Secret of Mana fans are getting quite the tease today: the series' official Japanese Twitter account has tweeted out a video of Seiken Densetsu 3 being played on a Nintendo Switch.
The 1995 game is the sequel to Secret of Mana, but it was only ever released on the Super Famicom in Japan. Unlike Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 was never released on the Wii U's Virtual Console.
We're still waiting to hear from Nintendo on when it plans to release Switch's Virtual Console. At Switch's launch, the company said fans can expect more information soon. We're already seeing some classic games pop up in the eShop; Hamster Corporation has released several Neo Geo titles.
In the meantime, fans of the Mana series can hold out hope they'll get to play SD3 in the future. Even if the game is only released in Japan, the Switch's region-free settings mean players from anywhere in the world would have their chance to wield the Mana Sword on Nintendo's new console.
The latest update to arrive on Overwatch's public test realm introduces some significant alterations to Lucio and his ability to buff or heal nearby teammates.
Put simply, the changes buff many of Lucio's abilities but limit his ability to aid his entire team at any one time. The area of effect on Crossfade has been reduced from 30 meters to just 10, but the amount of health restored by his healing song has increased by 50 percent. To help players adjust to this, a visual effect has been added temporarily that helps to demonstrate the new range of Lucio's songs. On a related note, his Ultimate, Sound Barrier, sees its range drop to 30 meters to 20.
It's not all bad news for Lucio, as other changes are being made to compensate for this. His weapon's projectile speed has increased from 40 to 50, and wall-riding provides him with a 30 percent movement speed boost. Jumping off a wall also provides an additional "burst of speed."
Blizzard provided some explanation for this in the patch notes, saying, "Lucio has often felt like a must-pick due to his raw healing output and the versatility of providing a speed bonus to your entire team. The goal of these changes is to keep those elements feeling strong, but making them harder to apply to everyone on your team at all times. The end result is that he should feel stronger with teams that he can stay close to but not as strong when on teams with heroes that are often spread out (such as Pharah, Widow, Genji, etc).
"Much of Lucio's character power was tied up in his large passive auras, which caused other elements of his kit to be weakened over time in an attempt to balance him. Now that his auras are more focused it will allow them to be much stronger and allow Lucio to be more active in his role."
Regarding the visual effect indicating Crossfade's range, principal designer Geoff Goodman said in a forum post, "[W]e're looking at getting a more permanent (and better looking) visual indicator at some point, and potentially making it an option to enable/disable."
Elsewhere in this update, Blizzard has introduced a new system meant to reduce the frequency of draws in Competitive Play. Similar to the way a winner can be named on Escort maps based on which team pushed the payload further, Assault maps can declare a winner "based on which team captured the largest portion." To sufficiently test this out, Competitive Play on the PTR will only see Eichenwalde and Hanamura pop up in the map rotation for now.
Eichenwalde is again the subject of a change in this update, as there's a new path from the attackers' spawn leading to the capture point. Custom Games gain a new ability to save a preset, while the Hero Gallery is now home to backstory information about characters and "some of their lore-inspired skins." There are also bug fixes, which you can see in the full patch notes.
All of this is already available on the PTR version of the game, which is accessible to owners of the PC version. There's no word on how soon these changes might be implemented in the full game, but we do know a patch adding Orisa arrives tomorrow, March 21.
A "reimagined" version of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time soundtrack is on the way soon in a number of formats, including very slick-looking CD and vinyl albums.
Called Hero of Time, this Materia Collective project is a 21-track collection of songs that have been recorded by a 64-piece orchestra. You can see a full tracklist below and hear a 10-minute sample here.
Hero of Time is being released digitally ($14) and in a limited-edition CD ($30) on March 27 through Bandcamp, with an iTunes release also on the way. The vinyl is due out in the "coming months" but can be preordered beginning today through iam8bit for $40.
"Orchestral recordings of music from The Legend of Zelda have become increasingly popular over the last several years," said arranger and project director Eric Buchholz in a press release. "With Hero of Time, we sought to create a single, cohesive experience that weaves all of the complex underlying themes of the game, like impermanence and mortality, with Koji Kondo's timeless melodies that have become as iconic as the game itself. The orchestration takes an 'east-meets-west' approach, with the inclusion of taiko ensembles, eastern woodwinds, and harmonies found prevalent in Japanese film and game scores."
Hero of Time was successfully funded last year through Kickstarter, where it raised nearly $52,000 from 1,000 backers, just surpassing the $50,000 goal.
Two new DLC packs are on the way for Dead Rising 4 in the near future, and Capcom has now provided further details about what they consist of.
After outlining the game's DLC prior to release, Microsoft today shared more about the upcoming Frank Rising and Super Ultra Dead Rising 4 Mini Golf packs. Frank Rising is an "all-new single-player story" that covers the events of an outbreak in Willamette where Frank becomes infected. A "former ally" deems him incurable, but Frank "find[s] help from an unlikely resource" as he seeks a cure.
Along the way, he'll gain new strength and abilities, none of which were specified. He no longer eats food to stay alive, instead being forced to "feast on others to survive," though he still endeavors to save at least some survivors.
Frank Rising launches for both the Xbox One and Windows 10 PC versions of the game on April 4 for $10 or as part of the season pass.
Following that is Super Ultra Dead Rising 4 Mini Golf, which Microsoft would only say launches for both platforms "soon" for $10 (or in the season pass). Courses are set in the Willamette Mall and the town itself, and Frank provides play-by-play as you progress. There are different clubs, costumes, and balls to unlock, as well as power-ups to help you kill zombies while getting the ball in the hole. In addition to playing on your own, there's four-player online multiplayer and local, turn-based co-op.
With its release date drawing nearer, Warner Bros. has published a new trailer for Injustice 2.
The new video (above) centers around Cheetah, who was previously confirmed as a playable character. It provides a brief overview of what she's capable of, which primarily takes the form of her beating up Wonder Woman.
This trailer comes not long after Cheetah was shown off in-depth during an Injustice 2 livestream. You can watch that segment below.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game and the studio.
The interview below features Chris Corfe, level designer on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Can you introduce yourself and talk about your experience with Mass Effect as a franchise?
Chris Corfe: I'm Chris Corfe. I've been with BioWare for about 10 years now. I actually worked on Dragon Age: Origins II, Inquisition and then hopped on a little bit to help out on Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and then wasn't lucky enough to work on Mass Effect 3, but then I was lucky enough to work on this one.
Your role on the original Mass Effect was QA, right? What was it like, playing an early and perhaps not perfect form of it, and what was it like to be a part of that process?
It was really humbling, actually. I've always wanted to get into the games business, and when I first started in QA, it was at BioWare after about two-and-a-half years of hounding them, like "Please hire me." The first project I got to work on was actually Jade Empire for PC. Walking in the door, I had no idea what to expect. I felt like I was going to be surrounded by really crazy talented people, and I better do everything in my power to write as many bugs as possible. I worked on Jade for about three months, and apparently I did a good enough job. They transferred me over to Mass Effect. It was really humbling to be part of that game, because it was like, this was the big deal.
A couple of positions opened up: one in editing and one in production. I went with editing, and kept growing from there. That's one of the things I really like about the BioWare studio. There's really low walls. You can talk to everybody. You make friends with everybody. If you're really interested in something, you just go stop by like, "Hey, cool, what are you doing? Show me what you got." It's been really nice.
What do you think was special about the original Mass Effect? What was the impact of it on gaming, and what do you think it did for you?
The original Mass Effect, to me, was really close to my introduction to BioWare games. It's incredibly story driven ... and action-focused at the same time. I came from a background where I played action games and RPG games, but they often didn't have the same elements. To see them overlapping, in something that was really crazy and talented, was awesome.
What do you think gave it the longevity it's enjoyed? And what were your feelings when it launched?
I didn't question its longevity. I thought it was a very interesting product when it came out. And I was surprised to see the fan reception that it did have. And to be honest, I didn't think I would like shooter games. But as I started to get into Gears of War and Mass Effect, they made a believer out of me.
[And] it obviously made a believer out of many of other people, too. I think it's also BioWare's attention to detail when it comes to story and character. I'm a big fan of that--reading a lot of novels as a kid. So playing through this wasn't just about the game and the mechanics and beating the bad guy up; it was the emotional journey that it took me on.
I was always impressed by how BioWare created a universe that was so rich and deep within the space of one game, when most game franchises were incapable of doing it over six or seven games--even Star Wars took ages to get that kind of comprehensive deep lore that people can latch onto.
I feel like part of it, too, is luck. We're really fortunate to have our fan base. And even just seeing everybody at the convention center dressed up, I'm like, "I'm not worthy of you guys. You're amazing." So I think it was a bit of skill--a bit of luck--involved in it as well.
That must really drive home what's at stake for you guys?
Yeah it does. Again, no pressure. Better make it good guys; is this one gonna be good? I hope so.
How much do you think about that, and how do you deal with that, day-to-day, creating the game? If you're constantly thinking about millions of people that are just waiting with bated breath to almost define the next few years of their lives, with what you put out there.
Yeah, it's kind of hard. I feel like we try not to put too much pressure on that, because then you're gonna psych yourself out. But at the same time, we're still very fortunate to work with a lot of the people who have worked on the previous Mass Effect game. So we're standing on the shoulders of giants. It's nice to come onto the team and have them welcome you with open arms, and they show you everything you need to know.
I feel like it's essentially learning the soul that is Mass Effect ... and trying to make sure that the game hits that note first. And then it grows in new and interesting ways. So, [for example] we've done the jump-jet and hover and dash and the dynamic cover system. I think they're all great additions to the game, and I'm really happy that I had a chance to play Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3. And playing this one now, it still feels like Mass Effect; so I'm hoping other people feel the same way.
What are your memories of Mass Effect 2? And did you think of it when it came out?
The first moment that I had in Mass Effect 2 that really struck me was the very beginning, when the Normandy was struck. And you had the whole blowout of the Normandy and your walking space, and it's quiet and ominous and your main character dies. That was really powerful. I actually feel like that was probably one of the strongest starts to any game I've ever played. And it really threw down the gauntlet, like, "oh my God, what's gonna happen?" It creates really interesting story questions.
And then much later in the game, you have so many incredible powerful moments happening with characters, like Legion, who you get to know--and I really didn't like the Gath that much. And then getting to know them--and then having some important moment happen later, well it was gut-wrenching.
Really, all I remember from the opening to Mass Effect 2 is the bit where Shepherd gets killed--moments like that are what define the series. How do you look at those from the original series and think about what you're doing on Andromeda. Were you looking back at the original series thinking, "We need something like this; we need something like this," or was it more like, "let's look at the original series as little as possible?"
I feel like if we focus too much on trying to hit the important notes that the previous games have hit, we're gonna miss the opportunities that are right in front of us. So I'm excited that Mass Effect is going to Andromeda. I feel like it borders on science-fact enough that it's interesting. I mean even going back to the first game--on the galaxy map, it was interesting to have our writers dive in and write descriptions for the planet. So even if you didn't land there, you could go there. And it actually felt like it was kind of a simulation of the Milky Way.
