Mass Effect 2

Tucked under its development belt is a wealth of fantasy and science-fiction titles that include Star Wars licenses and dice-rolling Dungeons & Dragons rule sets, so it’s hardly a school of conventional cool. Unlike the glitz of some of its Californian contemporaries, BioWare is based in a nondescript office block, in a topographically flat and architecturally uninspired city on the west side of Canada where the temperature hits -40 Celsius on a relatively balmy day in winter. People rarely venture outside for more than a few minutes during that time of year, and there’s not much to see out there anyway, so they have an awful lot of time to spend indoors playing games or in the office creating them. Founders Ray Musyka and Greg Zeschuk have spared no expense on creating a grand façade for this hit factory – that is to say, there is none to speak of. BioWare needs no such statement of grandeur when anyone privileged enough to walk through the plain glass doors is already well aware of its success; and if they aren’t, then a reception area strewn with nearly two decades of accolades should be clue enough.

It’s a similar story with BioWare staff: they’re not the hale and tanned games industry superstars other developers lay claim to. They have the pasty-flesh of a goth, the haggard appearance of a workaholic and the physique of a couch potato. They talk games incessantly, and when we talked Mass Effect 2 with a dozen or so of the staff on the team, a faint, flickering light appeared far, far behind their pupils. These are gaming obsessives. BioWare is full of them and it’s reassuring to know that the folks working on the second part in the trilogy won’t think twice about not spending quality time with loved ones, on their social lives, in the gym exercising, sleeping, eating, drinking and bio breaks, because they’d rather spend that time making Mass Effect 2 even better. These are the people we’d want working on one of our most anticipated games of next year. They’re RPG geeks, but far from being stereotypical, neck-bearded social pariahs, they’re intelligent, amiable and fiercely talented. Project director for Mass Effect 2, Casey Hudson, is the man at the helm of what could be the most important episode in the trilogy. He’s brimming with information about the sequel that would cause a pandemic of temporary bladder dysfunction among Mass Effect fans were he to spill the beans.

It’s just that he couldn’t tell us about an awful lot of the really sexy stuff we want to know. He sat forward in his seat, rolling the words around his mouth and glancing furtively at the friendly BioWare PR person in the corner, before resigning himself to his proverbial gag: “Mass Effect 2... is the dark second act of the Mass Effect trilogy. It’s a game where we’ve taken everything people loved about the first one and preserved all that stuff. Then we’ve taken everything the players wanted to improve and we wanted to improve, then built those into a fundamental new approach to designing and developing the game.” It’s a fair, if not very forthcoming, response to a very general inquiry, so we decide to wade straight in with the big guns. Mass Effect 2 is a standalone sequel, it’s perfectly accessible to a new player and you don’t have to know the plot of the previous game to tell a Quarian from a Korgan. But you’ll miss out on the most original and compelling fan service concept we’ve ever been privy to learning about. Hold onto your Mass Effect save games, because the current stage of your character’s development and the thread of the entire plot can be imported into Mass Effect 2, and from there into the final episode. “I think that’s never been done, certainly not on three huge games,” Casey told us, not without a glimmer of pride. “A lot of games will have consequences for choices. I think the thing that’s going to blow people away about Mass Effect 2 is when you come across something in the game that is a result of what you did in Mass Effect. Even if it’s a relatively minor thing, I think it really drives home the fact that your decisions matter and that it’s not necessarily going to be obvious that a small thing is going to have a small result, and vice-versa.

You may have done something in Mass Effect with a minor character off in an alley somewhere and you decide to be ruthless with them. That character might be important in Mass Effect 2. We can bring in hundreds of things that tie in with Mass Effect in way that are large and small, to make you realise that in Mass Effect 2 the choices that you make have that much more meaning because they could carry into the third game. They could affect the way the entire trilogy ends, and options that you have for big parts of the plot in Mass Effect 3 might be enabled by anything you do in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2.” The ramifications of this for the player are mind-blowing, to say the least. Take any one of the most prominent junctions in Mass Effect (**warning: spoilers ahead**), like your decision to save either Kaidan or Ashley, or whether Wrex dies. These characters play just as pertinent plot and combat roles in Mass Effect 2, but if they die in your original game then they’re completely removed from the second episode and the entire game adjusts accordingly. “We take Wrex throughout the game and then he can die, right there on the beach, and that’s it for Wrex. It’s a big thing that has been built into Mass Effect 2, partly because if we didn’t then that decision wouldn’t have any effect outside of Mass Effect. So in Mass Effect 2 you will see Wrex, but if he died in Mass Effect you won’t.” This mechanic isn’t restricted to major plot items and characters, and Casey makes it clear that even actions you thought nothing of in Mass Effect have consequences. You might expect to reap the benefits of saving the Rachni Queen in Peak 15, for example, and the way you treated your number one fan also has repercussions beyond the first game, “A lot of them are at least as fun and more subtle. If you remember Conrad Verner – he was the super fan in the Citadel who follows you and wants your autograph, but he’s kinda irritating – you can be nice to him or you can be pretty harsh with him, but when you come across him in Mass Effect 2 you realise that this quirky little side character is now something that you have to deal with. He’s going to remember and he’s going to be affected by what you did. So anything’s possible with the actions you take – a small thing can become really important, or vice-versa.”

