Mass Effect 2 Interview
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What short comings in Mass Effect or design ideas in the early stages of Mass Effect 2 were behind the game play decision made to change the health system to regeneration and also altering the role of medi-gel to party reviving only?
We took a fairly unapologetic approach to changing anything and implementing anything that would make the game as good as it possibly can be. In terms of the shooter experience and making things feel intense, tactical, and precise giving you the experience you'd expect having played the best shooters out there.
We looked at some of the things that were missing with the Mass Effect 1 combat experience. One of things being that if you were low on health and you don't have medi-gel that can heal you then you're just out of luck for the rest of combat. It's things like that that hurt the balance of the original game or really prevented us from getting to that feeling of being able to get in trouble, getting hurt a little bit, so you go into cover, recuperate a little bit and get back into the fight. These are some of the moment to moment feelings that we were able to get by making some of the incremental changes that we did.
Another one being to the approach we have to the way weapons work. It is ultimately an ammo-like system that is in Mass Effect 2. We have fiction in there based on weapons that don't need ammo, but we also have fiction on weapons that while they don't really need a supply of ammo they do overheat in the first game which prevents you from just constantly spamming your weapon. You would end up getting in situations where you would get into a firefight and your weapon overheats and you've got quite a long period of not being able to fire your weapon at all because it's overheated.
We try not do that and that causes you to use your bullets sparingly, but at the same time you can get caught out into a frustrating situation. The other thing being is that there is a certain sense of tension in combat that you get when you have a little bit more consideration to spending something with each round and then getting it back as you fight through, so that's another thing that's useful.
We built those things into the idea that if you had a heat sync, in Mass Effect 1 you have to wait for your heat sync to cool if your weapon over heats. But if you could eject that heat sync when its fully heated and not have to wait for it to cool off, you can eject it and pop in a new one and then get back at it, then we get back to the ammo like tension and consideration of each round (in Mass Effect 2).
Those things work a lot better with the fact that we have location based damage. If you have a sniper rifle and it's a large caliber, high velocity round, and it's going to do a lot of damage. If you think a little bit more about each shot, now you want to get the headshot because it matters. Or you want to hit a mech right in the knee so now he's got to crawl around, it's those kinds of things.
That allows you to get a little more tension, a little more consideration to combat and it's an overall psychological effect that combat just feels more intense and has a lot more tactical thought behind it.