So coming to Andromeda is really interesting, because a lot of space nerds think about that, like it's the next newest galaxy: "What if? What would happen when we go there?" So trying to come up with that and take a new story and new adventure there also means there's a lot of opportunities to capitalize on. So we try to keep with the soul of Mass Effect. But then what are the crazy interesting things that are gonna happen there? And I feel like those inevitably grow out of the cool moments that just happen. Have you guys had a chance to play the game?
Yeah, we played about four or five hours from the start and then got dropped ahead to midway through a mission that was very confusing with people we hadn't met yet.
It's kind of destroying to just get tossed right in the middle; you don't actually have the full appreciation of the character arc that goes front to back. In the first mission, the shuttle that crashed and blew up--it felt like that was a pie in the sky idea that one of the level designers had that he wanted to do. He takes you from the arc right down to the planet, and then actually seeing that pay off in game, was a really cool moment. Like, "What would it be like to go from here to there?" And you have to fly by the Scourge, which is this crazy evil thing that you're gonna have to deal with later in the game. So I feel like those experiences are gonna end up growing out of the game.
You've worked on the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, but not Mass Effect 3. What was it like starting the journey, and not being a part of the team that finished it?
My involvement in the original trilogy was on the border, so playing the game and writing bugs and QA. Then the editing I provided on Mass Effect 2--I was only there for a couple of months. So I didn't have that strong a role like on the previous one. So then coming onto this one, it was an even bigger deal, because it's a really talented team that made the first ones. So you try to do everything you can to live up to those expectations.
So, as someone who got to experience Mass Effect 3 from the outside and as someone who is a fan of the series, what did you think of the ending?
I remember hearing about the storm from within, and I didn't play Mass 3 at that time. I think, at the time, I was embroiled in one of the Dragon Age projects. But I played a little bit of the game at the start--it was great. I loved it, and then picked it up sometime later. I think it was a year or a year-and-a-half later. Without the noise in the background, I just finished the game, played through--it was all incredible moments--and then I got to the end, and I remember thinking to myself, "What were people so mad about?"
I feel like it depends on your expectations. Like your journey through Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 ... how you thought those characters would end up in the game. And ultimately, we can't make something that everybody loves--it's impossible. I feel like it's terrible that other people have a negative perception of it. But I do appreciate that we've been relatively open with fans in terms of their feedback, like, "Please give us your feedback; it's valuable to us." We try to use that information as much as possible to craft something that's going to be even better in the future.
You're involved in one of the major parts of Andromeda in terms of the worlds and building those, and helping define a lot of the exploration stuff. What's it been like to engage that part of your creativity for Mass Effect Andromeda?
It was a lot of fun, actually. I'm not sure how far you guys saw into the game, but I worked on one of the Remnant sections. The tough thing about that race, without saying too much, is that they're artistically obtuse. We don't want to get too exact with it, because we wanna leave a sense of mystery with them. But [we're] still trying to make something that's fun and has some specifics--you try to strike that right balance between the two.
And I was actually involved, to some extent, in most of the major [critical] path missions. And it was really fun to work with the writers and cinematic designers and level artists, finding those happy accidents, and figuring out what the best flow was for that particular plot.
You've had an incredible journey, going from QA to working on a major franchise. Very few people get to do that. What was it like to go from QA and now be working on Mass Effect? Was there ever a moment where you kind of like had an experience, where you're like, "Oh God, it finally happened?"
You know what, I feel like I keep having that moment all the time. I think I speak for most people when I say, "I feel like an imposter all the time. Oh my God, what if they find out I'm actually not as good as everybody else here." But, you keep working with the team ... it's all about the team work. And that journey for me has been surreal. As I've said, I've wanted to get into it since I was a kid, so getting a chance to actually squeak in the door and work in QA was humbling. Then working really hard to get each of the additional opportunities that popped up; and then learning on the job, because there's so many different people from so many backgrounds. It was really cool.
Even my transition onto Mass Effect, was a new journey for me; and it kinda resonates, in terms of the game itself. It's all about exploration and discovery, and almost every single role that I take on, is about exploration and discovery, and trying something new.
What has it been like to work with the people that have defined Mass Effect for so long? And now with the people who will be defining Mass Effect into the future? You're in the middle, learning about the foundations at the same time as trying to set them going forwards.
Yeah, it's pretty tough. Again, I feel like it's due in part to the team we work with. We do build in time to fail. And it's nice to be able to work with these guys and learn things, like the cover system and shooter-style game play, and learn better and better ways of applying puzzles and narrative moments.
Do you feel comfortable around the series' veterans and also around newcomers? Do you feel like your new team is rising to the occassion? There's high expectations for Mass Effect: Andromeda; no-one's really thinking about how a lot of your team is new to it, trying to put its stamp on the franchise.
Yeah so it's a really tricky thing to take on. I mean taking it on from the previous Mass Effect Team and trying to learn on the job is definitely tricky. But at least our development schedule, while sometimes hectic, has allowed us the room to make mistakes and fail and then learn in failure. And I think we've embraced that a lot as a studio, which is quite nice.
In terms of the fans, it's pretty tricky to pick up something that's loved so dearly. And you do want to do a fantastic job of it. So I think the things that we try to do are play a lot of games, discuss things a lot, and keep communication lines open. We work together with the old Mass Effect team to make sure the things that we're making are as good as they can be.
How did you, as someone who was a fan and worked on the originals, feel about cutting ties with the Milky way and moving to the Andromeda galaxy?
I think I felt mostly excited about it, actually. Probably because, over the last few years, I've been growing more and more as a space nerd. And then going to Andromeda just felt really cool to me, because there's so many things that we can do with that galaxy. The story has been told in the Milky Way, and I don't think that means we should drop it forever. [But] let's try something new, let's expand on it. I guess short answer: I was excited about it. And then working through the whole project, it was a lot of cool gameplay that grew out of it, and cool story and cool characters.
What does Mass Effect mean to you, specifically?
For me, it's probably exploration and discovery. And I think that's at the heart of the game, but it's also at the heart of my experience going through the entire 'breaking into the games industry' and then working on various projects within BioWare. And I think it's really scary to take on new things, but it's really rewarding at the same time. Again, working with really talented people and the crazy awesome tools ... that can be challenging at times, but it's really powerful. And at the end, you learn and grow. And even though we stumble and trip along the way, I think that's the way to grow as a person; to grow as a developer. And hopefully [we can] develop the franchise at the same time.
You worked on Dragon Age before Mass Effect. What have you brought from BioWare's other massive RPG franchise to Mass Effect?
I feel like, within the BioWare studio, it's a lot about people, process, product. And people have their various strengths in those three categories, but I think the most important of which is working with the people, working as a team. Because we can achieve so much more as a team as we can as individuals. And I think we're really fortunate to have EA and BioWare in this corporate culture; [to have] room to fail and room to create some amazing things.
So I feel like, from Dragon Age, I learned a lot about teamwork. I learned a lot about level design and various tricks from working with different people. And coming onto a new team. although scary, is a new opportunity to do that, and to work with some multiplayer guys, or some guys that worked on systemic stuff for different games so ... I think in short, everything.
Working on Dragon Age, we had a Frostbite toolset, and it was the first time Frostbite was used to make an RPG. So it was incredibly challenging. And then coming over onto Mass Effect, we learned a lot of those tribal tricks ... tribal knowledge from frostbite, and we were able to apply it over to Mass Effect. And then even the open world mechanics ... but it was tough, because it was BioWare's first stab at true open world experience--or at least in some of those relatively contained areas. So bringing some of the team over from Dragon Age who had worked on those things to try out similar things in Mass Effect, but in a new setting, was challenging and fun, and I think we've achieved a lot because of it.
How does it feel, after working on the game for so long, that it's so nearly done; that people will be playing it very soon?
It's surreal. We've been working really hard on this project and from a developer's point of view, especially when we're working on a project like this, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to get things done right and done on time. So from our perspective it's been: get up, go to work, go home, go to bed, get up, go to work, etc. And now we've reached the finish line it's relieving--not only that the game's in its state and we're able to ship it, and we're quite proud of our product, but also fans get a chance to have something new.
Someone approached me yesterday and said, "Yeah it's been five years since the last Mass Effect game," and it's like, wow! It's been a long time! As a fan of the game, it's tough to wait that long for the next installment. So I think it's gonna be rewarding for them, too. And it'll be really interesting to see--what is the feedback? What are the things that they love? There are things that we love in the game, but maybe they're gonna find something else that they totally capitalize on ... or combos in the game. I like how the skill progression tree has opened up a lot.
So just talking to a few people [who say] like, "Oh yeah, I do a vanguard charge here and a jump up, and I pull a guy and throw a thing." Like, you know what? Maybe we should have a site or something like that or a competition.
It must be so daunting for you guys as a team to think about all the fans who care so much about this game--Do you ever sit down together and think, "This is it; this is the moment where we find out whether Mass Effect continues, or if something really weird happens now?"
Yeah there definitely is that anticipation. But I feel like we have a lot of mechanisms in place to mitigate that. We've been involving the fans and the community for quite a while, bringing people into focus test, and even getting developers from the previous Mass Effect games to come and playtest our games. So it's always a reiteration cycle, working with people. And I think involving people early enough, and then showing it off in the media and getting engaging reactions, is definitely a calculated, measured way to make sure your game comes out, and that it's on the right track. Because most of all we want our fans to be happy. I mean they're the reason why we're here.
Is there a moment from the Mass Effect series that stands out as being particularly personal to you in some way?
I feel like probably one of the more powerful moments, to me, if I remember correctly, was the one with Legion when you could either choose whether he would die or Tally would die. And that, to me, was gut wrenching, because I loved both of those characters.
And I remember playing it through the one time, and then I think Legion died, and I'm like, "No, no, no, this is wrong!" Go back; load the save again; play it through--and then Tally died the next time, and I'm like, "I can't do it." And I love how we craft those tough BioWare choices in our games, and I think it's given so much more weight, because of the attention to detail we put on character.
So yeah, I played through that moment several times, over and over again. I remember sitting the controller down, going to have something to eat, eating a snack, look at the TV and being like, "I don't know what I'm gonna do. This is tough." I'm a fan of the game; we're a part of this game. But it still strikes a powerful chord.
Do you have moments like that in Andromeda?
Yes, there are definitely a couple of those.
Finally, what do you want people to take away from Andromeda when they finish playing?
I feel like it kinda borders on the exploration and discovery we were talking about earlier. I sincerely hope they go on this journey as well, and they love it, and they love the characters. But another thing I hope they take away is their enthusiasm and their inspiration. I hope the fans inspire us to make something better. And I hope that we inspire fans to top us. Like, come out with your indie games, and show us more tricks. I feel like the game designer, game development community is one big family. And we learn a lot from each other--we're coming from other studios, and we go to Devcon and GDC, and we learn a lot from them.
So I feel like the short answer would be: I hope fans take away their exploration and discovery; [I hope] they have as much fun with it as we've had making the game. And [that they're also inspired by] the new costumes and new events and new multiplayer matches and new DLCs. Wherever that takes us.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game and the studio.
