Mass Effect 2 Interviews

UGO editor Tracey John has been visiting a few different websites to post bits and pieces of her conversation with Mass Effect 2 creative director Casey Hudson during last month's Game Developers Conference. First, she chats about Miranda's ridiculously tight outfit on Kotaku:
Me: I have to ask about Miranda's super-tight outfit and Jack's lack of a shirt. Can you talk about their character designs and what went into their clothing, or um, lack thereof?

Hudson: I think people will look at the initial view of the characters and say oh, they're going after "this market," especially with Jack. With Jack, people were like, "Oh, it's a marketing thing. They're going after this audience." Of course we don't do that. What we do is, "We're going to create 10 to 12 characters, and we want each of them to be really different." The other thing is there are so many different kinds of players. We like to create all different kinds of characters so that all different kinds of personalities of players that play our game are able to identify differently.

That's one thing we tried with Jack and that's why we make a character like that. A lot of people are repelled by that kind of character. There are other people that see what she's about. That's what we want. The other thing is though that there's always more to that character. So in the case of Jack for example, she becomes someone you care about when you don't initially. Her story makes you kind of care about her and her love interest is intriguing at a superficial level, but the superficial level prevents you from getting to know her. But if you ignore that and try to get to know her, there's so much more there.

Likewise with Miranda. She's genetically engineered to be perfect and beautiful, and she uses that. That's why her outfit is sexy and tight and everything. But, again, it's something she struggles with. She uses it, it's been her gift, but it's also the thing that she feels she's stuck with. That becomes part of it.
Then she stopped by 1UP to talk about the lack of a homosexual romance:
Me: Tali is my favorite character. But my Shepard is female and totally in love with her. Why can't my character engage in a romance with her? Why not have the option to have homosexual relations?

Casey Hudson: Everything new that we add still requires extra content. Some people might argue in a case like that you could just have the same kinds of scenes that just work with different characters. But we wouldn't really want to have it that way. You'd want to take a proper approach to designing those scenes, otherwise you'd see the same scene. So we kind of pulled back and looked at where we had to draw the line in terms of how much content we make. How much should we support? We actually added a lot more romance options because we have new characters and multiple options already in the romances. So we kind of pulled back and said, "Well, the love interest is part of the story and it helps you care about the characters in a different way." We still view it as... if you're picturing a PG-13 action movie. That's how we're trying to design it. So that's why the love interest is relatively light. ... That's another thing we did better than we did before. We really lock you into character. Tali is really interesting because the whole idea of her character and what she's concerned about and her experience and age -- we kind of factor all those things, and we designed the love interests really around the particular characters because they're all quite different. So her (love scene) is a little more innocent and fun.