people that you survived with, or not. There are different permutations of how that can unfold. The people that survived on your team are going to say different things to you depending on what you did during the course of the game. It’s almost like an adventure to see what they are going to say to you at that point.

Of course, the adventure continues with post-release DLC. We’ll have more news on that later.

As you head to the end game, as you progress through it, some things happen based on the choices you’ve made to that point. That’s part of the final stage of the game. It’s showing you the consequences of your actions. Who survived alongside you, who doesn’t survive and why. Is it because of the choices you made they couldn’t survive? Some cases it is. It really leaves you feeling profoundly moved in a lot of cases. (Wow, I didn’t expect that to be the outcome. I’m really sad about that.) Or (Wow, because of the choice I made before I had this happen and that’s really satisfying. That was me that did that.)

That’s the way we are doing the endgame. It’s not one moment in time, one cutscene, congratulations you’re done, walk away. Instead it is this emotionally engaging, satisfying experience that progresses over the course of hours. It’s a unique approach to an end game that both RPG and shooter fans are going to find very satisfying.