The following is a transcription of the texts in the chapter "The Making of Mass Effect 2" within the book BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development, published in 2020 and written by Ben Gelinas.
A Spacefaring Dirty Dozen[]
BioWare's follow-up to Mass Effect was bigger and bolder than the original in pretty much every way—from the squad mate count to the galaxy map—while player choices made in the original game carried over to significantly impact the sequel's plot, a first for BioWare.
Characters drove the story of Mass Effect 2 in a Dirty Dozen-inspired plot that saw a resurrected, Cerberus-backed Commander Shepard searching the galaxy for a team to tackle the mounting Reaper threat.
The game streamlined some RPG mechanics in favor of greater emphasis on action gameplay. Instead of the Mako, Shepard explored hostile planets in the M-44 Hammerhead, a hovering infantry craft.
The game boasted a massive squad of characters, recruited for a climactic suicide mission where anyone could die, depending on the player's tactical decisions.
There were two camps on the team: those who wanted to push combat and systems forward, redefining the Mass Effect experience, and those who wanted to make a true sequel, with the same gameplay and systems and a new story.
"I think it ended up being a good push-pull," Mass Effect 2 editor Karin Weekes says. "It felt like a pretty healthy creative conflict."
Origins of the Illusive Man[]
Mass Effect 2 was a game you could hold up to someone who argues that games aren't a serious medium and say: "Oh yeah, then why is Martin Sheen in this?"
Sheen was cast as the mysterious Cerberus leader known as the Illusive Man.
Trilogy executive producer Casey Hudson says Sheen was their first pick to play Mass Effect 2's shadowy string-pulling villain.
The idea for the character came from a mash-up of concepts Casey had collected over the years. The name "Illusive" was originally Casey's pitch for naming Dragon Age: Origins' Eclipse engine, a word inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi's line in The Phantom Menace: "It's not about the mission, Master. It's something ... elsewhere. Elusive."
"I thought: What if we called our next engine 'Elusive,' but used an I, and then it's like, illusion, it's 'Illusive,'" Casey says. "So that was my idea for our game engine name, which we didn't use. But I still really liked the word illusive with an I and what that conjures."
When DLC for the original Mass Effect was in production, Casey had been watching a lot of CNN, specifically Anderson Cooper.
"How is one guy traveling to all these places and never looking tired and always being able to speak with clarity?" Casey says it seemed almost super-human. "What if there was someone who is the absolute maximum of the things that you would aspire to be, but also the worst of humanity?"
Cooper, though far from the worst of humanity, became an inspiration for the Illusive Man, right down to the gray hair and piercing blue eyes.
The other piece was his role as a major influence in politics secretly pulling the strings. Inspiration for that came from Jack Bauer's brother Graem in 24, a figure with considerable clout who works behind the scenes. "He can call up the president and tell the president what to do and hang up, because he's so connected and so influential," Casey says. They then added Martin Sheen, who had played a president. His performance brought wisdom and gravitas to the role. "He had quit smoking, but the character smokes. He didn't want to fake it, but he also didn't want to smoke, so he actually asked for a cigarette," to hold it, stopping his words to take drags with natural cadence.
With that, they had a performance by Martin Sheen coupled with a look and superhuman aura inspired by Anderson Cooper and the clandestine influence of Graem Bauer.
"You put those things all together, and that's how we got to the Illusive Man," Casey says.
What's a Mission Without Some Scars?[]
Shipping a AAA game can often feel like landing a starship while it's still being built. ME2 had plenty of last-minute fixes to ensure that it landed safely.
On the writing side, the team was still pushing to write and revise lines hours before recording sessions started.
The writing team also got pretty used to setbacks. Multiple writers left Mass Effect 2 during development, including lead writer Drew Karpyshyn. Mass Effect writer Mac Walters became lead writer on the project when Drew left.
Patrick Weekes joined the original Mass Effect from Revolver after Mac fell down a flight of stairs and injured his back during that game's production. In a similarly hectic period during Mass Effect 2's production, it was Patrick's turn, breaking their shoulder while ice skating.
It was a lot to juggle, considering Patrick and Karin Weekes's kids were two and four years old at the time.
"I think it would not be overdramatic to say that was the most dramatic two weeks of my life," Karin says. "I remember calling Mac Walters on my phone and going, 'Hey Mac, sorry to bug you on Sunday morning, but I have some news.'"
Mac, who was injured during Mass Effect's production, of course understood. In the waning months of Mass Effect 2's production, the team had lost a writer to a growing BioWare studio in Montreal, while two others had left for other opportunities. With Mac's role keeping him mostly in recording sessions, that left veteran BioWare writer Luke Kristjanson, Karin, and fellow editor Cookie Everman to land the story safely.
"Me, Karin, and Cookie took over the writing bug and task list, and I can't stress enough how much they did to get ME2 out the door. There's no part of that thing we didn't touch," Luke says.
Patrick helped out where they could, writing transition dialogue and non-VO in lowercase, leaving Karin to clean up the copy.
Untitled Anecdote 1[]
Mass Effect 2's plot is a web of conditionals that track (among so many other things) which squad mates Shepard recruited over the course of the game and whether or not they earned each squad mate's trust. The variables at play affected the outcome of the game's iconic "suicide mission" in which it was possible for the entire squad to be killed.
Untitled Anecdote 2[]
"Mass Effect 2 was much more of a shooter than Mass Effect and more of a shooter than anything BioWare had made since Shattered Steel," ME2 design QA Kristen Schanche says.
