Mass Effect 2 Interview, Part Three
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GO: Besides its trunk story, Mass Effect had a galaxy of optional planets you could explore. Of those, about 90% were represented with superficial text descriptions, while the remaining 10% you could actually land on tended to be mechanically and visually generic. How distinctive are the planets and optional locations this time? What can we expect from planetary exploration?
CH: It's completely different. It's based on an approach that's 180-degrees different. Much of what we were trying to do with the first game was to accomplish this experience of enormous scope, and that involved creating a new IP and all of that stuff. Now we're able to look at the feedback, what people wanted, what we want to do differently, and yeah, dealing with planetary uniqueness was one of the big points of feedback.
With Mass Effect 2, we actually looked at whether we should simply abandon additional worlds outside of the core ones. We seriously evaluated that, because with the first game, we had all these rich core-story-based worlds, and then we added to that a large number of other worlds you could explore and conduct missions on. But in general, there was a lot of feedback, as you say, from people wanting the optional planets to be more distinctive or unique. So we thought, should we even have this extra expanded universe portion of the game?
What we found in evaluating what people were saying, was that they loved the idea that you could look at a galaxy map and find a planet, go out there and find something amazing and explore it. They just wanted more substance and for the whole enterprise to be more interesting.
So we've kept all those additional worlds in Mass Effect 2, but we took a completely different tack, which is that every area has to be.every planet that you find out in the uncharted worlds has to be based on its own unique hook. There has to be something different there, an opportunity for you to play with something in terms of gameplay or the story content or whatever's going on at a given location that's different from what you're able to do in the core story.
With the first one, we built lighter content but were able to deliver a large number of worlds. In Mass Effect 2's case, by contrast, it's about every area being something amazing and special, so that you see one and you go wow, that was a really cool and different experience. But then the next one is completely different from that, and changes your expectations again about what you'll find. The more you do it, the more you realize that anything can happen in the outer parts of the exploration experience.