The interview below features Cathleen Rootsaert, one of the lead writers on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Can you introduce yourself and talk about your experience with Mass Effect as a franchise?
Cathleen Rootsaert: Hi, my name is Cathleen Rootsaert. I'm one of the lead writers on Mass Effect Andromeda, and I started on Mass Effect with a tiny little bit of the Liara DLC on Mass Effect 2 and then I went on as a writer on Mass Effect 3.
What were your kind of first experiences with the characters and the universes in Mass Effect? When did you first come to it? Or did you start off as a fan before you started working on it?
I started as a casual fan, I guess. When I first came to BioWare, I actually worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I was playing the [Mass Effect] games. I'm a big Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic fan, so I knew BioWare's work really well. [But] I actually wanted to make the move--I just loved the Mass Effect franchise so much that I wanted to be on it. And so I actually applied from inside the company. I applied to [Mass Effect creative director] Mac Walters and said, "Please, I want to be a writer on ME3."
What was it about the characters and the universe that attracted you and made you want to write for Mass Effect?
What I love about Mass Effect is that it's about humanity, right? It's about us. It's about humanity finding all of these other races and our journey to make our place. I think on Earth, we're the kingpins here, right? So the idea that out there, there are the Asari, the Turians; that there may be other races that have known each other for years--I just think it's interesting to watch humanity struggle and to write humanity's struggle as we try and find our own place in the future.
What was it like to see how passionate the fanbase is about the small things, such as characters' places within the universe or how they deal with their own personal struggles--be it a racial struggle or a health struggle or a mental health issue, or whatever?
I think that's what takes it out of the realm of being just pure hardcore science-fiction. It has a basis in emotion and in our own personal struggles. The thing about the writing team at BioWare is, we do bring our own background into what we do. So, very often, I'll be writing this character and, [if, for example] my grandmother just died--what can I bring from that personal human struggle or that personal human experience and emotion? There is place in this game, in this universe, to bring those human emotions and experiences into it, and that's really what I love about it.
How does that make you feel, to know that people are looking to these characters to find something deeper?
I think part of it is that people spend a lot of time with these characters; you've read a book, right, where it's over and you're just devastated because you're never gonna get to hang out with those characters again? And I think that, in a way, we have those same touch points, in a way that a movie doesn't. When people come up to me and they say, "Kaiden was my friend," or "Garrus is my buddy, and I just love spending time with Garrus," when I hear somebody say that they're playing the Mass Effect trilogy for like, the third or fourth time, it's because they want to spend time with those characters. And I think that that's really unique, in terms of an art form, and it's really kind of a blessing. It's very lucky to be able to create those experiences for people.
Do you think characterization and story had been done to the same scale before Mass Effect? Do you think those are the core of the franchise?
I think it's a core of what BioWare does, not just the Mass Effect franchise. I loved KOTOR and I played the heck out of that game because it was kind of something new at the time--that kind of in-depth hanging out with characters that you could piss off and who would give you shit for a long time. So I think maybe the ground started to be broken back then, and that we've just tried to evolve.
When we approach writing these characters, we take the player experience into account. And I think that that began years and years ago in BioWare and each time we go to a new game, we try to hone that just a little bit. Now it's sort of more, "What's the experience about? What's the emotion of the moment and how do we get through that?" And so we're always trying to hone the player experience to make it better and to keep moving ahead. I mean, I don't know if I should say this, but I feel like we were innovators and now there are a lot of people who are copying us.
Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And I think you can't help but call BioWare innovators in that.
Some of your fans are obsessed with one character or another--do you feel a responsibility to write these characters for not only their own sake and for yourselves, but also to satisfy your fans?
Well, absolutely. I mean, we always do take fan response into consideration. I mean, you can't help but, right? It's everywhere. You open your laptop and it's like, "Garrus is awesome!" is at the top of your Google search or whatever, right? So you can't help but take that into consideration, but at the same time, I think it would muddy the waters--if you try to please everybody, you're gonna end up making milquetoast characters that have no soul, right? No spark to them.
So, as much as we want to take into account the fans--and we do feel pressure, absolutely we do feel pressure--we make them ours, first. And then we put them out there hoping that we've created a character that is full and fulfilling and that it will continue to be loved.
Whenever you have fans like that, or whenever you have people that feel passionately about something, there's always the danger, I guess, of disappointing them. But you need to try and create something real, right? And love the fact that they feel passionate about it. I mean, that's a gift, that's amazing.
What was the feeling after finishing work on Mass Effect 3's DLC? Were you excited to work on Mass Effect again with Andromeda or were you like, "I don't know if I want to go back there again?"
Oh my god, so excited. Seriously. The thing is, the writing ends sooner than the game comes out, generally speaking. So your wheels are already turning--our wheels are always turning about how do we take this and make it better and what kind of character can we create? Things like ... People loved the Turian female who was in the Omega DLC, right? And so we're like, "Okay: squadmate." Right? Those are the kinds of things that you start to get very excited about. The challenge, of course, and maybe other people have talked about it, is that we had an ending on Mass Effect 3 that we couldn't pick a canon for, right? We had to create something for players that preserved their ending they chose in Mass Effect 3 and [at the same time] allowed us to start something fresh and new.
How did you feel about starting fresh and new? Were you excited to move on, or were you wishing you could carry on working with those characters you were invested in?
Oh, of course. Any time that you put something out there, probably you guys know as well as writers, you put something out there and then you just find all the things you'd change if you could go back, right? So that exists for us as well. But no, I think [the idea that you can create new characters] was hugely exciting.
It's a bit intimidating, though, as well because for example, one of the writers on the team, he was just like, "I don't even know where to begin to create the next Liara." Liara evolved over the course of three games. How do you start and create something fulfilling for players who are used to a Mass Effect 3 experience? But basically, [it's like] Mass Effect 1, where you're laying out these people and their experiences for the first time. And you're hoping that they work for people and that they like them.
How did you approach doing that?
Coffee, liquor, pastries ... I don't know! We have a writers' room where we bounce things off each other to begin with. Everybody on the writing team came up with three characters that they thought could be squadmates. So that left us with something like 15, 20 potential squadmates, and then they went to the lead writer at the time, who was Mac Walters and then Chris Schlerf, and they looked at them all. And then we got back in the writers room again and we gave each other feedback and decided which ones we thought were the most compelling and balanced. Also, gameplay [helps]. They're like, "We want to have an [electromagnetic] ability, so can you find us a squadmate for that?"
Did you feel like you could maybe have elements of past characters in these new ones so they could sort of spiritually live on in the new team? For example, Cora is basically trained by Asari commandos, which makes her this awesome mix of Miranda, Samara, and I guess Liara as well.
I would say that it's more a function of the IP that's been created by this multitude of writers over the course of ten years leaves us with these things that we can find, right? Like, "Oh, Asari commandos. I know, I'm gonna make the human squadmate, we're gonna make her someone who trained with the Asari commandos." And so there's always that place where we can kind of dig and find things that other people have mentioned, or something that always piqued our interest to take pieces of the universe and then put them into these squadmates.
When you're building a new set of characters, do you think, for example, "We need to find that spirituality of Thane again in a new character?"Are you thinking about replicating the things that people kind of hooked onto in the original games, or are you thinking like, "We'll just make a character" through your complicated process and if it happens to fulfill a role, then you'll allow it to?
I would say no, beyond gameplay saying they need a squadmate with an electromagnetic ability. No, we start with what we think is an interesting character, and then sort of write a backstory to them. I mean, religion, for example, is something that we do consider, but it's not about balancing what people liked or didn't like in other games, in past games or in Dragon Age games or whatever. For example, [new character] Suvi has a spiritual side to her, but it wasn't a reaction to Thane having a spiritual side. It was more her backstory and having a diverse cast of characters. I think that so that they can have things to conflict about, to converse about, and in turn, people who play the game can have things to converse about or talk about.
It's more personal than [fulfilling archetypes]. [Sheryl, who wrote Suvi] decided she wanted to go down that route. So the writers do have a personal take. And it's not about reflecting what they personally believe and then putting out, because that would be obnoxious, it's like--I don't know, Zaeed loved guns, and so the writer loved guns. No, it's not anything about that. It's about being able to craft the character as the writer wants to.
In the past, Mass Effect has often addressed issues affecting people in the real world at the time--for example, the progression with sexuality and same-sex marriage. Do you feel a pressure to address those kinds of things, be it the political climate or health issues, or whatever?
I think because we're creating a game about people, essentially, we can't help but think about the challenges, the struggle, the joys that humans have. And that sometimes goes out to things like the environment ... it's the same sort of territory that Star Trek tread as well, right? The idea of the overpopulated planet where people had to die at a certain age because there was no room. We do go those routes, but on the other hand, we started writing this game years ago, and there's no way that we could have predicted the challenges about immigration and those conversations that are happening right now. And so, I don't even know, I wonder what sort of conversations that will spark. We were very conscious in creating the game that the Milky Way races come into Heleus, but they don't just settle the planets they find, right? There is a diplomacy. They understand that there are people here already and we need to deal with that and talk to those people.
Andromeda is a game about a group of people finding refuge at a time where refugees are in a difficult position in the real world. You started writing this game a long time ago so you weren't to know that would be the case, but do the parallels, and the possibility of adding to the conversation, excite you?
I think "excite" is the wrong word. I think "interest." It interests me because, you know what, there's gonna be people on either side and everyone's gonna be yelling. Or hopefully not yelling. Hopefully everybody talks nicely to each other.
What is Mass Effect: Andromeda's story about, for you, as someone who's worked closely with it?
For me, the themes and the journey that I love are ... I like Ryder's story because Ryder is a person who is not meant to be thrust into the position that they are thrust into. Circumstances dictate that Ryder, because their father dies, has to take on the mantle of being pathfinder. [And while] they were intended to be there and kick ass, they were never intended to be pathfinder. And I think the struggle to find yourself in a new galaxy, in a position where other people are counting on you and to rise to the challenge ... I like the story about rising to the challenge and finding a place where you belong.
The squadmate Jaal kind of mirrors that as well. He doesn't know where he belongs in his family, his family's quite famous, he's got kind of the middle child syndrome and on the Tempest, traveling with us, he finds a place where he belongs. So yeah, belonging and rising to the challenge, I think those are my sort of favorite themes of this game.
It kind of reminds me of the story of BioWare. It's your story. It's the story of the studio, right? Rising to the challenge, taking up the mantle of a franchise that's beloved and trying to find a new place for it, a new home for it. Is that something you thought about?
I did just now when you said it! [Laughs] No, but it is very apt, you know? And even BioWare back in the day, taking up the challenge with the Baldur's Gate ... People loved these paper D&D games, and so they're like, "We're gonna take that up and we're gonna push that out and we're gonna rise to the challenge of making that playable for everybody on a new platform."
The team for Andromeda is almost completely new--what's it been like going from that tight-knit, close team to this new group?
