Mass Effect 2 - Progress Report Part 2

Welcome to the second part of our Mass Effect 2 progress report. If you missed it, you can read the first part right here.

On Load Times & Elevators

"In Mass Effect 2 we have a different system of transitioning from one location to another and it actually shows you a schematic of where you are"

Paying as the Engineer pays off, clearly.

This planet looks familiar...

Casey had been asked to explain if BioWare had spent some time to improve certain technical aspects of the game, such as long elevator load times, which we've all experienced in the original. "In Mass Effect 2 we have a different system of transitioning from one location to another and it actually shows you a schematic of where you are, where you're going and how you're getting there. Quite often, these are spectacular, like the ones in the Citadel - you actually see now for the first time where you are and what an amazing location it is in 3D and how you move from one place to the other. The other side-effect is that, by doing it this way, the actual load time ends up being much faster. It's part of a narrative. It gives a seamless continuity to the narrative because you can see yourself moving from one place to the other, but at the same time it's faster," explains Casey.

Transition has been improved on the Normandy as well. "You get the schematics of the Normandy and each deck as you through it, but again, it's so much faster," continued Casey. "Now it's just a ton of fun to move all around the Normandy, go between decks and go up and down from your quarters and engineering at the bottom, and just zip around the Normandy, talk to everybody, see what's going on, there's a lot of activities there... So yeah, even something like that we've improved. Texture loading, texture resolution, memory frame-rate and all of that stuff is much improved."

Improving the Dialogue

"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."

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."

Cool explosion. But it wasn't my fault, I tell ya.

Take that, Metal Pants!

The Sex Theme

Just when you thought nobody would bring it up, the question about the controversy surrounding sex in Mass Effect suddenly popped in.

"We think a love interest or a romance story... adds meaning to the decisions you're making in the game."

"None of what was being discussed was actually based on the game itself," said Casey, referring to earlier reports about the sex scenes in the original game. "It was kind of a story being reported and discussed by people who have never seen the game and then when they did, they themselves admitted 'well, yeah it's actually tasteful and it's along the lines of what you'd see in an action movie or evening TV.' In terms of what we actually delivered it was really well done and extremely tasteful. Personally, I'm extremely proud of the way the romance scene and the whole romance relationship, which is what it really is (because you develop it over the course of a 16-hour game)... I'm just really proud of how it was done in ME 1. Similarly we're doing something along the same lines in ME 2. We think a love interest or a romance story just like you would have in a PG-13 action movie or a great sci-fi movie, the love interest adds an additional level of emotional attachment to characters. It adds meaning to the decisions you're making in the game. So, that's why we always do it. We're doing something similar, but just with, I think, even better skill, as part of really closing in on a high-quality cinematic experience."