On the Process of Effecting Mass

Dean Takahashi, of the San Jose Mercury News, has up a lengthy interview with Mass Effect project director Casey Hudson on the almost four-year-long development of the title. The two men go into some detail on BioWare's approach to game creation, as well as discussing the numerous technical and storytelling leaps they made with the game. "Hudson said, 'One thing I'm hoping people see in it is how much more there is for a player to make decisions on. It makes it really hard for us to develop, given the customization that we make possible in the game. For example, from the beginning, you are not pre-made as a character. You can play Commander Shepard. But you can also create your own character, male or female. You can choose your special abilities. Those are ways to make your game different and unique. These are things that make it much harder for us to make the game so that it is consistent all the way through, given your choices.'"

Comments

Suprisingly intelligent science and physics

[elrous0]

One of the things that most impresses me in Mass Effect is the sophistication and depth of the speculative science in the "Codex." If you go around and outside the Normandy and look at all its systems, you get some pretty heady entries into the Codex that deal with how the engine works, how faster than light travel works in this fictional universe, etc. It's the first time I've seen concepts like "red shift," "blue shift," relativity, etc. used seriously in a videogame (these aren't exactly everyday concepts for your average dullard). One of the sections I found particularly amusing concerned the fictional problem of heat on a combat spaceship. Since excess heat can only be vented into the vacuum of space via radiation, each ship has strips that run along the hull for conventional heat dumping, with combat ships also having the option to drain superheated coolant out into space in heavy combat situations. I've never seen a videogame deal with an issue with that much understanding of real world physics.

I don't know who wrote all these codex entries, but they must have put quite a bit of effort into them. Unfortunately, this isn't always matched with the rest of the game. For example, one of the weapons entries explains the "unlimited ammo" aspect of the game by the nature of the guns themselves. Rather than fire "bullets" as we think of them, the complex computers in each weapon actually shave an appropriate small mass of metal off a large solid block "cartridge," with its mass based on the velocity it will be fired at, the desired effect, the range to the target, and adjusting for other factors like wind, gravity, and planetary conditions. It's a pretty clever way of explaining a lame game convention. Unfortunately, the other game designers must not have gotten the memo about this, because in the equipment section the ammo is shown and treated exactly as if it were conventional bullets in conventional shell casings (the ammo graphics all show bullets and the text all refers to "rounds").

Re:Suprisingly intelligent science and physics

[orclevegam]

One of the things that's always bugged me about space combat, and that even most sci-fi books fail to address is the physics of space warfair. I read some books in the Night's Dawn series (Peter F. Hamilton) a while back that did a really great job dealing with space combat, even if they blew off a lot of other science in other areas (as well as delving into some serious religious issues, they were major plot points in the later books of the series). I particularly like how he treated energy weapons (ships had ablative layers and would spin going into combat to reduce the amount of time any given point of the hull was exposed to weapon focus), as well as the issues of momentum on passengers and maneuverability of the ships. I think the temptation in games, movies, and books is to just say space combat is like dog fighting with jets only on a black background and with lasers or some other fancy futuristic sounding weapon (maser anyone? And what's with the fascination with gauss rifles? Anyone who knows about electromagnetic weaponry knows a railgun is a much better design). There's lots of potential for some really cool scenes in space combat, but they need to put some more thought into it (and for gods sake, if you want the engines always on zooming around thing at least take the time to come up with some sort of drive system that requires something like that, traditional mass reaction drives SHOULD NOT ALWAYS BE ON!).

Re:decisions decisions...

[TheThiefMaster]

Take Half-Life 2. When I played this game for the first time I really had bad times figuring out gameplay mechanics. Nobody in the game tells you can use flammable barrels as grenades with your gravity gun. Nobody tells you a lot of things in that game. You just figure them out as you play, in a way maybe intended by developers, but perfectly dressed to make you believe you actually come with the solution by yourself. (Italics by me)

Portal. That game is designed around coercing the player into figuring things out themself. Play it through, then play it again with the commentary on and see how many times they taught you how to do something without you even noticing.

Inherent problem with RPGs

[Leo Sasquatch]

Traditionally, in an RPG, you start out weak, and build up skills and abilities as the game progresses. Which is fine if you're some naive farmboy who's come home to find his family killed and his house burned down, and who has vowed to make those evil (plot points) pay for what they've done. Start with a leather jerkin and a quarterstaff, and build your way up to being a parahuman by the end of the game.

But how do you handle level progression when you're supposed to start the game as a fully trained whatever-it-is? In Mass Effect, you start out as a highly-trained uber-warrior who's supposed to be hard as nails, yet you can't shoot straight, your weapons are ineffectual shit, and you'll get beat down by just about anybody until you put some points into your combat skills. Bioware had the same problem with Jade Empire - 15 years in a martial arts school as their star pupil in the pre-game scene-setting, but weedy as hell in the actual game until you spent some points. At least KOTOR and KOTOR2 had reasons in game why you didn't have, or couldn't remember your actual abilities.

It's just that everyone's going on about the brilliant story, and yet completely missing the fact that in order to shoehorn it into a traditional RPG engine, they've had to bend it all out of shape. Why would you make your elite troops buy their own guns with their own money? Because hoarding gold and trading it for stuff has been a mainstay of D&D since pencil and paper days. Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds? Because shitty starter weapons are generic to the classic RPG advancement-based structure. Doesn't fit the storyline at all, but it's a tired old staple of the genre, so just make the player do it.

Even being given the option of having all the character-design points at the start of the game would have been a good idea. Once your character's created, that's who and what he's going to be until the end of the game, because that's who he's become in the last 15 years of special forces training. The events of the game last about a week in game time - tops. What are you going to learn in one week that's going to override everything else you've ever learned?

The actual plot and characterisation, and the sheer scope of the game is fantastic - showing what they can do with a KOTOR-style game when not tied to the Star Wars universe. But the overall framework of the story makes no sense at all, and that just rankles. I'm sure that due to the massive financial success of the game and all their others, they're perhaps not too worried about one gamer's opinion, but everybody else seems to be queueing up to suck Bioware's corporate cock over this damn game, and I feel like the only person who's spotted that nobody could have heard Kane say Rosebud...