It's been most interesting to see the sort of new take on this exploration content that we have never had to build before, right, and how we can craft quests that are fulfilling and interesting, with interesting characters and people, and populate those worlds. That's been really fun to do. And in terms of the team, it's been a really good balance between people who worked on the last ones and people who are bringing new energy to the franchise.
As someone who creates characters and stories, what do you think were the biggest challenges in starting fresh and leaving it all behind?
The major challenge in creating these new characters fresh is that I couldn't hear them yet. So, for example, on Mass Effect 3 when I was writing Shepard, I could hear Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer in my head as I'm writing.
One of the challenges then, is writing Ryder from the get-go, evolving the character across the game but also across a number of writers--because we all write the main characters as we're doing our missions and our quests, and not knowing exactly what they sound like. Now I could, now I know what they sound like, but at the beginning certainly, that is a challenge. And for example, in Mass Effect 3, in the Citadel DLC, I wrote Zaeed and Samara; I'd never written Zaeed and Samara before that. But I I could hear their voice. I knew who they were, I knew what they sounded like. But Liam and Gil and Suvi and Kallo ... Now I know, but when we started, I didn't. And so that's a challenge for sure.
Are you comfortable with the voices you found for these characters now? Do you feel like they'll resonate with the fans that are coming into it expecting so much from it, having played and loved the three games before this?
I have no expectations. We can't. All we can do is present people that we think are rich, deep characters and who have opinions and who love things and hate things and piss people off and embrace other things. We can only create that and hope that at least one of them resonates with somebody.
What do you hope that fans take away from Andromeda? When all is said and done, what do you hope that they walk away thinking about; what's the message you want to convey?
I hope it was fun, basically. Like, seriously, when I play the game, when I watch other people play the game, if it's fun, then that's kind of a gift in our world that can be challenging, right? I just want it to be enjoyable.
Some of Andromeda has a lighter tone than the rest of the series. Why did you decide to implement that, and how did you go about doing that?
[When] you get to Andromeda, things go ... Shit happens. It's bad. But it's not like in Mass Effect 3 where we were dealing with the end of the Milky Way galaxy. [In Andromeda] you need to start in a light place. So it wasn't like, any sort of comment on the world or what people needed. It was, this is what the story needed. It needed us to start someplace light and more fun.
When we were writing Mass Effect 3, we had a little placard on the wall to remind the writers that, "As you are writing your mission, remember that somebody's grandma is being killed by the Reapers on the other side of the galaxy." Right? So we just wanted to create something that was a bit lighter [this time round]. And who knows, maybe it'll all go terribly wrong again and it'll become very, very dark. But for now, we just want people to have fun and enjoy it. Not that there aren't [bad themes]. Like, the Kett are nasty. They're nasty bastards.
Which is more similar to Dragon Age: Inquisition, where it definitely was quite dark and upsetting at some points, but then you had characters like Sandra who loved romance novels.
Yeah. And the thing about the Citadel DLC is that three games bought us that, right? Three games of knowing those characters so well that we could place Tali drunk in the bathroom, or biotically hanging James in the air, that we could do fun stuff like that. But that's what three games bought us, and we really are starting new, in a new galaxy with a whole new crew.
Mass Effect: Andromeda arrives five years after the last entry in the series and explores a new, uncharted part of the galaxy light years away from the Milky Way. The original trilogy delivered a vast, rich universe filled with some of the most memorable characters in gaming, so expectations for the newest entry are high.
Created by BioWare Montreal, with support from a number of sister studios, Andromeda is pitched as a new start for the series and a glimpse at its future. To get the inside story of its development, GameSpot travelled to Boston during PAX East and talked to the people that made the game.
Across two episodes we explored the impact of Mass Effect, the controversy surrounding its ending, and the new future BioWare Montreal is trying to build for the beloved sci-fi RPG series. Below you can find both episodes of The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, as well as the full transcripts for each of the interviews we conducted. Additionally, we've also included supplemental Mass Effect: Andromeda features. Check it out:
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game and the studio.
The interview below features Jessica Campbell, level designer and space lead on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Can you introduce yourself and talk about your experience with Mass Effect as a franchise?
Jessica Campbell: My name is Jessica Hara Campbell. I'm the Space Lead and the Level Designer for the Tempest on Mass Effect Andromeda.
So for me, coming to BioWare this is my first Mass Effect game with the company as someone who is a very large fan of the original trilogy. So I think really interesting for me, walking into the company, hired as a level designer to actually start working on the UNCs, and when the level designer who previously built the Normandy for the trilogy shifted projects, they were like, "Jess, you want to do the Tempest?" And I'm like, "Y- Yes? I think so?" 'cause I mean, there's no small feat to try to live up to what the Normandy is for fans, myself. So being given that opportunity was just absolutely incredible, to be involved in all that.
And then, partially along the way, started also leading what we call the Space Team, which is pretty much where we redesigned the galaxy map. So we took the core of what the galaxy map was, in terms of these are experience, but then what we wanted to make it, this beautiful, immersive player experience that reinforced the narrative of Ryder as the Pathfinder. Especially with the Frostbite technology we have, it's so powerful. It was like, "This is a great opportunity for us to really feel like we are exploring and engaging the player to see space in a totally different lens."
Where were you when the first Mass Effect came out and what did it mean to you?
So I did not play any BioWare games for quite some time in my lifetime of gaming. For years, my husband was trying to get me play it, like, "You need to play these games." I'm like, "No, it's a space ... I like Star Wars, but space shooter things are not my thing." Actually, my gateway drug was Dragon Age: Origins. Love that one. I'm like, "Alright, fine, I'll try it."
So I was sick the weekend I picked up ME1. Played it in about two days. Picked up one disc, put in ME2 and just kept going. So it very quickly consumed me, the fascination with it and it really changed the way I viewed games also, as a player being like, "Oh, I'll try something new," and then realizing, "Wow, this is an experience in games I'd never previously engaged with." And it was like, "Wow, I was missing a lot," and in terms of ME2, still to this day is one of my favorite games ever.
So especially for me to be able to, with the Tempest and working with all the writers to create all the characters which are the core of what Mass Effect is, to be part of that whole experience from beginning to end and watch them develop, it really is the dream job, and I'm building part of it.
As a fan, did you ever worry about seeing behind the magician's curtain?
Oh, we knew. We knew it was over as soon as we took the job here. At the same time though, it's a really special thing to see. And I think, for having loved the trilogy so much, there's something even more special now to see how the whole process is done. I will, unfortunately, never be able to experience it like the fans, which kind of hurts still a little bit, to not be totally wowed, but even so, having been a major part of the main hub of the game which connects to everything … When I'm testing some levels, I will run into Concept like, "Holy crap, I had no idea, this is great!" So I mean, even for me, there's gonna be so much to see I have no idea even exists. And even just the different storylines, characters, it's ... there's gonna be a lot in there that is gonna be really exciting.
You talked about how daunting it was creating a new ship for people to call home with the Tempest, so you're kind of keenly aware of what that one slice of the game means, but did you ever step back and think about what the experience overall means to different people? You're not just making a new ship for people, you're making a new Mass Effect, a new galaxy, a new entire universe for people.
Oh, absolutely. The responsibility of living up to what was already previously defined and established was tremendous. And every decision we made was like, "Okay is this at least meeting par of what we did before? And what can we do to make it special and new and inviting for the player?" 'Cause it was a very fine balance between reaching part of what was already established. We have a wonderful IP and lore, and it would have been silly for us to be like, "Nope, we're rewriting everything as we move to Andromeda."
No, there's a core foundation for a reason. We're gonna take it, build upon it, and also be aware of, as a fan, what I really want to see this thing, and it really drove us to make a lot of the decisions in what we were doing. And always, we were so careful with every aspect of what we were doing, in terms of the way the levels function, the user experience and how they engage with things, and just overall the pacing of the game and the content we were giving them and always look for fun little bits that are like, the little one-off banters that you're like, "What? What did they just say?" It's always surprising.
What was it like actually going from being a fan to being in that studio working on the new Mass Effect.
I think when we were offered the opportunity to come work with BioWare on Mass Effect, there was, I think- I say "we" because my husband is the lead level designer, so this is both of us coming here, dream jobs, moving and being part of this team. There was this moment like, "Yes! We're going! We're gonna do this! Oh my god, what have we done?" It's really incredible to be part of it, and daily, it's just living up to the expectations of what it is as a company. I mean, we look at this team, many of them were even around for ME1, so we have incredible talent that has been part of everything for such a long time, to be able to, as newcomers, being welcomed into all of it, getting up to speed on all of the things we didn't even realize was going on, the decision-making process.
Often, it was very overwhelming and intimidating, but at the same time, I think the way this team has built the leadership structure, they were there to help us get through it. And at the same time, through their vision, they have ideas of what they want to do. But at the same time, with the talent we have, it's letting the team also take the reins and go. Now, there was course-correcting involved, but it's overall, they let us not only become part of the team, but help recreate even what we're doing right now.
So Mass Effect, the series overall, is a series about strong characters. And it's easy for people to fall in love with Wrex or Liara or Tali or whoever it may be. The Normandy was this space you never actively think about loving until you're away from it. How do you approach creating a new version of that, and how do you build a new Normandy for a new age knowing that, eventually, it could mean a great deal to people?
So at first, it was really interesting because at the time, we still had the level artist who had created the Normandy and the level designer who did the Normandy as well. So having them to walk through things they did, there were key things we wanted to maintain in the Tempest. Some features, whether it was the player experience with handling, we knew we wanted the Galaxy Map. Maybe change how it was gonna work. We wanted to keep some core visual elements to keep it familiar. Not entirely new, but it needed to be different. This was definitely a different ship.
I remember the first time we opened up the level of the actual Normandy, I think I got goosebumps. It was just like, "It's real and I can fly around it and look at it." It was such a surreal moment of like, "Wow, this is really happening." So for us, being able to actually look at what the Normandy was as a level and then now start to build the Tempest ... it was something where we had an idea of the elements we wanted to recreate and then change to make the new experience. 'Cause to us, the Tempest and the Normandy, they are characters. They're not NPCs, but they are, unto itself, its own character.
And I think with what we did with the Tempest, very much unlike the Normandy, we have windows and you can see outside to space. And for that, alone, it was like, "This is something so different." And I can walk around, go up to the meeting room and you have a 360 panoramic view of space and you can fly to an asteroid belt, park in front of a sun and outside is this new thing to see. I really get a kick out of the fact that the ship feels so much bigger than the Normandy because we have windows. We didn't have the streaming restrictions we had where we had the elevators to load. It is seamless. You can run from the bridge, the cargo bay, the pathfinder's quarters back up to the bridge and you don't have to wait. So it's just so different, and yet this thing is so much smaller than the Normandy. But it feels like a really amazing experience to run around.
I thought for ages that I was just not seeing all of it. The ship felt really, really tight and kind of enclosed at a point, and I was initially like, "There's not a lot of space here for me to explore." But then realized that it was also bringing a lot of the characters closer together. Was that something that you did intentionally?
