Mass Effect 2 Previews and Interview

BioWare continues to heavily promote their upcoming Mass Effect sequel, so it comes as no surprise that two new previews and an interview with producer Adrien Cho have hit the web.

The first preview is at IGN:

The bigger decisions, however, will have an immediately noticeable impact. Hudson listed the decision regarding the council at the end of Mass Effect as one of the choices with the biggest repercussions. “It’s not like the entire game takes on a completely different story with different colors and different locations and things like that. It’s more the collection of many different effects all throughout the game. If you let the council die so that human beings can take more control in the galaxy, or if you save them, that’s one of the things that you’ll see the biggest number of repercussions especially when you go to places like the Citadel where the council was based. You’ll hear it as you walk around, you’ll see things being different. There are different plots that open up for you.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Different plots, and different side quests, will become available or be blocked off depending on your actions in the first game. Hudson elaborated, “The quests are different and the things that happen in them are different, and that’s true of a lot of the plots. The things you have to do really only make sense if you made a certain choice previously or if certain characters are alive or dead.”

The other is at Atomic MPC:

We got to see three segments of gameplay, one featuring some classic ME running and gunning, and the graphics are pumped up across the board. Those annoyingly grainy shadows are long gone, the details is a vast improvement, and the devs have really gone to town on the camera work.

If the original was cinematic, this one is cinematic in the extreme. The best example of this is during the much more organic conversation sequences. These are no longer two-camera interview-style setups; instead, a far defter camera sweeps around the protagonists, cutting dramatically or panning slowly. The sense of filmic gravitas is wonderfully maintained, helped again by some top notch voice acting and some very adult scripting.

And the interview is over at Polygamia:

What did the inspiration for the Illusive Man come from?

For all those shadowy characters in thrillers, there is always someone behind the scenes who knows a lot, is a broker of intelligence, is a few steps ahead. Like in Blade Runner, in terms of chess, is able to anticipate his moves a few steps ahead.

Like the Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files?

Yes. We definitely wanted to have a feel of Mad Men, some of it was inspired by Anderson Cooper, a CNN correspondent, and the personality was taken from all of these Hitchcock movies, from The X-Files. It’s a mixture of all those different elements.