This elaborate fan service is a huge undertaking for the Mass Effect team and an area into which it’s ploughing a lot of manpower. Mass Effect’s finale broke down into eight separate conclusions depending on your renegade or paragon actions throughout and the final choices you make. Those of you who have completed Mass Effect can appreciate how this will change the ongoing story. But in developing Mass Effect 2, BioWare has had to consider every divergent plot choice you made in your saved game experience and account for every possible permutation. What’s more, the team’s going to have to do the same thing for both Mass Effect and the second episode when creating the third game. So if you had trouble getting your head around Dr. Emmett Brown’s timeline sketching in Back To The Future II, try not to think about how BioWare’s doing this too much – it might give you an aneurism. “It is an incredible logic nightmare,” Casey puts it mildly. “Replayability, characters dying, the consequences of your actions coming to fruition and, as part of driving home the importance of the consequence of how you play the game, Shepard can die.”

Hold it right there... so now Shepard can die after all? Let’s backtrack a few months to the time when BioWare released the Mass Effect 2 teaser trailer: for most of the minute of trailer footage the camera pans around what appears to be a battered suit of N7 Alliance armour, while pop-up text reels off Shepard’s stats and accomplishments, before declaring that Shepard is ‘killed in action’. That set the community ablaze with speculation, naturally, but we can reveal that he isn’t dead. After all, BioWare has repeated on numerous occasions that Shepard isn’t just part of the Mass Effect trilogy story, he IS the story. “First of all, all the stuff in the teaser is a part of the story in Mass Effect 2, so it’s not ‘hey wouldn’t it be fun if we tricked people into thinking he’s dead!’ or something like that. We thought that teasing that out would be a fun way of bringing people into what Mass Effect 2 is all about. You do play as Commander Shepard, and Commander Shepard’s death is a part of the story. Mass Effect 2 is really all about a suicide mission that you know you have to do and in order to make it successful you’re going to have to build the best crew from around the galaxy, go get them onto your team, make them loyal, well equipped, build up your ship and then, when you think you’re ready, you go into this end mission that you are told is a suicide mission. In fact, it is a suicide mission unless you play the game well, make good choices, understand the people you’re bringing with you and set up this end mission, because one of the endings involves Shepard not making it out.”

Playing the spin-doctor, Casey managed to create more questions than he answered, but we have to admit that we still hung on his every word, “It’s more that this mission is the most dangerous thing that Shepard has done. Ultimately what you’re trying to do is to prove that Shepard can come out alive. You know what you have to do and you know it’s dangerous. If you do the minimum then you get the bloodbath ending, which is what you’d expect from a player who just wants to get to the end and finish. But if you play it well you’re going to get better and better versions of success, all the way up to the ultimate ending where you hit all your objectives and get everybody out alive. You’re gonna know how well equipped you are for the ending, put it that way. If you’re really under-equipped, you’ll know before you head in. You can go and do it and you might complete the mission, but the whole point is to get the best people and equipment. If you don’t do a lot of that and you head into this suicide mission then you’re going to get something that is along the lines of a bloodbath.” There’s also the question of that enigmatic Geth, apparently wearing Shepard’s armour at the end of the teaser. Casey virtually stonewalls when it comes to revealing any more information on that particular character, but apparently he’s friendly and can become a playable part of your team.

