Mass Effect 2 Interviews

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Written by BuckGB on January 25th, 2010

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O.G.:How did that work with two main characters with identical lines? Did they direct you two the same way? Did you do some sort of collaboration?

Jennifer: That right there, the consistency, is a credit to the producers and the directors. They coordinated everything because Mark's in Canada and I'm in LA. So the producers and directors really stated on top of what each department was going. Sometimes we'd hear reference of each other and sometimes we wouldn't. And please let's not forget the writers, the script is written so specifically and so clearly that the acting takes care of itself. You just step and be that person you see on that page and it's going to be consistent. There are subtle differences between Mark and me in just who we are and how we interpret things, and that's the fun in playing a male or female Shepherd. That and I hear that a lot of male players play a female Shepherd just like having boobs.

I think that over the course of this generation, the shooter genre has become important, and it's been blending very heavily with the RPG genre. You see that more and more. Obviously, games like BioShock, Fallout 3, and Borderlands all blend elements of RPGs and the shooter genre. I feel that Mass Effect came very much from the RPG angle, but with the sequel there is more emphasis on the shooter aspects. What attracts you guys to that?

AC: I think it's accessibility. It's being able to bring [it] into a market that might not have actually tried our games.

And when we made this game, we want to compete with the best of the best out there -- the best first-person and third-person shooters out there. I think the goal was, if we can make that aspect solid and open up the audience, then they'll be blown away by all these other things about a BioWare game, that they might not have played before.

That hybrid is always going to happen. You know, I was thinking about this because we get a lot of that, but I think back to -- switching genres almost -- to something like Onimusha, which is hack and slash, but it actually had really cool RPG elements into it. And to take it to another level, say, GTA. You have shades of role-playing in there as well.

And I think that's what's expected now. People want maybe a bit of something from each. The core gameplay still stays the same for whatever genre that you're in for, but you need that extra depth or complexity to keep players engaged, to say, "Hey, man, that's kind of cool. I do this, but it's not just enough."

So, I think the one thing, like the critique on, say, if you're looking at a pure shooter, it's obvious. The critiques are always the stories are way too flat, there's no character development, it's two-dimensional, there's no rhyme or reason as to why I'm going on this eight-hour journey to kill everything in sight.

So, what Mass Effect does is it still delivers all the visceral impact of that for people to get that really cool feedback, but... that is only one fraction of what the game offers. All the cutscenes, all the cinematics, all the character development, and most importantly the story -- I think those are the things that we want to be able to get to this larger audience.

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