Mass Effect 2 Preview, Continued

The editors at ActionTrip continue to provide us with the information they gleaned from the recent Mass Effect 2 conference call that BioWare hosted. Some details on dialogue, courtesy of project director Casey Hudson:

In reference to dialogue, Casey said: “Well, I think it’s an improvement over the first Mass Effect for a few reasons. One them is that the technology has improved for how we portray the conversations. You are able to see the characters moving around a lot more, the actual situations are more dramatic, they can walk and talk at the same time. You’re in quite a variety of different situations when you’re having a conversation. Another subtle change — you have to think back to when we were designing the first game — a lot of the dialogue was written before we could really prove to ourselves how good the game would look and how cinematic it would be. Coming from games like KotOR or even Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, where you’re essentially writing dialogue for sprites, if you don’t write the dialogue, if you don’t write the words, then to some degree it didn’t happen, do you have to write everything. But we were trying to go for a more movie-like or TV-like quality where an actor can give a response that is unspoken and with a look can tell you everything about how they feel. We had that as a goal, but had to prove to ourselves that we could do it. In ME 1 there were moments like that, when Ashley apologizes for ruining the first mission and getting you hurt and you can say ‘No, it’s okay,’ or you can reprimand her. If you reprimand her, her response is just a look. She looks hurt, like you’ve hurt her feelings and you feel it as a player. Until we really saw those scenes in the first game, we didn’t know that we could pull that off, but now that we have, now we can go ahead and write it much more like it’s a movie, with more concise dialogue and with more reliance on the acting performance of the digital actors.”

“The bigger functional difference is that we’ve added a new kind of dialogue response, which we call interrupts. It’s basically a way to seize physical control during a conversation depending on what’s going on. You’ll either have Paragon interrupts or Renegade interrupts at certain times and you can let them pass. If you’re a Paragon style player and you an opportunity to do a Renegade interrupt you can let pass and it’s okay, you keep playing. It’s more a part of role-playing as opposed to being a quick-time event where you have to do something or you die. It’s not that at all. It’s more about do you want to physically do something special at that moment as part of role-playing that character. If somebody that is hostile to you wonders near a ledge over a steep drop off, you might see a Paragon interrupt and know that you’re character will be able to shove them off at that point. As a Paragon player you might see that and think ‘no, I’m not gonna push them off the building.’ Likewise, you might be talking to a character who’s dying right there in front of you from an illness and you have the cure with you and just as they start sputtering their last breath you could do a Paragon interrupt and inject them with the cure right at that moment and save them. Again, if you don’t like that character, you can let that pass and then that character will die.”