Yeah, part of the whole idea was being the Pathfinder, we are on a small scout ship. We're no longer on a military vessel. So as part of that, we wanted to shrink it down to make sense where we now have a small, intimate crew. Where previously, the Normandy housed, I think it was like, 70, 80-odd crew members, granted they were just the NPCs in the background or eventually on the death wall once they all died. So there was this whole ensemble cast that was part of the Normandy. And we knew from the get-go, this is a small ship and it would probably typically only have a crew of 8.
So we have a small ship, very specific things for it to do, and then we're gonna cram a couple extra squad mates in there too. So it was really about building, "We're explorers, we have our new family with the squad mates, but then everything's a little crowded, and everyone should have a bunk, but we don't have bunks for everyone, so Liam's dragging a couch into this ship and okay, that's your spot." So we're still maintaining the identity of rooms associated with the squad mates, and you can see it evolve over time of the things they're collecting as you're exploring and progression with the relationships.
And something we really wanted to push, because we didn't have the ensemble cast, was, so what are they doing when they're not standing in the rooms waiting for you to talk to them? And we've really pushed bringing them together and establishing relationships with each other. It's not just about you as Ryder and them. So they're also walking around and talking to each other, and over the course of the game you can start hearing what starts as an argument slowly transition to conversations and these threads playing out through the whole game.
I think I caught PeeBee arguing with Lexi about doctor patient confidentiality at one point and it made me stop for a minute and observe the surroundings, because she was moving about as well. And playing the original games, I'm so used to just bolting from one room to the other because I know Wrex is here or Tali's here, I need to speak to this person, this person, this person, so ...
Yep, it was the Normandy tour. There's virtue to having it, but at the same time, we wanted to get away from that to let the player feel more like it's a living world, that people aren't just scripted to stand in their room and wait for you. They're doing things. Because we have such a small crew, they need to be doing their jobs, otherwise the ship isn't going to function. It was an interesting challenge to do, and I think it's gonna pay off. I'm really excited about it. It was something that I really, really wanted to do, and it took an incredible team with the writers, the cinematic designers to be able to get this to actually work and function.
What's it like, going from a fan to someone working on the game, not being allowed to talk about it for four or five years, to finally being able to open up about it?
It's about as intimidating as working on the project itself, because it's like, "Oh, there's so much cool stuff." And especially with the BioWare community. The fans have this amazing way to reach out to us. There's so many different letters and conversation with them of what the games mean to them, and it's just like, "I want to feed you all this stuff. You're gonna be so excited. I'm so excited to share it with you but I can't yet. Just not yet." So I'm really looking forward to the game coming out and just being able to respond and see did everyone enjoy the thing. I really hope they did. What didn't they like? Just being able to react and like, "Okay, next time around, I'm gonna get this thing and make sure that conversation or reaction happens."
So really, it is for me, kind of the lifeblood of giving me the energy to be able to continue to build this level. It was no easy thing. We had some really interesting tech challenges that we introduced with how we were doing space, but at the same time, it was like, we can nail this whole experience. I think it's really gonna be something very different that we're bringing with the Tempest.
It must be exciting to know that people really care about that kind of stuff. Because in most games, there's something like a world map and people don't pay too much attention to it. Whereas your community is one where they will really think about the distance between two planets and think about the atmosphere of each planet. And those kind of really little details that, in most games are just kind of incidental and no one cares about.
It was a really big challenge for us, 'cause a lot of it is, we want to make the experience for the player to see space and be able to move to the [uncharted planets] or the missions as easy and ... Hmm. There's probably a better word than "quick", but it's just making it accessible and very simple, intuitive for them to do.
But at the same time, initial designs we were doing was much more using the pathfinder and same as the AI, like maybe it's just like you're swiping through and you're looking through things. And then we realized, well we're losing what space is. It's space. It's vast. It's humongous. But we're in a brand-new galaxy, and you are the explorer. If we take that away from you, the player is not engaging with that moment when you're coming out of FTL and voom, we're right in the middle of an asteroid belt, or you see this really weird thing in the distance. If we didn't have that, it'd be like, "Yeah, okay. Just click, load, next level, let's go."
So really, being able to craft that experience, it was very different. And for us, we still wanted to be able to fly around the system so you could see the movement and take the couple seconds to just look and appreciate and experience what you were seeing before you're like, "Alright, we're now diving into the mission banter and let's go." And it gives us the opportunity also during the flight sequences to have the squad mates chime in, even them reacting to like, "Whoa, look at this thing. I don't understand what this is." It just makes the experience feel more succinct and alive.
BioWare has said it's been able to do things that were maybe thought of in Mass Effect 1, but due to tech restriction, couldn't do until now. What's it like finally being able to take these really old dreams and bring them to life?
I think the legacy of what ME1 was trying to do and move forward was something coming back to the exploration, returning to the UNCs was kind of that dream. We're like, "Okay, I think we can do this now." So that experience, I kind of have a weird relationship with it, 'cause I was part of how we get from Tempest to planet. So for that, being able to go start the transition, actually see us transitioning through the atmosphere and all the cinematics, talking about the story, what was there and then the moment of reveal, the UNC. It was like, "Oh, this thing's really big, and there are a lot of things to do here."
So that was a fun thing that we were actually able to really get across 'cause there's a very weird thing that happens where it's an alien planet and we want to explore it. So there's this really weird difference where we want to give the player stuff to do, but we need to make it feel barren, and it's a planet, so if we give them too much content, it doesn't feel alien and strange. But at the same time, if there's not enough for them to do, it's boring.
So it was a very interesting balance of how that minute-to-minute, second-to-second gameplay to keep the player moving through the level and especially using the Nomad to get there ... you can still go through moments of nothing, but because you're moving quite fast, then you can be hitting that content as you're going, to always keep engaging and seeing, "There's something peeking around that rock, I want to go see what it is," and really visually leading the player to all the different locations to find and explore all the different content.
You obviously played the original trilogy, so you probably feel a lot like fans felt in regards to the Mako and that kind of stuff, and you were just talking about Nomad there. How does it feel to be part of the team trying to make that work?
I actually always loved the Mako, and I think I used it in ways it was never supposed to be used. It was the, "I'm gonna drive into the combat, hop out, hide behind it." It would be smoking on fire, more than one occasion I would jump into and die immediately 'cause it was too far gone. So for us to be able to bring that back and then just spend so much time iterating, improving on the whole overall driving experience, it's really great to see what was before and what we were able to do with it now. It's funny, even with us, my cat is named Mako. It's more the shark, but now I'm like, "Yes, he's named after the car." Just even coming home the other day, my husband walks in and he's like, "Where's Nomad? I mean Mako ... " Work is so part of our life that we're like, "Alright, we'll just drive the cat around now."
What has the mood been like in the studio? Obviously you have this contingent of veterans and now you have this contingent of new developers forging a future for the franchise. Is there kind of like a old school-new school split? Is it a teacher-pupil relationship?
So I think in the early stages of development, the original Mass Effect team was part of some of the creative force, and eventually they all started shifting off because for them, a lot of them had been making Mass Effect for ten years and were ready for something new. So they were very much there to help us establish the vision of what Mass Effect was and making new steps to what would become Andromeda. So it was very much a passing of the torch experience. They imparted a lot of wisdom. I have a list from my predecessor of "Make sure you don't do this, don't do this. Do this, not that." Probably didn't listen to most of that. But a lot of it, I wish I did. It was like, "Oh, we could do this. We could do it better. We're fine." It was like, "Oh, he was right in so many ways.
But overall, it's a new team, more or less, building Mass Effect. And I think for us, actually, one of the greatest challenges, we were building it over three studios in three time zones. So trying to work with everyone, find times to have meetings and work out problems, we became very agile and very good at communicating very quick, because it's a lot of questions and really, when you break it down, that's two hours in a workday where everyone is actually in the office at the same time not on lunch.
It was definitely a project that people loved and they wanted to get it right. It meant a lot to not just the fans, but us as well. It's a legacy we're carrying on, and we really wanted to do it right. So the last few months, it's been ... we've come so far, we've been working so hard and we're just gonna fine tune this puppy as much as we possibly can. Now that everyone's kind of like, "Okay, we're almost there," just being able to watch the fan reactions as all the media's coming out over it, there's a lot of excitement about everyone actually getting to play it for the first time.
When you got to the studio and you realized that you're working on Mass Effect, did you understand the vision straight away or was it a thing that slowly clicked into place?
I mean, I think when we walked in, they already knew it was gonna be not Shepard. It's a new PC character and we're moving to Andromeda, it's not staying. And we're clearly making a break and it will be different, which I actually think was a very, very wise choice to not try to carry over all the legacy of what was there and like, "No, we're gonna start fresh." So I think right then, it was like, "Okay, I think this is a good choice," and it felt good. So there was ... I think things generally worked out in terms of just moving forward and never really feeling like we were kind of failing in that.
One of the things that you helped bring to Andromeda in a big, new way is the whole space stuff. Can you talk a bit about how you came to the decision to do that, the challenges you faced in doing that, and why you decided to do it?
Yeah, so looking at space previously, over the course of the galaxy map over the three games, it changed. The core of it was there. You would look at the different layers of the system and you would fly the little Normandy around to go places, and we knew inherently we still wanted to keep that concept to remember this is large and we're constantly looking down, seeing the different levels of it because it is big, even though the Mass Relay has shortened how much of that travel time was. Knowing immediately we don't have Mass Relay tech, how were we going to move around something so large? It was kind of paired with that experience of, we don't want the player just to look at a UI screen because it's not engaging. It doesn't fulfil the desire to explore space.
So we went through lots of different iterations of how we were gonna move around space. Some of it was too fast in terms of a HUD, moving around, and eventually we played around with, "Do we just let the player snap around to the different views?" More or less, we got to the point where we decided we wanted that experience to move through the systems. It was more than the technical challenge of how do we make it as smooth and easy for that experience to happen, not make it too boring 'cause we don't want to sit there for five minutes as we're flying from one side of the solar system to the other. And especially for us, it was how we transitioned into the missions, in terms of we had this great, new tech to show us moving through space. How were we gonna show us transitioning to a new location? So we were really conscious in terms of how we built the experience and how we were able to technically do it and now make it boring or repetitive. 'Cause a lot of the UNCs, you're gonna go back to time and time again. The narrative, the stories, they drive you to return to places to see what changed, so it was very much fluidity issue of not making everybody too bored as they went back. So it's pretty quick, it's engaging, but each time it's visually a really nice thing to look at.
It's really interesting the way, I think, of introducing intimacy to this thing that's vast and cold. In the previous games, the most intimate you got with a planet while in space was when you were probing it. And that's partially only because it's EDI shouting, "Launching probe" or whatever.
Yeah, we played with a lot of different ways of engaging in the gameplay. Much like my love for the Mako, I also really loved ME2 where I was gonna mine the crap out of that planet till it was run dry, and I know there's many different opinions, so it's like, all right, how do we strike that balance where we want the player to engage with searching for debris. We have that anomaly, something's out there. How are we gonna find this thing? And the experience of tracking down where it is and then flying to it and it's a ghost ship type of thing, or maybe it's a distress signal and now we have quest content there. So we knew the elements we wanted to maintain from what the trilogy was introducing, but now we had a different way of experiencing it and moving around with it.
