Mass Effect's Aftermath

1up is republishing a short interview with BioWare's Casey Hudson, the Project Director for their sci-fi epic Mass Effect. The piece originally ran in EGM, and covers a few nagging details left behind by the project, things like "What happened to the ability to interrupt people?", or "What's up with the UI?". "Hudson: Well, the item comparison is probably a lot better than KOTOR's because we now show you a graph that compares [the stats] of one weapon to another. As you can imagine, the inventory-management system for a role-playing game is probably one of the biggest and most complicated systems. It's actually one of the drawbacks to giving people so much to do and so many things. We didn't get much negative feedback during development with the inventory screen, although [if stuff doesn't work right], that's definitely something we want to fix in the future." That's a really deft way of handling that question, but I have to say: despite my deep and abiding love for the game, the user interface is an affront to Tufte.

Comments

Re:Oh come on!

[Carbonite]

I think you're greatly oversimplifying. The complexity isn't in storing the bits of data, it's in designing a system that's intuitive for players. Not to mention that I'd bet that the actual data structures are much more complex than you described above.

Re:I can agree

[Alexpkeaton1010]

The problem is not that it is confusing, the problem is that after about 10 hours in you start getting the "Inventory Almost Full" message. Then you spend 30 minutes cleaning out the inventory because there is no sort-by-item-level when you are at a vendor. Plus the scrolling speed is extremely slow. Consoles games stink for inventory management, but this game was the worst of the worst. Just give me a mouse and some bags.

Re:Oh come on!

[MaineCoon]

You can't see the forest for the trees. Yes, you are being extremely arrogant.

You're talking strictly about engineering. They were talking about exposed design, user interaction, and user interface. How the data is stored in memory and manipulated is completely irrelevant to the point at hand. From an engineering perspective, the amount of work required for that part IS trivial. From an interface implementation perspective, its not that difficult, just time consuming. But when it comes down to actual screen real-estate planning, interaction with the user who is using aj oypad, it becomes a much more difficult system to plan and design. Keep in mind it is a console game which must be able to function at less than 640x480 - and on top of that there is a dedicated safe region around the edges, so take off 5% of your screen space on each edge! Additionally, a joypad is a very different control paradigm than a mouse - you can't just click around the screen. Don't judge how long it would take to create the screen they used. They're talking about how long it took them to come up with the screen they did, which includes prototyping other ideas which they felt did not work as well.

You seem to like to use background to backup your claim, so here is mine. I am currently and have been an engineer in the games industry for almost a decade, having worked on big budget titles for every platform of the current and previous generation systems, as well as PC (with the exception of the Wii). Along the way, I've worked directly UI engineers on implementation of UI screens and back end interfaces on both PC and console games.