Bonus Content Disc/Inside Mass Effect

This is a transcription of the documentary "Inside Mass Effect" found exclusively on the pre-order bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007. Large parts of its commentary were re-used for documentaries released on subsequent bonus disc versions.

The interviewees are:

• David Falkner – lead programmer
• Casey Hudson – project director
• Preston Watamaniuk – lead designer
• Derek Watts – art director

Content

Casey Hudson: It really started with looking at what kinds of things that we were most excited about in science-fiction. If it were real, if you were actually able to have your ideal adventure in space, what would you want to do? Have your own starship? Have some kind of superhuman abilities? Be put in a position where you, as a character, are somehow empowered, even beyond where you can grow in a normal RPG, but even that your starting point, puts you in a position where the kinds of things you're dealing with are really epic. If you look at the late 70s and early 80s science-fiction, so we're talking about movies like Alien and Aliens, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and even Star Wars and things like that, that particular era, including Blade Runner and some of the really atmospheric science-fiction, took a really interesting cinematic approach that was very immersive, very stylish, but it was also kind of a type of futurism that they did in the 80s that seemed somehow even more futuristic than the kinds of things you see in science-fiction today. There is kind of an entire genre of art, a kind of futurist art, where things are just extra sleek, they kind of have a graphic design sense or even like an aerospace design sense to them. They look like they're drawn with a compass and a ruler, and you get these very functional but very sleek-looking designs. So we didn't want to create this clean and shiny future that could never really exist, because the next day, it would actually get dirty. And so what we did with Mass Effect is the idea of having those kinds of designs, but then showing what they would look like in the actual world. So, when you run around in Mass Effect, you can put on a piece of armor that's, you know, plastic and shiny and has that really futuristic look to it. But once you're running around in the world for a little while, you'll actually get really dirty and gritty and you can actually see how this is a real thing in this part of the galaxy and you can kind of believe it on that level.

Derek Watts: It's a cleaner look, it's structures that follow a nice sleek line. We want to get a lot of curves in there, simple panel lines. It's not super gritty, it's not beat up, it's a place you would feel comfortable going to. It's large structures; some of them really blend into the environment. We looked at a lot of modern architecture to keep it real, something that people could actually look at and go "yeah, that has floors, that has windows for it, I can actually walk through these areas," it's not too wacky, it's not totally abstract, it's not far off from what you would see here but taken a little bit further to fit into the future world.

Preston Watamaniuk: So there was a year of nothing but "what is our IP?", "what are we trying to make here?", going back and saying "what kind of a science-fiction game do we want to make?" We decided right away that, no, we're going to go to a real time combat system but really focus on making sure that the RPG aspects of that combat were still there, meaning: "as I progress through the game I'm getting better, I'm able to upgrade my character, my gameplay is evolving as I move through the game," but it's all done in real time, it's all done without having to constantly sort of re-hit the round based sort of thing. One of the big problems on KotOR is melee and the sort of blaster weapons were always fighting like we couldn't resolve the balance on those issues very well so we made the decision, we're going to use ranged weapons for this game, and actually that decision has made it much easier to design and it's made it more fun, because everything going into it with the tech powers, the biotic powers, the mass accelerator weapons, all those things are ranged so that everything sort of builds off that philosophy. On KotOR, you had like your six little planets you could go to, but on Mass Effect you have your galaxy map, you can drill down, and you can go to like dozens of different planets and actually land on them, explore them, find story-based content there, and that has actually really pushed out the exploration aspect of the game. The interactive conversation system is the biggest thing we were trying to go for in this game. Basically, we do have like a real-time conversation, and that's really the key: iit's that it's a real time conversation that you're inputting into, and in certain circumstances, the end result of that is digital acting like we saw at E3 where you grab someone or you pull gun or even more than that. So you'll see that pay off when you do the traditional BioWare "Intimidate" and "Charm" But when you intimidate somebody in this game, the pay-off will be something physical as well as something verbal. Just like KotOR, we wanted to say we want science-fiction moments that you'll recognize, but they're redone in such a way that they're new. So, that was sort of the challenge for the first year: making sure that the framework was in place. We didn't even worry about the story so much. We worried about, what is the framework where we can tell a good science-fiction story? And after we're done telling this story, we'll have a lot more stories we can tell.

David Falkner: So, you got to bring a lot of strong technical talent to the craft of making art, while still maintaining you know a really high impact vision for the game. It takes designers, who are there to make sure that they're thinking about the player experience, how do all of the components of the game, and in a role-playing game, there are a lot of different components that you have to worry about, like inventory management, resource management, how you decide tactics in a battle, all of that stuff comes together. And the writing of course which is something that we take very seriously. We really want to give the player an experience that they've had an adventure, they're the most important person in the entire universe, and the whole game concept has to be geared around that to make that really high-reward. So bringing those talents in, and of course there's a tremendous amount of content that's coming in because of that as well. And so, just coordinating all of that is actually one of our biggest challenges, as programmers, is making sure that all of that stuff can get in there because we have hundreds of people all contributing content at once trying to make this vision come true, and that's actually the biggest challenge that I experienced day to day. And of course there's lots of other groups that come into that this. The testers; there's a lot of testing that goes in with all of that content. The sound engineers; I barely know how they manage to pull off all the things that they do. But of course, 50% of that the experience you have when you're watching something, just like in a movie, is what you're hearing. So, it's just so many different talents and making sure that everyone is able to contribute their creative talents as much as possible while not being blocked by technical issues. And I always think of trying to explain to my parents, you know, "what is it you do for a living?" "What I do is I try to make that do what it did. You know, the fact that that creature attacked me at that particular time." "Well, the creature looked awesome. Did you make the creature?" "No. No, I didn't do that. But I made it attack you when that happened!" [laughs] So, it's a challenging thing to explain, but at the same time everyone wants their stuff to look really smooth, all the animations to be smooth. They want to make sure that the game rules are the way they intended them to be, and we're there to make sure that that vision comes alive, right? And it takes a lot of technical skills that, you know, maybe people don't necessarily understand if they're not actually coders themselves, but you know, we try to make that... accessible.

Casey Hudson: We're getting very close to it being done, and I have to say... I think this game has seen more evolution than the previous games that we've worked on in the sense that... you know, we had we had a good idea of what the end product would look like. But I think this generation in particular has changed so much in what a video game can look like, and the kinds of visual fidelity you can pull off, the kinds of acting that we can get out of our characters, that one thing we weren't able to envision just because the technology didn't exist three years ago is how far we would have to take every aspect of the game. And so it's... You know, if you can create a photo-realistic character or a photo realistic environment, the animations have to be perfect. And if the animations are perfect, then the transitions between the animations have to be perfect. And the physics and everything has to be all to that same level, otherwise, it's very easy to point out the thing that's not working very well. And so we literally have at least an order of magnitude, more complexity in every system. And that's something that you just can't visualize from three years out, so it's seen a lot of evolution. And because of that though, the game is actually becoming so much better than we could have imagined three years ago. And even right now, every day, it is getting so much better, and we've got people working very hard in a very large team, and it is getting better and better every day, and, you know, we can't wait for people to play it.