Bonus Content Disc/Environments: Eden Prime

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Environments of Mass Effect: Eden Prime" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept we did up for Eden Prime. At this point, we were thinking it was a farm world, with rolling hills, almost like the countryside of England; maybe hedges, these large oak trees... So it's a very agricultural area. This concept was done up, you can see the towers, some bridge structures... Maybe these would be structures that they would take the crops on these trains, bring up these towers, the ships would dock up with them. Eden Prime was a planet under attack. It was almost like the beginning of D-Day when they were storming across Europe, across the fields; that was supposed to be the look for this.

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Derek Watts: Eden Prime went through a lot of changes, just like a lot of our other worlds. A lot of it, you just have in concept, so it's not much of a change; other ones, you get as far as actually building a level before you make changes; other ones, you've built the whole thing and then you just try and fix it with lighting changes. So when we start to get the map down and talk with the designers and the writers, we have an idea of what they want to happen. At this point, on Eden Prime, you were actually supposed to land in the Normandy--see where the "1" is--walk up through the areas, have some encounters, and then look over these giant crop fields, that's the kind of beige area. And then there was supposed to be a big trench, a meteorite trench, where the Prothean ruin kind of ploughed through, and the camp was in 4 and 6. You would actually go down in this trench. We modified that quite a bit just to look more like a dig site.

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Derek Watts: This is another map of the same area; just changing around the views, maybe to help out with streaming load. You kind of want to get the character moving around so you can actually stream in separate parts of the level without him seeing.

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Derek Watts: This is the second part of Eden Prime. You were actually supposed to go across a river, up around some turrets, and then go through these giant crop fields of wheat or whatever kind of crop that they grew on this planet. And then we had these floating crop beds. Then you get up to 7, up to the station, and take the train all the way to the end of the level. These are some early concepts for some structures on the level.

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Derek Watts: The top one was supposed to be maybe these tubes that they built. Maybe even the whole planet was more of a metal, man-made planet; and the grass and crops were just put on top. That's some of the ideas you throw around at the beginning, before people tell you that it's crazy. So that was a tunnel that maybe you went into. The lower structure was maybe some kind of pumping station, some kind of other structure that would help out with the crop beds. So you always need something that people can go in and turn switches. So, those were early phases of these.

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Derek Watts: This is an idea for some floating crop beds. They would fly along over top of the planet. They had crops on them, or maybe they didn't have crops. Maybe they were full of dirt that would just move around. I think it would be kind of fun because at one point you were supposed to go in and turn them off and it would crush the enemies below, or you'd be able to start them up and cross them. You'd run around them for combat, just for cover. We ended up having to cut these, they just didn't work.

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Derek Watts: On Eden Prime, we had these large towers; this is an original concept for those. It's just way too much; all the extra fins and stuff... Once we removed those, you pretty well have the final concept for what we went with. We needed some kind of large man-made structure on this planet to make it feel science-fiction.

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Derek Watts: So this is where we're starting to block in a level. We're getting some of the walkable areas, a rough feel for the size... One thing we noticed after building this, it was just quite big. We were going to have to spend a lot of time building and detailing that station. So we ended up modifying that, moving the tower further away so we didn't have to worry about all that. It's just going to be a lot of detail meshes and worry about how it would hold up when you got close. You can see those grey squares off to the right; those were just some temp versions of those floating crop beds.

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Derek Watts: This is another view of the same area. You can actually see where you walk through. You're going to go through all the trees for cover, there will be crop areas... And then the grey structures off on the right, those were just quick models done up of some of those other buildings that were concepted. And then the large towers in the background... Those are just temporary turrets in the lower left.

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Derek Watts: So Eden Prime was one of the areas we built first. We knew it was going to be a showcase area, we were going to show it a lot, so we put the most time into it. This is an early version of Eden Prime. We have a large structure; this is a ramp. I'm not even sure at this point if you're actually supposed to drive your rover up there. You can see the tower in the background, some early looks at what the vegetation would be... Maybe even kind of what we were thinking the color would be; we were thinking about almost like early morning, maybe mist on the ground... And as you can tell from the final game, that changed quite a bit.