Bio-Trivia: ME2 Included an Interactive Comic Book on PS3[]
A year after launching on Xbox 360 and Windows, Mass Effect 2 became the first in the series to be released on a PlayStation console. In order to ensure that decisions made in the first game carried over, BioWare worked with Dark Horse Comics to create Mass Effect: Genesis—an interactive comic DLC that caught players up on the story. The comic featuring branching paths that allowed player [sic] to make key choices from the original Mass Effect, including the fate of Wrex, the Citadel Council, and the Rachni Queen, as well as whether to save Ashley or Kaidan.
Untitled Anecdote 3[]
New romance options were added in Mass Effect 2, like fan-favorite Garrus Vakarian, and the drell assassin Thane Krios (pictured). With Thane, artists took great care fo craft a character who would appeal to human players while still appearing alien. At one point, the artists sent multiple variations of Thane to the team, asking them to vote on which appearance they the most attractive.
Untitled Anecdote 4[]
Most of the Normandy crew was actually written by lead level designer Dusty Everman. "l gave him advice in the evenings between bugs," senior writer Luke Kristjanson says. "Kicking ME2 into shape was a wild ride."
Note: "BioWare en Français: The Founding of BioWare Montreal" and the subsequent untitled anecdote have been omitted from this page as they are not directly related to Mass Effect.
Bio-Trivia: There Was an Alien Character Creator in Mass Effect[]
The character creator in Mass Effect that allowed players to craft the look of their Commander Shepard was based on the tools that character designers used to create in-game characters. Under the hood, similar tools existed for designers to create aliens, including a variety of krogan, asari, and turian characters.
Sadly, for story and technical reasons, Shepard needed to be human.
"The aliens were actually much easier to animate than the humans. As soon as you have something that's human, it's very difficult to make it look realistic. You see all the mistakes and everything," Mass Effect cinematic animator Jonathan Cooper says. "If you have some alien, you have nothing in real life to compare that to, so they're actually much easier."
Untitled Anecdote 5[]
Mass Effect 2 built on the success of the original, with ample buzz built through heavy anticipation in games media and tie—in stories, including novels by Mass Effect lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.
Notes on Mass Effect 2's Story Structure[]
Following the success of Mass Effect, BioWare got to work creating a follow-up that would introduce a new villain and squad mates, while presenting a story that encouraged players to explore the galaxy a little more than in the first game's race to save it.
The team decided on a sort of Dirty Dozen concept, where Shepard faced what could be a suicide mission. The Illusive Man would give players leads on potential squad mates to recruit, bettering the chance at success. It turned the recruiting of characters into a kind of collection mechanic, where players would not only recruit but also work to earn the loyalty of a ragtag group of spacefarers.
"The final mission would play out very differently depending on how you prepared earlier in the game," project director Casey Hudson says. "Over the Christmas holiday of 2007, I worked out a diagram on a single piece of paper that would define the entire scope and structure of the game."
Bug Report: A Shotgun So Powerful It Destroys Textures[]
Release: Mass Effect 2
Priority: 2 (Moderate)
Description: A shotgun fires a spray of pellets with each trigger pull. At a certain point in Mass Effect 2's development, the damage meant to be dealt by the blast as a whole was applied to each of the pellets. Shotguns in Mass Effect 2 were so powerful, they shot the textures off any enemy unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a blast.
"I shot a krogan so hard that his textures fell off and he got the checkerboard default Unreal texture," Mass Effect 2 quality assurance tech Boldwin Li says. "It was pretty amazing."
Untitled Anecdote 6[]
"We rewrote chunks of Jack two days before she went to final VO," senior writer Luke Kristjanson says. "Jack's voice was the only one we could change, because all the other NPC's were already recorded. We helped Jos [Hendriks] redesign her mission by juggling locked NPC lines, and changing Shepard's reactions by rewriting the text paraphrases to change the context of the already recorded VO."
Hidden Meaning in ME2 Distress Signals[]
When called upon to dream up seemingly random numbers for game systems, writers will wedge in all sorts of references. See if you can guess the obscure nods Luke Kristjanson snuck into these distress calls in Mass Effect 2:
- General distress. MSV Hugo Gernsback, registration BW46-10034-087. Impact and unscheduled sub-orbital deceleration recorded.
- Fault in beacon protocol 90-35768-TTJ. General distress alert triggered by unspecified incident. Status is not known.
- General distress. Beacon auto process recovered from unspecified fault, GMOP-65000. Status of system operator is not known.
- General distress. Beacon auto process interrupted at parse point GLR-21-12. Unspecified incident. Unspecified user.
Solutions[]
- BioWare's initials and Edmonton phone number backward
- Initials and backward phone number from Tommy Tutone's "Jenny"
- Initials and numbers from Glenn Miller Orchestra's "Pennsylvania 6-5000"
- Initials and numbers from Geddy Lee and Rush's "2112"
Untitled Anecdote 7[]
Blasto is a fictional hanar Spectre from a series of action vids who was first mentioned in Mass Effect 2. Though the character was meant to be one step above an Easter egg, Blasto's popularity among fans prompted the developers to bring the character back for Mass Effect 3. In Andromeda, an in-fiction cereal was invented to promote the in-fiction action star: Blast-Ohs. BioWare's community team even went so far as to create a box for the cereal and film a commercial to help promote the game.