Bonus Content Disc/Technology: Space Vehicles - Geth

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Technology of Mass Effect: Space Vehicles - Geth" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Derek Watts: The geth were our main enemy in Mass Effect. They were going to be everywhere. These were the guys you shot all the time. So, we needed to do a couple of ship designs for them; they were important for the cinematics, cutscenes with them flying around. This is a version of one of the geth transports. This is a larger ship. We actually just took one of the smaller geth ships... actually, this is a geth cruiser. We actually took the geth transport, modified it a bit to make it a larger ship. This one, if you actually go to the weapons category under "geth", you can see a lot of these elements were used in the geth rifle.

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Derek Watts: One thing that was mentioned earlier on in the game was to have a geth dropship, almost like a helicopter, that could drop off the troopers onto the ground. This is a version of that. Similar head, those kind of arms would be able to move around; and the back would have the engine thrusters on it.

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Derek Watts: This is very close to final design for it. We had designed this all up, built a quick model for it, then we decided to cut it. It was just going to be too hard to get all the programming time we needed, we had other stuff to concentrate on. Then, just recently, we added it back in. We made it more of a vehicle enemy. At this point, it was made so that back end, that tail area, could rotate around so as it kind of came in, that area would rotate up more horizontal so it could get lower to the ground. Geth troopers would pop out of it and then this thing would take off. It has a large gun cannon at the front, and then those legs would be able to move, giving it a bit of life. We had to remove a lot of that because we added it so late to the game.

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Derek Watts: When we're drawing ships, we'll actually just draw a lot of stuff, draw a lot of different kind of variations and then I usually just group them into things that could fit with different races. A lot of these were actually early concepts for what the Normandy might look like. But actually, we started to even think of more as a geth type of ship. These are more of that kind of organic feel. This one even has a bit of the look of the geth head in there where the cockpit is, on the far left. The pilot would sit in there, and then it has reverse thrusters right at the front. It has these large wings at the back. We kind of looked at a few of... Final Fantasy did a movie a few years back called The Spirits Within. We had the concept book and it had some really nice ship designs in there. They had one called the Black Boa and Copperhead, which we looked at quite a bit for some of these.

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Derek Watts: This is another ship design. This one got a bit crazy. The thrusters on the back would rotate around. These wings would be able to move in and out. I didn't even know how this thing was going to look from the front or side or top. It would probably take them forever to build all those curved areas in there. So, we had to make this one a bit simpler.

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Derek Watts: Here's another just quick drawing. You can see it was just scribbled down, this is a quick pencil drawing. The way it kind of undulates down on the back there with the thrusters... This might be more of a fighter-sized plane.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept done up. It could have been maybe a larger geth ship. You can see how some of the design elements tie in with the geth head at the cockpit at the front left. Some of the lower wings underneath would maybe fold up. Maybe that would be where they would drop some of their larger ships would come out of the back of that.

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Derek Watts: This is another design done up for a medium-sized ship. Those wings underneath would be able to move out to the left and right and then maybe fold up as it went faster through space. So, maybe they would unfold as it came into the atmosphere and landed on a planet. It has these kind of neat wings at the front. Then the thrusters would help slow it down. Also in the cockpit.

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Derek Watts: This is a final design for the geth transport. It's got this nice interesting head to it which we used in that other geth dropship, the one was probably about the size of a helicopter. So, at this point, it was meant to land like that; the head would actually support it. The front right would have a hole in there, kind of like the geth armature on its neck. The boosters are at the back. You can see some little sections in there that kind of pivot around in there to make it conform to the ground. This ship here, you can get a good view of it as it's attached to the side of the building in Feros.