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Derek Watts: These were some other test areas; maybe how rocks would look, some of the trees...

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Derek Watts: This is just another test area. Maybe looking at how the plants-- again, how the plants-- maybe put some white flowers in there; how the texture would work with the rocks, maybe some static mesh would be where those cliffs are--those would be all detailed up-- how we would place them and blend them in... Just trying to figure out how we would actually attempt to build this world. You can see some of the hills in the background, those are pretty well just rolling high areas with a large texture on them.

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Derek Watts: So after deciding that we were going to move the tower further away, we still needed an area for you to get up onto the train. This was some early versions with SketchUp about how these trains would get loaded up. You can actually see the platform moving up to where the train is. These were pretty ambitious. We had to really modify this quite a bit to make it work in the game.

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Derek Watts: This is another view of the train. This is the bottom of it. So we actually didn't build a lot of this detail because you'd never see it in the game.

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Derek Watts: This is another quick SketchUp view of the train. We ended up using the top of it. We just widened it up for combat--it was just too narrow--and then simplified up the bottom of it.

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Derek Watts: And this is another view of the train. Again, we just modified the top, kept it simple; added a bunch on there, put some cover in there... Problem with this one is there isn't really a place for you to hide behind. So we had to build these structures, so you could run, take cover, shoot the enemy and keep moving.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept done up of the rails, how this vehicle would move along. Originally we were actually going to have a combat on top of the train. You were going to get on it, move along in its train, shoot people on the side. But we were having problems with, you know, you throw the grenade and now that the train is moving, the grenade was moving at the same speed as when you were just standing on flat ground, so obviously it's not going to be moving as fast. We were having other issues with people falling off the train all the time. So we just ended up turning that into a quick cinematic.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept done up in SketchUp of the station. Some of these structures we ended up using. We simplified it up a bit, we didn't put the beams across the station. We ended up using those X-shaped beams on the sides. Those were a big part of the station.

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Derek Watts: This is another model done up of the station. This is the final part where you get off and have the big fight over the Prothean ruin at the beginning of the game. Again, we just modified this a bit from the actual SketchUp model; again, moving the beams to simplify it up.

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Derek Watts: This is just another SketchUp view of the train station.

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Derek Watts: Another view of the station. Just showing some of the platforms. Maybe some of the areas you'd actually fight down in the lower center and then lower left of the painting here.

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Derek Watts: Another view of the station.

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Derek Watts: So this is pretty well what we thought was going to be the final version of Eden Prime. We had the towers in, we had some nice kind of seeds floating around, we had the water... Everything looked amazing. We thought "this is done." We had this beautiful sky in there. And then we started to get feedback that people just didn't feel connected to it. It just didn't have the feeling like this had been beaten up like you were in a war area. We needed some more emotional impact, like some homeworld was completely obliterated; because you get down here, you find out there was a battle and you go "well, this doesn't look so bad. Well, what's to be concerned about this? We'll just patch it up and it's good to go."

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Derek Watts: This is another view of that early world. Nice sun. Some of the towers that the train tracks across there, some of the vegetation...

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Derek Watts: And then we did a concept to give it more impact. So this is Eden Prime after it was beat up. This is the geth coming down and just letting it have it. So we had these spikes, we had these people impaled on them, we had our deep red sky, the towers are burnt to all that heck, the ground is all scorched... So this is the changes we decided to do to Eden Prime.

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Derek Watts: So this is pretty well the final look for Eden Prime with the red clouds, burnt out towers... You see the spikes down there; we had embers floating in the air... Just to make it feel like this world had been completely wiped out without it being just this baked glass rock. I mean, there's still life left in it.

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Derek Watts: This is the final area where some of the towers are. That scorch mark where Sovereign drops down... And this is the way Eden Prime looks now.