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

I got laid 4 times in Mass Effect

[grub]

Had to play it through twice for it. 2x by the consort on Citadel then once each by Ashley and Liara. Doing the blue chick made me feel cool like Captain Kirk.

Re:I got laid 4 times in Mass Effect

[grub]

You can score with the consort?

You bet!

When you get your initial reward after finishing her mission it's just some new-age touchy-feely speech. One of the replies is something to the effect of "That's it?!" Choose that and it's SEX WITH A BLUE CHICK!!!!111````

Re:Oh come on!

[SirSlud]

I've played mass effect, I've coded games, and I can promise you that such a structure would be at least three times as large.

Description, cost, icon, colour (since items with the same skin are colour shaded differently) .. and thats just to display the damn thing. Internally, there'd be a lot more simply because items would be a specialized form of a larger abstraction of game assets. Not many games these days are written out of pure C and no abstraction of game asset data structures.

However .. what the hell does any of this have to do with an inventory screen? The complaints were about usability. It doesn't matter how complicated/simple the data is, the issue is that the UI to equip/unequip and manage your items was too simplistic given that as a player, you're switching your inventory items in and out relatively often.

I think they missed out big time on not allowing you to build preset load outs you could switch between, and the button mapping for the control of the inventory screen was unintuitive at best. That has nothing to do with coding; thats an interface design (or possibly just a feature scope) issue.

BTW, you'd be shot on sight for using a character buffer to represent any form of id outside of a debug name for debug builds around here. Why use ("character.weapon.mod1"), a 20 byte string in presumably a 32 byte string buffer for an id?!? It's easy to hand wave, but the devil is in the details, and the same goes for interface design.