Bonus Content Disc/The Future of Mass Effect

This is a transcription of the documentary "The Future of Mass Effect" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2008.

The interviewees are:

• Casey Hudson – project director
• Drew Karpyshyn – lead writer
• Ray Muzyka – general manager and CEO, BioWare; general manager and vice-president, EA (listed in the game credits as executive producer)
• Preston Watamaniuk – principal lead designer

Menu Description

Find out where Mass Effect's creators want to take their award-winning franchise in the future.

Content

Ray Muzyka: I think post-release downloadable content in Mass Effect is definitely something that's very important to BioWare, and it's true on all of our products. But Mass Effect is just, like I said earlier, it's this big toy box. It's like this enormous galaxy with millions of stars and planets to explore, and we can select out the interesting ones and develop them out and continue the storyline, as we did with the batarian race in Bring Down the Sky. So I think from a franchise perspective, it's going to help to fill in the gaps in understanding and continue certain plot lines and develop certain types of gameplay, and really we'll try and customize it and build different types of post-release downloadable content to suit different play patterns, to suit different types of players. In the end, it's all about making a great, fun experience for our audience.

Casey Hudson: Through the first story and things like Bring Down the Sky, we want to make sure that there's always content out there for them to be able to play through, so that it kind of leads into Mass Effect 2. And in particular, we have some exciting things that we want to do in terms of the story and how the story through downloadable content is going to set up the sequel.

Preston Watamaniuk: Things we're working on right now for the Mass Effect universe next is... We had something in Mass Effect 1 that, again, we weren't able to pull off just because we didn't have the time and we didn't think we'd be able to do it well enough, which was a fight club or an arena. So we're actually working on that for our next downloadable content piece, and we're hoping it'll be really special.

Casey Hudson: So we wanted to be able to give people a much more combat-oriented, a little bit lighter story kind of experience. You're going to go to kind of a casino gaming fight club space station. Any save game that you make for Mass Effect 1, you should be able to carry that same character into Mass Effect 2. So if you do the fight club and you make your save, you finish Mass Effect 1, you'll be able to take that save game and create a character so you can continue that experience into Mass Effect 2. So in the second game, you're actually going to go through a darker period where you're really looking for answers. It's a lot harder to find what the realities are, and there are a lot of twists and turns, and it's generally a much darker experience.

Drew Karpyshyn: Well, I think what we want to do with Mass Effect is look at universal themes, themes that apply to somebody in the future, in the past, in our present, contemporary themes. So as we've explored in Mass Effect 1, we had things like love, loss, consequences, choice, does the end justify the means, morality, in a general sense like that. We're obviously going to continue with those kinds of themes. We are going to continue to push forward on other themes like technology, what does it mean to be alive, how does synthetic life or artificial intelligence compare to true life or organic life, how do you cross those boundaries, can you cross those boundaries, should we cross those boundaries. We really want to push into that direction, things that people are already starting to think about and imagine in our world, and we just want to take those kernels of exploration and push them forward, extrapolate them into our vision of what may come down the road. We've been very conscious of the ability of players to make choices, and we understand that if those choices don't have consequences that carry on through the trilogy, there was no point in making them. Now that obviously has painted us into a difficult position, because we have multiple threads, multiple endings, certain characters may or may not be alive. It's created extra work for us, but we felt it was necessary to really capture what we were going for with Mass Effect. So the short answer of how we're going to deal with all those decisions in Mass Effect 2 and going forward, is that we're creating alternate versions of all sorts of scenarios. We're almost creating, I hate to say two full games, but we're definitely creating more content than what a person will see on one playthrough. If you play through the game with a save game from the first Mass Effect, and then you make another save game where you had made different choices and play through again, or you talk to a friend who's played and they had made different choices in Mass Effect 1, there will be significant differences. You'll be saying, "wow, how did that happen? That guy was dead in my game." They'll say "well, he's not dead in my game, and boy, he sure had an impact."

Casey Hudson: You're going to see Captain Anderson again. You're going to see Udina again. A lot of the main characters that are a big part of the story in Mass Effect 1, and that's a lot of the fun of an ongoing story is that these characters, it's a character story, so you'll see these characters throughout the trilogy as long as they don't die because of you. [laughs]