Mass Effect 2 Interview, Preview, & Developer Diary

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Written by BuckGB on November 5th, 2009

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IGN: I know there has been a lot of talk about how the downloadable content plan will be more fully realized this time around. What exactly prevented that from happening in Mass Effect and how is that being fixed for the sequel?

Casey Hudson: Well, it was a couple of things and really they do make a functional difference that was a limitation before but isn't really now. The main one is that in trying to build Mass Effect 1, just the core experience and all of the things we wanted, is incredibly ambitious. It really pushed us to the limit just to deliver the game. We knew we wanted it to be extendable through downloadable content. We put as much opportunity for it as we could given all of the other things we wanted to do. But in the end, the limitation was that we were only able to do the large, mission-style pack. We couldn't do the whole range of things from tiny little free downloads all of the way up to a huge expansion pack. The technology just didn't support that.

That's what we've changed for Mass Effect 2. All of the different things that we want to extend are actually extendable. So we can do little things, medium size things, a mission, an armor, a gun, all of the way up to a big expansion. I guess the other thing is that we've actually set aside people to work on these things. That was another challenge we had. You know we've been trying to develop two huge games here at once, so there just weren't the people to work on these things. But in the time between Mass Effect 1 and 2 we've actually built up a team that is going to be able to provide ongoing content. So we'll have the people to do it.

I guess the last thing is just a lot of what we've done with Mass Effect 2 is to develop the technology that makes everything happen. So the pipeline we have for building content is just a lot easier. And then when you combine that with the fact that it supports different sizes of things and we have people to work on it, those are some really big differences for why we'll be able to support it much better this time.

It's safe to say the majority of the gameplay is extremely similar. However, there seems to have been vast changes made to the weapon-based powers. There was a lot more variety, although the new powers seem to encompass what was previously implemented as ammo types. It's unclear whether these are also remaining, just separated. Grenades were also unavailable in the demo. The health system has also been changed as medi-gel was no longer required to heal wounds, health recovers over time instead.

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