So it was a lot of trials. A lot of time to experiment with that experience, to make sure for people who are testing and building it everyday to the point if we're like, "Oh, this is really cumbersome," that is not what we want. So when we finally found that right mix of flight times and interacting with something and actually feeling rewarded for finding things, we were like, "Okay, we have a really good balance now." And then it was just polishing.
We had a really great, small multidisciplinary team which was two programmers, myself, one of the tech designers, and a VFX/level artist who basically built that whole experience. So it was a massive undertaking. And it's really interesting how large and intricate it is, and it's the way you go from the Tempest to everywhere else. But it's just something that if the player doesn't think, "Wow, this is ... I'm really thinking about it," the experience itself, then we've done our job. We're giving you the experience you're reacting to and not the clunkiness of actually using it.
When Mass Effect 1 came out, it was always clear from the get-go it was the first part of a trilogy. If Andromeda is also a first chapter, where would you like to see Mass Effect go?
With the game, we've introduced a new galaxy, so there's a lot of new possibilities of what's there, and specifically we're in a section of a galaxy. We're not even experiencing everything, so there's going to be much more to explore and we very much feel like there are other things out there. And as for the player with this experience, everyone you're encountering in the game is, they have come to this new place, left everything behind in attempts to start a new life. So this is very much almost like a coming-of-age story, it's, "We're coming here, this is new, nobody knows what they're doing, there are many mistakes to be made," and it's going to be this really interesting evolution of, it's not just humanity encountering the aliens for the first time. We are the aliens coming to this place where people live.
Granted, we're coming with our own alien friends to this location, but I think there's a really interesting ... just different things that we can introduce and expand upon and show as the growth of us coming to this place, realizing who we are as we're interacting with them. And even on a smaller scale with the player character, just how they are growing and changing, whether or not they are the main character if we do a sequel, but like, where they are and just seeing how they're growing also into this brand new role.
What does Mass Effect Andromeda mean to you?
I guess being part of the Space experience, Mass Effect Andromeda is the wonder of finding new things. That there is hope. You're with your friends and you're experiencing brand new things for the first time. It's just the discovery. The wonder of it. Embracing new things. I think especially for myself with this game, it really pairs to where, at least, I am in my life of picking up and moving to Canada, joining my dream job. It's all about this is brand new, it's awe-inspiring, it's intimidating, but we're gonna embrace it and what you make of it is what you're gonna get out of it. It's a personal. The story of my life is, part of this game is like, we're just gonna make this thing amazing and do everything we possibly can.
It's also the story of your BioWare studio, isn't it? A group of new people trying to find a new home for the franchise. Do you ever see shades of that in the game and be like, "This is us. We're seeing ourselves in it"?
Yeah, it really is. For the studio in Montreal, especially, we were given this massive thing. So seeing it come to fruition and feeling like we are this new family, even, as a team building this thing, it's new challenges of meeting new people, new team coming into it whether they're old school BioWare, brand new to BioWare, part of EA. I think it's really brought us together us a family unit, as a team. So it really pairs well, I think, with the overarching of narrative of what the overall story is.
There's a lot of fans out there that are looking at this franchise trying to change its identity. You've gone from someone who's a fan of the original identity into someone trying to find the new identity so can perhaps understand the worries and anxiety some fans have right now. What would you tell them to assuage their fears?
I think they will be pleasantly surprised at how much of the core of what Mass Effect is, is there, and the new things that are brought to it. So it is, I think, a really, a homage to what the series is. Our fans who were part of the trilogy grew up with it and can embrace it, they're gonna find the core things that they love. That hasn't gone away, and I think it's a really great introduction for fans who have never experienced, to now walk into this and experience it all for the first time. So I think we can really deliver to both sides and everyone is going to experience this together as this brand new, very different thing. I think it's gonna work out well.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and its developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the interview material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game.
The interview below features Yanick Roy, studio director at BioWare Montreal. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your experience with the franchise?
Yanick Roy: My name is Yanick Roy, I'm the studio director for BioWare Montreal. I'm in my twelfth year with BioWare. I started at the very beginning of the production of Mass Effect 1. I was the senior project manager on that game. Started in a similar role on the second game, and that's when [BioWare co-founders] Ray [Muzyka] and Greg [Zeschuk] asked me to come to Montreal and open up a studio there so we could grow the BioWare family.
We helped, from Montreal, supported the development of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. When that team that was driving the first three games was ready for a change, we took over. [They] passed the baton and we took it on with Mass Effect Andromeda. I've been lucky enough to have my entire career in video games attached to Mass Effect, which is not the worst thing to have your name at the attached to.
Yeah, it's one of the most well-known, beloved franchises from a fan perspective. What does it mean to you being attached to the franchise? What's the heart of Mass Effect to you?
It's interesting because my background was more on the software side of things, so when I joined BioWare it was my first experience in the video game industry. And the kind of game that we do, people get so emotionally attached to them that, rapidly, my experience with Mass Effect has become my experience interacting with our fans. It's easy to forget your days in front of computers, developing things, and struggling with the difficulties of game development, to kind of get lost in the technicalities of it all. But whenever we get a chance to interact with our fans--and now with social media it happens on a regular basis--it reminds us of how much of a difference we can make. Even though it's not a word I like using, I find it very humbling in that you realize even the small decisions that you make in a meeting somewhere actually has a big impact on somebody's life somewhere.
For me, as much as it's a constant pressure on us, it's a good pressure that keeps us going. That's where I take my energy [from]. So my experience with Mass Effect is less about the game itself and more about what it means for so many people and how that translates into our fuel.
Pictured: Yanick Roy
You build a game, people have a response to it, and then you build two more, and you can see what it means to people over time develop and become a big part of the franchise. Now that you have that knowledge going into Andromeda, how do you approach making a new entry knowing that it means that much to people?
You basically need to go back to the initial motivation for a game. When we started Mass Effect: Andromeda, that's exactly what we did. For people who have played the three games, the first one is the one that probably had the most ambitions--if you want. It was trying to push boundaries in every aspect of a role-playing game. As we moved forward, we focused our efforts a bit more on combat and storytelling, less so on exploration and customization.
When we started this one, we wanted to go back to these roots and say, "Let's try to get to the essence of what made people fall in love with the franchise as a whole." And try to, with today's technology, with everything that we've learned over the course of developing the trilogy, [ask], "Can we do today what we were trying to achieve the first time around?" That was about keeping ourselves true to the franchise.
It's constantly reminding yourself of what they fell in love with in the first three game. It's interesting, since we're putting together a new team, from the beginning it was perceived as, "Let's give you guys something easier than to start a new game franchise from scratch." We're gonna start with a franchise that's well-defined, we know what Mass Effect stands for so that gives you one less thing to worry about as you're building the team and new technology and new generation of game console.
What ended up happening was living up to Mass Effect does not make things easier. So yes it's well-defined but also we wanted, of course, to move into Andromeda, bring in new races and everything. But it's the constant reminder that Mass Effect means something to the fans, and as much as you want to move that game forward, if you don't deliver what people expect in a Mass Effect game, it doesn't matter. It could be a really good game, if it's not a real Mass Effect game, you've kind of spoiled it.
You're in a situation where you know that this means so much to people. This slightest change to its identity could upset that relationship and dynamic you have with people. But at the same time, Andromeda, at its core, is about reinventing the franchise and taking it into a new place where you can inspiring that kind of sense of wonder that we had when when nothing made sense and everything was new. How did you approach that?
That was the subject of a lot of conversations, of course. The way we chose to approach it is try to bring what was the core of the Mass Effect experience. Of course, there's the elements of bringing the races that people knew, and the biotics and a lot of the law that comes with the franchise. But also a lot of what the essence, if you want, of Mass Effect. So going back to what does it mean to be human, for example, which was at the core of a lot of the questionings in Mass Effect. Humans versus aliens, what's their place, and how can you transpose that to our struggle in this society projected at the intergalactic scale. But also what does it mean to be human versus AI. And those themes of what does it mean to be human are things that we wanted to bring with us.
You're starting from a science fiction, action, RPG that builds upon these things, that uses the Mass Effect core tenants for a lot of the action aspect, or the story aspect. You know that you're started with a lot of these seeds of a Mass Effect game. But at the same time, we know that a lot of time has passed. Today when we were talking to our fans, some of them have gone through the entire trilogy, some of them joined at the third game, some of them basically were not old enough to legally purchase the game last time we released the Mass Effect game. So we knew we're talking to a lot of new fans.
How do we make sure that we in full respect to the people that have been with us for so long, give them wings, show them that we have carried over the franchise that they know and love. That we have these kind of secret messages and connections to the franchise, that they themselves can say, "Oh, I know why this is happening." But to make it in a way that is not daunting for new players and getting the feeling that I don't know what's going on. It's striking that balance between staying true to the definition of Mass Effect game but introducing it in a way that if you are brand new to the franchise, will only give you a desire to go explore what happened before but not in a way that it doesn't make sense without it.
Rolling back a bit to the first Mass Effect which you were involved with, now that you have had time away from it and you've seen the industry progress and develop, what do you think the impact of that first game was?
It's, of course, I think is difficult today to argue that it didn't have a huge impact on the industry but it's interesting because projecting myself back to when we were building that game, it's so not something that you think of, right?
I remember when I was hired by BioWare, initially I was put on two projects at once, and I was more attached to the Dragon Age side of the business. I joined because I was a huge BioWare fan and I joined right after the first trailer for Mass Effect had been released., it was very early at an Xbox event. I remember seeing it and thinking, "This looks interesting. This doesn't look like a BioWare game."
I joined the company and I get put on the Mass Effect. [I was] a bit disappointed and like, "Ah, I really wanted to work on a BioWare game." But what I discovered as we were developing it, we actually were rapidly evolving with what being a BioWare game was. We didn't use to put this emphasis on a cinematic conversation. The action used to be much more rudimentary in our game. We got into a world, suddenly, where, from a shooting aspect, we were starting to compete with actual shooters. Something from the past that would have been crazy to think about. Same thing on the cinematic delivery with the scope of our games, it's a bit crazy to say, "Let's try to hit that quality bar of games that have a tenth of the content that we have and that don't have to deal with customized characters, they don't have to deal with characters that can die throughout the stories, so you need to have different setting for everything."
To be part of that and then see today, you know, when you talk about what type of game that you do, I find that it's becoming more and more difficult nowadays to actually describe it because every game is a bit of everything. You're playing linear shooters and nowadays there's heavy customization and then progression. Things that were more on the RPG side of things.
So all these genres are blending as we evolved since the first Mass Effect. Now I could think that was one of the--you know, of course, not responsible for everything--but one of the elements was that it kind of pushed the industry in that direction, where suddenly crossing boundaries between game genres became possible. Not only possible but something that fans were interested in. As I said, when we're given the reigns of Mass Effect, that kind of ... The importance of what you're being handled, that is the daunting part of the challenge.
