Interview: Mass Effect 2 with Casey Hudson, BioWare

by Sarkis Daglian - January 14, 2010

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Yesterday we sat down with Bioware’s Project Manager and Executive Producer of the Mass Effect franchise Casey Hudson to discuss Mass Effect 2 ahead of it’s January 26 release date.

We went into specifics over the improvements in the last 6 months since I last saw it at E3. We go deep into Mass Effect 2’s combat, Casey’s favorite playthrough class, and we even manage to get a few answers on what’s in store for the next chapter of the Mass Effect trilogy, Mass Effect 3.

Check out the full interview below and after the jump.

How are you doing? Thank you for joining us!

• I’m good!

It’s been a bit over half a year since your demo at E3, what aspect of the game would you say has come the furthest since then?

• I guess one of the big things would be that even at that point we had made a lot of improvements to the way combat works. But, it still ended up coming along way between then and the final release.

  People were able to play parts of the E3 demo later at PAX and GamesCon. But as much as people liked the combat at that point, that was only the half way point of where we got to with the final game.

Can you elaborate a little bit more into the specifics that make you feel that way?

• Some of the things that have improved since then are things like the AI being a lot better, the smoothness and precision of the aiming, and that was before some of the new weapons and powers came in.

  Just the overall feel of the weapons and your ability to use the power in different classes really came in over the last few months. The other thing being the overall design of combat got really polished and each of the levels.

Importing your Shepard from Mass Effect into Mass Effect 2 is one of the most discussed features of the game.

Will there be certain levels of evil and good that are only be attained as part of your choices from Mass Effect or can you bring any persona into Mass Effect 2 and still be able shape your game as you see fit?

• We’ve got the main things that come in like your name, appearance, class, and all of your choices you’ve made. It’s really the choices that make it feel like you’re continuing where you left off and that’s really the big thing for us.

  That’s why we have the feature of being able to import your save game because we really do see Mass Effect as; they’re obviously standalone stories that are great. If you’ve only played only Mass Effect 2, you don’t really need the first one to enjoy it but as you are playing each game in a series they obviously do connect together to a larger story.

  But, it wouldn’t be a story in an interactive sense unless the story actually carried forward and things ended up being different as a result of your actions across the games and that’s why we have the import system. We want you to feel like you’ve started from where you left off.

Well for example, there was a photo of a Shepard out there that looked really evil, had red eyes, a pale face with scars on it etc.

Will you be able to reach extreme ends of Paragon and Rogue in Mass Effect 2 without the need to import your player?

• Yes, the reason for that is kind of spoilery so I won’t give it away in terms of what initiates that. But it does give an understandable reason as to why your appearance comes apart over the course of the game playing a very renegade approach versus a paragon approach.

  In Mass Effect 2 your play style starts to manifest in your appearance which is an interesting approach. But we needed a reason for it that would make sense in the story, and it’s a story reason that I can’t reveal yet.

  But it does work as you’re describing, you can come into the game with a biased toward the paragon or renegade points on the scale if you had played that way in Mass Effect 1.

  You start with an advantage one way or another with how you played the first game, but even players who are new in Mass Effect 2 will be able to get to those ultra evil or very paragon stages on the spectrum.

What short comings in Mass Effect or design ideas in the early stages of Mass Effect 2 were behind the game play decision made to change the health system to regeneration and also altering the role of medi-gel to party reviving only?

• We took a fairly unapologetic approach to changing anything and implementing anything that would make the game as good as it possibly can be. In terms of the shooter experience and making things feel intense, tactical, and precise giving you the experience you’d expect having played the best shooters out there.

  We looked at some of the things that were missing with the Mass Effect 1 combat experience. One of things being that if you were low on health and you don’t have medi-gel that can heal you then you’re just out of luck for the rest of combat. It’s things like that that hurt the balance of the original game or really prevented us from getting to that feeling of being able to get in trouble, getting hurt a little bit, so you go into cover, recuperate a little bit and get back into the fight. These are some of the moment to moment feelings that we were able to get by making some of the incremental changes that we did.

  Another one being to the approach we have to the way weapons work. It is ultimately an ammo-like system that is in Mass Effect 2. We have fiction in there based on weapons that don’t need ammo, but we also have fiction on weapons that while they don’t really need a supply of ammo they do overheat in the first game which prevents you from just constantly spamming your weapon. You would end up getting in situations where you would get into a firefight and your weapon overheats and you’ve got quite a long period of not being able to fire your weapon at all because it’s overheated.

  We try not do that and that causes you to use your bullets sparingly, but at the same time you can get caught out into a frustrating situation. The other thing being is that there is a certain sense of tension in combat that you get when you have a little bit more consideration to spending something with each round and then getting it back as you fight through, so that’s another thing that’s useful.

  We built those things into the idea that if you had a heat sync, in Mass Effect 1 you have to wait for your heat sync to cool if your weapon over heats. But if you could eject that heat sync when its fully heated and not have to wait for it to cool off, you can eject it and pop in a new one and then get back at it, then we get back to the ammo like tension and consideration of each round (in Mass Effect 2).

  Those things work a lot better with the fact that we have location based damage. If you have a sniper rifle and it’s a large caliber, high velocity round, and it’s going to do a lot of damage. If you think a little bit more about each shot, now you want to get the headshot because it matters. Or you want to hit a mech right in the knee so now he’s got to crawl around, it’s those kinds of things.

  That allows you to get a little more tension, a little more consideration to combat and it’s an overall psychological effect that combat just feels more intense and has a lot more tactical thought behind it.

Christina Norman did a great job narrating the class videos. What class did you enjoy playing the most in your Mass Effect 2 experience?

• I really enjoyed my Vanguard playthrough. I think Adept is really interesting too because we have some new biotic powers and some of the higher level powers as an Adept just make it so you don’t even really need your weapon.

  You can just go through the battlefield and cause incredible chaos by throwing characters. You can throw them with precision now in certain directions, you just have a lot of fun as an Adept.

  The neat thing about Vanguard is that you’ve got great shot gun ability, so at point blank you can be a one shot kill to some of the most deadly enemies. You also have this charge ability that allows you to shoot across a level and hit an enemy physically and get into that point blank range.

  The end result is that you end up getting out of the toughest situations where you’re almost dead by doing the most aggressive thing possible by finding the guy who is causing the most trouble, shoot across the level and hit him into the air and then shotgun him at point blank range.

  It’s the experience of constantly getting out of the worst trouble and saving it with the most exciting resolution

Mass Effect 3 has been reported to already be in the planning stages. What things would you like to see improved from the end of the development cycle of Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3?

• I think the biggest thing is first of all the resolution of all the plots, all the decisions players have made throughout. Being able to play and experience all the surviving cast members, all the characters people liked. That’s one big part of it.

  The other part though is really down to the feedback we’ll get from fans having played Mass Effect 2. That’s going to be our biggest focus is understanding the way people play our games and trying to make them better based on what they say about them.

Thank you for stopping by Casey!

• Alright, thank you.

Casey Hudson gave us a lot of good info about the game and unfortunately time ran out before I was done asking questions. Some of things I wanted to touch on but didn’t and we’ll just have to answer for ourselves in two weeks are the loading times between zones which have been rumored to be lengthy and if they can be improved by hard drive installation.

Also, the new vehicles out in the field and exploration is still a bit of mystery. And just how difficult will it really be to complete Mass Effect 2 with all your party members being alive? I guess we are going to have wait the two weeks until the 26th to find out.

As you can tell, we are pretty excited for this one here at Ve3tro. Keep an eye for a full review and plenty of coverage around release.