[This is an ME2 question, but leads into the rest] Game Rant: When you addressed design concerns going from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2, how did you start? What influenced the changes?
Christina Norman: A couple of major factors. First of all, we always had a vision for the game. The vision evolves, it never stays exactly the same but from the very start, there was the vision of the game. We knew at the point when Mass Effect 1 came out that there were certain aspects of the original vision of Mass Effect that we had not addressed. In addition, we looked at feedback from both reviewers and fans and we were lucky. If people had been all over of the map and everyone said something different then it wouldnt have been useful.
There were a lot of themes that emerged that seemed really consistent and resulted in kind of like a critical, hardcore gamer feedback and there were also people who would just say things like, I find this game confusing, I try to play it and my gun isnt hitting anybody and I dont know whats going on, and other sort of things. So there were certain aspects of the gameplay that were making the game inaccessable to players.
The way I like to put that is, Mass Effect has always looked like a shooter, but Mass Effect 1 didnt really play like one. It could play like a shooter, if you were a smart gamer and you understood what we were doing and you did all the RPG stuff in just the right way, you could have a pretty good shooter experience.
We wanted to make sure every gamer who have already played a shooter could have a good experience in Mass Effect 2 and look at the RPG stuff as not being the barrier to entry, like you dont get to play a shooter if you dont do this RPG stuff and make it more like You can play it like a shooter, but if you want to be really awesome, if you want to just destroy everything, you really have to engage that RPG stuff. And that becomes sort of a competitive edge to a gamer when you engage those RPG mechanics.
Game Rant: Will players who opted to stay romantically involved with Liara or Ashley Williams from ME1 be rewarded for staying loyal?
Christina Norman: I cant talk about any of the specific decisions or what they actually do. But what I can say is that decisions through all of the Mass Effect games, including the DLC, will matter for Mass Effect 3. And its not just like decisions that carried over from ME1 to ME2 will matter in ME3, theyll be decisions in ME1 that did not visibly impact ME2 that will have an impact in ME3. What we looked at is the total story, everything that happened in Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 is real and matters, we let the writers draw on that as much as they want to customize the experience and to be pretty much without limits.
Game Rant: Since the design differences between 1 and 2 were so prevalent, are you taking an approach to the third game of if it aint broke, dont fix it?
Christina Norman: Sure. This is the metaphor you can think of it in. I can tell you the overall arcing design for 1, 2, and 3. With ME1, we wanted to build Mass Effect and we did our best to do that and we succeeded in a lot of areas, but we didnt reach where we wanted to do in some areas. Mass Effect 2 was like, OK, now we have time to take what we did and fully sort of realize the vision we had for Mass Effect. And weve done that, but now what we can do is add another layer on top of that in terms of now that we have something that we think really represents the Mass Effect experience, lets build on that.
There really is infinite possibilities now that we have that really, really solid Mass Effect 2 core. What youll probably not see in Mass Effect 3 is a lot of major, complete reinventions, because we dont have those things where well shift it and all that. That is not actually what we wanted to do. There will still be things that are in ME2 that wont be in ME3 and thats just because were looking at the overall play experience of does this make sense to have in both games? Sometimes theres something and well say this is great for one game, but we dont want to do it again in another game, because once was enough. And instead we want to put in something new to replace it.
Game Rant: Like planet scanning?
Christina Norman: I cant comment on anything specifically, but there will be elements that are in ME2 that are not in ME3.
