Mass Effect 2 Interview, Part Four
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GO: Turning to first game quirks, I know everyone cranks about Mass Effect's slow elevators, but what bugged me was exploring with the Mako. It didn't seem to scale well with the rest of the game. At one point I recall hopping over projectiles spit by an alien sandworm and feeling this Super Mario vibe that clashed with the seriousness of everything else.
CH: We have a completely new vehicle in Mass Effect 2, and it's a similar idea, but the way it works and the controls are fundamentally different. We're not talking too much about it yet, in part because it's one of the things that's just gone in and we want to make sure that it's going to stay the way it is in the final game before we talk too much about it. But it's definitely a different design.
It's a similar idea, in that it's a vehicle about the size of the Mako that you can use to explore these really rough alien worlds. The difference is, it moves fundamentally differently from the first Mako, where now.it basically moves similar to the way your character moves. You can strafe from left to right, you can shoot wherever you want, it's easier to target enemies that are standing right in front of you or directly overhead, and it just navigates the terrain a lot better.
Part of the issue with the first Mako was that it literally, in a way that I don't think anyone knows or will ever fully appreciate, it was probably I'll bet the first and only physics-simulated skid-steer vehicle in games. Not that that's a. [laughs] .not that that's a bullet point we'd put on the box, but the amazing thing about it is that it was actually physically simulated. In doing that, it incurred a lot of control difficulties. You couldn't just strafe to the side and hide behind a rock and then pop out.
The new vehicle fundamentally addresses all the stuff we wanted to improve with the Mako, and that's part of the value of really just.instead of moving ahead and just continuing into the sequel, the fact that we stopped, we looked at everything about the way people were experiencing the first game, and then designed things that were fundamental solutions. We could've made incremental improvements to certain things like the Mako, but by going back to first principles and thinking about the way the worlds actually ended up, how rough the terrain was, the kind of fighting that you'd want to do there, the kind of exploring, then designing a vehicle that captured exactly those things...knowing all that we know from the first game, we now have a vehicle that's right out of the box so much easier and intuitive to play with.