Obviously, we can say this with retrospect, but it blows my mind that you can come into a franchise like Mass Effect and be disappointed that you're working on it.
Yeah!
It doesn't make any sense to us because we can look back at it and see the impact of it. If you could go back in time and tell that person, that version of you who sits there, bummed out being like, "Awww, I'm working on Mass Effect," what would you say?
Disappointed is maybe too strong a word, but I had the feeling that it was, you know, as mentioned before, not quite a BioWare game because of the emphasis on action, but also because I was very much a PC gamer and I had the feeling that, especially when we were working on it, it was Xbox exclusive, right? I thought, "It's not even a game that I will be able to play at home."
But I think what I would tell myself is, "You're looking at it as you're developing it, but you need to get into the habit as a game developer to project yourself as to when you're going to be releasing that game." So the game that we started working on, the Mass Effect: Andromeda of almost five years ago, it's the game that's being released today. It was the same thing back then when I started working on it, I'm a PC gamer and you know a BioWare game means this and that, and I think I would tell myself you need to project, to see yourself in the future, because the game you're building is not meant to be BioWare's present, it's meant to be BioWare's future. I think it's what I've been more excited to think that, "Hey, we're building BioWare's future instead of, you know, repeating what we've done in the past."
Is Andromeda the game that builds BioWare's present or a game that is building BioWare's future?
I think we have a foot on both territories, so when we start with a new IP, with a blank slate, it's really solely about where do we think the industry is going, where do we want to take it, and how do we want to define BioWare? Whereas for us, as I mentioned earlier, there's also that constant reminder of be true to what the franchise means.
So you want to evolve, [but] revolutions? Be careful. It needs to be an evolution. At the same time, as much as I still love the first trilogy, if you go back, especially to the first one, it's quite clunky. So you need to make sure that even though you're staying true to that formula, it's a game that plays good today. Again, we're not building in the same way where we know it's a trilogy but we know that we're planting the seed for something that we want to keep building upon in the future. So it needs to be a formula, as we're refreshing it, we believe will stand the test of time and it's something that we can keep building upon.
How do you approach building this specific game but knowing that the fans expect beyond just this one experience? You want to try and focus on Andromeda and create this self-contained experience, but at the same time you need to lay the foundations future titles. Does that split your focus?
It didn't prove to be like the toughest challenge. We have a lot of experience that we carried over. We have a mix in the team, and what's interesting is that the new people are experienced developers so they bring a lot of expertise to the mix that we didn't necessarily have before. They're not only are they experienced developers, but what's interesting is a lot of them joined us because they were fans of Mass Effect. It's probably the same thing for everybody who plays the game but if you ask a fan, "What is Mass Effect game?" And then you turn around and ask another one, you're likely going to get two definitions that are not exactly the same. I think the strength of the franchise is really if you can make it your own.
So the same thing happened when these fans happened to be game developers that you bring into the project. Mass Effect means something to them that might not be exactly the same for people who were there from the beginning, and never experienced it purely as fans, they only ever were developers on the Mass Effect franchise.
So, when you're putting these two together, some people are more attracted to planting these seeds for the future, it's like, "Oh! Let's put in that." Whereas others are more into the habit of doing it. They say, "Well, okay, we need to close that loop.." It becomes more a part of the job whereas others still haven't forgotten what it is to be a fan. It's a great dynamic in a team and what it brings and how we set the ground for future games.
How is it been for you to allow these new people to come in and leave their mark on a franchise that's very close to you? Now that you can take a step back and can see others building it, has it changed the way you experience and see the universe now?
It's a good question because it's not necessarily something spend a lot of time reflecting upon. As much as the Mass Effect experience is defined when we start a game, I feel that it's a blank canvas to some extent. And it's interesting because when we interact with fans, they tend--by reflex, and it's understandable--to put a lot of importance on the people that they interact with on social media because we're doing interviews and stuff like that.
But game development is such a team sport that anybody in the team, regardless of the role they play, be it creative director, me driving the studio, we keep getting surprised by stuff in the game because everybody contributes to what we put on that canvas. So even though it did not necessarily force me to reflect about what it means to be a BioWare game, people actually take the brush from my hands and they paint a little part of the picture and I'm seeing the results myself without having to think about it.
I remember, it's one of the first things Casey Hudson told me when I joined the first Mass Effect, how for a while you try to tell people what it is you're trying to do. You're trying to sell your vision of the game, you're trying to tell them what is going to be Mass Effect and what is not going to be. But at the same time, at some point, you play the game and you realize that what has become is so much more than what you were imagining. Everybody adds their touches and it's the same thing in this case where without having to think about, you're suddenly surprised by how everybody, especially the newcomers, have added their touches to that painting you're doing.
We talked about how you went into Mass Effect 1 and you laid the foundation for this huge universe. Going into Mass Effect 2, what was your feeling and mood? What were you focusing on for the sequel?
It's interesting. At BioWare, there's a lot of values that we've held onto over time. One of them that we've used a lot is humility. There's thing that you're only as good as your previous game, but the way we used to twist it was that you're only as good as your next game. It was about reminding ourselves that it doesn't matter that the first Mass Effect was rated 90 plus, it only matters what the next game is rated at. It's always trying to beat yourself. We're very bad at celebrating our successes.
So, Mass Effect 1 got released and it had a super good reception in general. What's our first response? We went through all the reviews and did this table with all the criticism we were all seeing, and which ones were coming over and over, and what are we hearing from our fans, and basically filter that huge list and say, "Okay, we need to address these things."
We always used to think of role-playing as four major pillars. You have the story, of course, you have combat, you have progression and customization, and you have exploration. Those four pillars were very much trying push hard on the first game. When we started working on the second one, and we were reading the criticism of the first one, we decided to focus more of our efforts on the combat, and on the story. And by story it's also the delivery and how the conversations were happening. By focusing on these, you're naturally focusing less on the others, [so] you saw a bit less of that progression and customization and lot less exploration.
Again, because I was very new to the industry, I was a little bit afraid of what it would mean to sacrifice things in order to do other things better. I've learned since that it's actually the only way to do something better. Focusing on everything is the same thing as not focusing at all, right? So game development is always about compromises and making sacrifices here so you can put more of your efforts elsewhere.
As we moved onto the second one and moved the learnings, it was not a celebration of, "Woohoo. We've achieved something great with Mass Effect 1." It was, "How do we make it better?" Obviously it was not perfect because people were criticizing it. As much as I wish that we were a bit better at being happy for our successes, I think that what keeps us releasing games that our fans like is that we never rest on our laurels. It's, "What's the next game gonna be like?" It's kind of sad because we haven't released Andromeda and already we're talking about what we want to do next time around.
I imagine it is very difficult to read criticism of something that you've poured your heart and soul into--what gives you the drive to take on that five years of hardship again? What is it about developing a game like Mass Effect that pushes you forward?
At heart, we're all storytellers and, it's interesting because game development should be a bit more akin to movies in a sense that you're building something but you're never exposed to people receiving it. Over time, we're getting a bit of a taste of what maybe, being in a play or being in theater is like because we interact more with our fans. I know for me and for a lot of people these interactions are what keeps us going.
As we've seen in the past, we generate a lot of passion from our fans. Ultimately you need to take that as a reward. People care about what you do, but you need to accept the passion goes both ways. You're not going to build something that people are passionate about and they all like. Passion is going to go both ways. And that's why sometimes if the overall reaction was negative that it would probably cause a lot of questioning. But the fact that we have some part of the fanbase that is unhappy about something while the other is in love with it--that we're not pleasing everybody--that's part of the course of something that generates passion.
That's ultimately what we're trying to do as storytellers. We want people to care and they're obviously caring. Sometimes it might feel like we're masochists because we keep putting ourselves in front of those criticisms, but in the balance of things, the amount of love that we're getting and the feeling that what we do means so much for people is amazing.
Our fans are just amazing. Throughout the development, suddenly you receive a batch cupcakes because, "I know you guys are working really hard and I want to keep it going." You have kids who are dying who go to Make-A-Wish Foundation and their dream is to come visit the studio and meet the team. Of all the things you can wish for, you just want to get behind the curtain and go see how we build that game that you love. How can you not want to keep going, right? Even though we know that there's going to be a lot of hate on one end of the spectrum, there's going to be so much love that's coming too.
As someone who's bridging the gap between the old trilogy and Andromeda and going forward, that must be a core part of bringing you back to it, right? Having completed a franchise and done really well with it, most would be like, "Maybe I'll go and make beer now," in the case of some of your former executives...
[Laughs] Of course, Mass Effect is important enough for BioWare that they wanted to make sure that they were handing it to people who deeply cared about it, so yes, that was part of the decision. But there's also an element for me personally that was more to do with the BioWare Montreal studio in that eight years ago now, when Greg asked me to open up the studio in Montreal. In my head, building a BioWare studio means something. For me, we did not have a BioWare studio as long as we hadn't shipped a BioWare game.
You know, of all the BioWare games, we had the privilege of saying we're now branding the Montreal studio with Mass Effect: Andromeda. I can't ask for more, right? Again, because we're trying to touch people, you start with a fanbase that cares. We're not trying to build something from nothing and hope that it's going to touch people. So for me it was we're being held in something that is something precious to BioWare and it's the thing that we're going to use to determine what BioWare Montreal stands for: is it a real BioWare studio?
That alone was motivation to keep going. In my 12th year attached to the Mass Effect franchise one way or another, I don't necessarily feel like, "I'm done now with it." No, it's something that keeps me going.
This is a statement game for you and team. This is the game that will define your studio. That must be so daunting.
It's a lot to live up to. The thing with game development is that for so long, it's about faith. For so long, you don't see the end. All you see is the difficulties, the problems, the things that don't work. So, the people joining the team, the newcomers, they keep going because they have faith. And when you reach that point, it's a super exciting time in the studio because those people that stuck around can play the game. Because they were so focused on their part and what they owned, most of them didn't have a real sense of the package. Now they have time to sit back and play the game, and you can see some of them saying, "We built that?" As I said, I never wanted a studio with a BioWare name on the door, I wanted to have a BioWare studio and I feel that with the release of Andromeda, we now have a BioWare studio.
So you're confident it's a game and a statement that lives up to the BioWare name and it builds a new future for the franchise.
Yes. Exactly.
Stepping back again into the history of the series, you discussed needing to be as good as your next game. How did you apply that philosophy to Andromeda and how will you apply it to whatever follows?
It's very early for the next Mass Effect game. Right now my next project is probably taking a vacation, but as I was mentioning earlier, even though I was doubting that it was the right path. What we've seen and we've done in the past, in Mass Effect 2 of now that we've pushed boundaries in different directions, we have the opportunity to have millions of people telling us the things that they now really care about in that slightly new formula and the things they care less about. I think it's going to help us focus our efforts. [To figure out] what do we need to double down on next time around, what do we want to leave as is.
If you look at Andromeda, it was a little bit like that because we wanted to reinvest heavily in the exploration and customization pillar. It's interesting because we thought we said, "We're going to stick with what we have with combat, we're not going to push it forward, we're kind of happy where it's at." It didn't play out this way because as we added elements to exploration, it kind of started trickling down in combat and we ended up, actually, progressing that action quite a bit far.