We’ve seen more than enough to make us believe that this character has stronger ties with Shepard’s death that we initially thought – especially the fact that there’s a gaping hole in the torso of its second-hand armour. We’ve got a feeling your old Quarian companion Tali and her mechanical genius have a part to play in all of this too... Teasing conclusive plot information from the project director was proving difficult, so we changed tack and began to talk about combat. Casey was much more open about how BioWare has improved upon the old combat system, which wasn’t an entirely minor thorn in our gameplay experience. Squad controls have been split so that you can direct your team mates individually, allowing you to perform more tactical manoeuvres than before, and the cover system has been made far more dynamic – now with over 220 animations directing it. “The combat system is more fluid, more real-time, there’s better aiming and camera behaviour, better squad AI, better enemy AI, more physics-based gameplay, the powers are more at your fingertips, better use of cover... you could tell that when a lot of people were playing Mass Effect they also played Halo, for example. They would do a lot of strafing and then slide past objects. But in Mass Effect they would get stuck in the auto cover system. So looking at that, a few changes to the way cover works allows them to play that way but still make use of cover.”

Prior to the release of Mass Effect, a trailer circulated that showed combat with direct control over individuals and a camera overview of the battle scene; very much akin to BioWare’s RPG combat system in Neverwinter Nights. That didn’t make the final cut for Mass Effect, but had BioWare returned to that system in an effort to improve combat for Mass Effect 2? “In Mass Effect, everything is a group order, but if you have one order for two people you can never really be tactical about what they are doing. Now you can say “you take cover here and you take cover here” and now everybody’s in the position. It basically achieves everything shown in that original video except now you’re able to do it in real time with two button presses. If you want to flank somebody then you can click on an upstairs floor that you can see through a doorway, and have them run upstairs behind the scenes and appear up there, then flank the guy and shoot him from the side. If you have a character that has Biotic pull, then you can say ‘you, run to the other side of this hole’. Then, in the middle of battle, you can tell her to use her power in real time, see the guy go flying across the battlefield and land in the hole. “They are simple changes but there are enough of them that they add up; it’s part of being able to have more of the powers on real-time mapped buttons, including your own. I had Throw mapped onto one of the buttons – and the powers recharge faster in Mass Effect 2 so you can do them more – so I was throwing things over here and a guy comes up and I was able to throw him back. But there was a guy behind cover – and the AI is better now so will find a better position – so he gets up and starts sprinting over to a better piece of cover. I can see that he’s running in a line between me and an exploding container. I can see what’s going to happen and I have an idea: I hit the button, throw the container which smashes on the wall behind him, explodes and takes the guy out. So it’s physics based, real- time and if you have an idea you can just pull it off, on the fly.”

We were demonstrated a small section of combat where Shepard and his team encountered a hostile squad of Loki mechdogs and their bipedal masters. Shepard was able to direct one of his crew to cover while sprinting to the other side. In the meantime, the heavy weapons specialist was ordered to hold his ground while he unleashed Armageddon on the enemy with a very impressive new toy. Let’s just say Fallout 3 fans won’t be disappointed and leave it at that. More tactical control in this context meant a single character in your trio could lay down heavy artillery from a relative distance while you take the other two closer, possibly into point-blank range for Biotic power and assault weapon support. But from a broader perspective it means that gameplay, the powers are more at your fingertips, better use of cover... you could tell a huge range of Biotic, combat and tech power combinations will be at your fingertips, rather than at the whim of the AI. “What we were trying to get with Mass Effect was the feeling of real tactical control over your squad, so that people are in the right places and doing the right powers and stuff like that. What we ended up with was a lot of the real-time combat stuff, but not enough of the tactical stuff. It’s tipped the other way and now you can be really opportunistic about the things you can do in combat. You can say, ‘well, as a soldier character I have this kinda carnage-style attack and I have huge physics impact with my shotgun. Then I have this character and they’re doing lifts a lot, so I can do this skeet shooting thing in combat. So once the guy’s lifted out of his cover I can use my shotgun power and knock him back.’ It’s just a lot easier to do the same combos that you could do in Mass Effect, where you really had to work hard to figure them out.”

Talking with BioWare has raised far more questions than it answered and hasn’t come anywhere near answering our original queries to our satisfaction. We left the Bioware studio buzzing with some pretty wild speculation as to what direction Bioware is taking Mass Effect 2. But at the time of writing, with barely anything but fan conjecture over a teaser trailer available anywhere else, what we have learned represents a wealth of Mass Effect 2 knowledge by comparison. Even in the wake of its E3 reveal BioWare is holding back, and why not? Its reticence is more than just hype – it’s not as if one of the most anticipated sequels to one of the biggest games of recent years needs the extra publicity anyway. BioWare’s staff aren’t just big fans of their own games, they’re storytellers. And part of this protracted crescendo to the release next year is giving players the space to let their imaginations run away with them. Ultimately, giving more away would only detract from the Mass Effect 2 experience – a scenario neither the fans nor the BioWare team wants.