Mass Effect Interview
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Q: How difficult has it been to make each world in the game different and distinct?
Ray Muzyka: We have a big team. We have a lot of people working on this; it's the biggest team we've ever fielded. We've got 130 people working on it, so that's a lot of content creators, a lot of testers. We're on the polish phase now kind of finishing up some content, optimising and fixing bugs. So we've had a big team for a long time and it's a grand vision, and to achieve that vision you need a large group of talented people.
Part of the vision was to have a galaxy to explore. You have to have variety in the worlds; ice worlds, swamp worlds, desert worlds and things like that. There's a whole range of choices in the places you can go. You can just focus on the mains storyline and the critical path, but the offroad path is just so tempting because there's so many cool things to explore.
There's full quest-based planets, there's planets with dungeons to explore and there's planets where you just walk around outside and find some cool loot and take off.
Greg Zeschuk: There was also a very long conceptual phase for the game. In other words we spent six to eight months in the beginning conceiving how things would look. A large amount of work was spent with the ground work and visuals, so if we did actually end up building it there was a real clear idea what the armour looks like, what the environments look like and what the monster look like.
Ray Muzyka: We've got some amazing art up on our wall. All the concept art is just plastered all over the place. We've even got screenshots up on the wall and that's the best part; it really has been achieved. You can put the screenshot next to the original concept piece and that's what it looks like. The team's done an amazing job on the art side.