We do a lot of testing through the course of the development and the feedback we constantly keep getting is on how fluid and how much people are getting lost into the action aspect of the game, which again is interesting because it's almost by accident that we ended up pushing it forward so much.
But as we moved to the next game, again, we know we're going to hear things that people are unhappy about and we know that we're going to hear things that people love about the game. It's about determining, as we did moving from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2, [where to go]. When somebody doesn't like something, we have two choices, either we double down on it or just remove that part so we can focus our efforts on elsewhere. I suspect that it's going to be the same thing as we did in the past. Listen to our fans and try to improve.
The original Mass Effect was put forward as the start of a trilogy, your decisions will matter and characters that die won't be in other games. With Andromeda, you've said you see Andromeda as a new future but you're not going into the details of, "Yeah, it's going to be a trilogy or two games." Are you concerned that people won't care about the characters so much that people don't have that opportunity to invest in advance?
It's a good question. Of course one of the challenges with Andromeda, especially moving away is that what we've learned over the course of the few games, when we talk about the story of the game, it's, of course, important but it's not what our fans talk about. They talk about the story, it becomes very personal. It's about their experience and relations with the characters.
Knowing that, that's what we double down on in this game, allowing you to bring back the loyalty missions because we know it's a good way to get invested with their relations to the characters. But at the same time, they're all new people. What we find is you need to give people time to fall in love with these characters, right? If I show you this new character you'll say, "Nah, I like this character from the first game better." But you fell in love with that character over the course of three games. Now we need to start from scratch.
So we knew there was a higher bar to achieve and because of that, even though, as I said, it's very, very early in the thinking for the next game, we've recognized that there is an investment that people put in characters themselves. How we carry them over is to be determined but I don't think that we want to erase that investment because they're so much value and the love that people have. Again, many people tell us that their favorite moment is hanging with Garris. It's not the story of Mass Effect but that's what they remember because they fell in love with the characters.
I don't think it's going to be an obstacle because at the end it's less about story arch that brings one game into another. It's whether you are able to carry the love that people have, or the attachment that they have, for characters [across].
That is something that the original trilogy was known for specific characters and the carrying of love through the series. The narrative that connected all of it together started to fade away, right up until the very last game. When you ended that game the response was towards the narrative that connected it all, the treatment of that narrative was something fans took umbrage with.
Yes.
So when you're building Andromeda and you're focusing on the characters and carrying that love, how much attention are you now paying now to the broader narrative, given that, people actually care about it quite a lot. The ending changed the way people talk about the series as a whole, surely you're thinking about not repeating the same mistake.
Yes, but again--while completely agreeing with what you're saying--but whenever people talked about this grander, greater narrative, that's the negative that they attach to it, right? Every time they talk about the positive, it's about the characters. It's about taking that into account as you build it and say, "Do we want to have the story arch that we're going to say that's going to close in three games? Attach yourself to this narrative because that's what's important."
Ultimately for two games and 90 percent, that's not what people really were caring about. They were caring about the characters, so as you're writing this story, remember that what people care and fall in love with is not that grand arch. The grand arch should be at the service of the relationship with the characters, and that's, I would say, more the motivation there. Not the other way around. You don't want the characters to serve the grander arch, you want the arch to serve the characters, ultimately.
Balancing that grand narrative and finding how characters propel it and it propels the characters is one of the major challenges you faced in coming to Andromeda. What are the other kind of key identity, reinvention issues that you faced that come along with cutting ties to the previous games?
So, there's a lot of factors that went into this conversation. Of course, after Mass Effect 3 we talked to a lot of fans, asking questions, and one of the themes that was coming over and over that they wanted to play more Mass Effect, but they were done with the Shepard's story. I'm not talking unanimous, some people still wanted to see more Shepard, but I would say 80 percent of the people said, "I'm kind of done with this story. I saw the end of it now, but I still like Mass Effect. I want more of it."
So that was one aspect of it. Another was, as we were moving to a new engine, we knew that we had to build everything from scratch. So there's less of a game to say, well, "We have an asset that's built here, let's take this Lego piece and use it in the new game." We have to rebuild it anyway so how do we start anew. And as I was mentioning earlier, there's five years between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, so there's five years of people who were technically too young to play the last one. That's the age group who are most likely to play our games, so how again, do you make it accessible for them to join the franchise and fall in love like all the people who have been through the first trilogy?
But as we discussed before, doing that while keeping in mind that if it's a completely about moving away from what we've done before, you're also failing because it's no longer a Mass Effect game. The challenge was that constant balance. But yeah, the decision to move away was listening to our fans, some technical aspects and keeping in mind that a lot of time has passed since the last game.
Where do you hope that the franchise, Mass Effect, whether it's with Andromeda 2 or 3, or whatever it may be going forward, where do you hope it is in five or ten years' time and what do you hope your studio's role in that? What do you hope it will be remembered in bringing to Mass Effect?
Wow. It's actually great question. So in five years from now, because I define Mass Effect in terms of what it means to people and how much they fall in love with characters … This is going to sound cheap, but I hope that five years from now, this is exactly what it still is.
I care less about where it technically we're taking it and more that we are staying relevant to people, and we're still allowing people to fall in love with the characters that we're building and the games that we're building.
I think you can expect that as a studio, we're going to keep being associated with it moving forward. We've kind of built a studio around what it means to build a good Mass Effect game, so hopefully we're going to keep that going.
Hopefully, as we keep moving forward and we keep bringing new people in the team, keeping the mix fresh. We are also going to bring yet another generation of game developers, people who will have fallen in love with the franchise, with Andromeda, and its recipe that is true to the franchise who will bring this additional flavor. In turn, they are going to add to that formula and allow us to stay fresh.
What does Mass Effect: Andromeda mean to you?
Andromeda is, like a lot of BioWare games, is about choice. It's about giving people a place where they can be what they want. And allowing them to be successful in a game term, but not being forced into being something specific in order to be successful. Allowing them to, through the branches in the game, the different classes in the game, the different relationships you can build, to play the game that they want to.
It's that element of choice and being whoever you want in the game that to me ... In the end, we're providing a setting in Andromeda with all the element of exploration, of allowing you to live those grand adventures, and make these great discoveries, face these humongous dangers but always in a way that is up to you.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and its developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the interview material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game.
The interview below features Fabrice Condominas, producer on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: First could you just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your experience or history with Mass Effect?
Fabrice Condominas: Sure, my name is Fabrice Condominas. I'm a Mass Effect producer at BioWare Montreal. I joined BioWare... I don't know, five or six years ago. I don't count anymore, but [it was] at the beginning of Mass Effect 3, and I've been there since.
You're very much like us, you got to experience the first two games as an outsider.
Absolutely. Yup.
What were your first experiences with Mass Effect and what did you think of it back then?
As most of the people at BioWare, I fell in love with the game. The one for all the field exploration, it was just something different at the time, and it was also a different approach to science fiction, the place of humanity was different. A lot of things were different, so I loved it, regardless of how clumsy some parts were. That didn't matter because... [it was] one of those games that makes you realize the experience matters; the rest doesn't really matter. That was key.
Pictured: Fabrice Condominas
And then Mass Effect 2, I think the learning for me--I was already working in video games and all that and interested in that--so the learning for me was how important to remain bold and innovative was as a franchise. When you see how Mass Effect 1 was a success, everybody will tell you it was a great game, and still they had, as a studio, the courage to say, "Well, let's redo the gameplay entirely," and that kind of thing. But yeah, I was a big fan of the two first Mass Effect [games] and again, as most of our team that joined BioWare, they're actually fans of the game.
You talked about innovation; what do you think the lasting impact of the first Mass Effect was on the industry and RPGs as a genre. What was it that it brought that made it memorable and stand out from all the other games that were coming out?
I actually think it goes beyond the industry. It changes partially the science fiction world in pop culture because the approach for me wasn't only about being a space opera and even the exploration part. All that was about execution, how it was made, and that was the interesting part, but beyond that is the approach of the place of humanity, the role he plays in a galactic world with different alien races. Most of the time science fiction is about an encounter--usually hostile--between humanity, who is either a dominant race or the weakest point in Mass Effect, in that universe--suddenly you were neither one or the other: You were just a mediocre race amongst all of the race. There were way more powerful races and were weaker races, and you were just in the middle of that, and basically, no one really cared about humanity. I think that was an interesting approach. That grabbed me for science fiction.
If we talk specifically about the industry, the blend of the RPG and the mechanics that the Mass Effect 1 still has but it also starts to open the door to mixing more of the genre. We saw that since KotOR, basically, when BioWare did that and we see that trajectory throughout the industry that I think now led to a lot of games that we see. Whatever the dominant genre they're in, you can see the mix. You can see the blend. I think those games like Mass Effect open the door to those changes.
Interesting what you said about not really caring about humanity's place within the world. It feeds into the idea of what Mass Effect 1 was about--the exploration--if you're too important the focus is too much on you and not the world around you. How does that design principle translate to Andromeda?
I think first, there's a difference between Ryder senior and the siblings. Ryder senior is already an N7, so he's obviously someone that matters, and he's part of the Initiative and all that. As his son and daughter, the twins are different. They don't have that credibility yet, and as a son and daughter of famous people, they're actually probably trying to get away [from] that father figure. That all depends on the choices you want to make. You can try to get away or not. The relation is not the same to your own importance, and you will be proposed in that position during the game.
Already as a player, the character that you play is a bit different. I think that's an important part of it because, at all levels in that game, you grow with the characters, so when you reach Andromeda, you don't really know anything about the galaxy or what you thought you know in the characters is actually not true. The player and the character has the exact same level of knowledge in that galaxy, and you will learn with them, and you will discover with them. There's no difference of knowledge, which also put that in a very specific position, both the character and the player. Again, just an idea of what narrative when you reach the galaxy, well things don't go as planned, and things aren't only what you thought they were, so you're back to square one.
Keep in mind also that the conflict is very different. Even if you're someone of importance for humanity; you, your father, and actually any single person in those Arks is someone of importance, so you're already in the middle of a crowd of someone of importance for humanity. It doesn't matter in Andromeda. You're a nobody in Andromeda. You're actually the intruder, so that entire narrative's context builds up to that, that if you want to make [a] difference, you'll have to work for it.
I really like the idea of calling the Ryder family and also the people that you bring with you "intruders." How do you come up with the idea for that theme of being an intruder, being an outsider looking in now, whereas, in previous games and a lot sci-fi genre stuff is about you being a hero or some sort of catalyst for a major change, instead of being just this outsider who's trying to figure out what's going on around them?
I think, again, the theme of the Mass Effect franchise has always been the place of humanity. As I mentioned, humanity's not necessarily central to what happens, and so the theme came also from there, if you wanted to push that further. If you look, this is actually the main question of the entire game: how do you find your place? When you reach Andromeda, not only are you an intruder, but, again, if you take the classic science fiction schemes, you're not the weakest part, you're not the strongest part. You're actually in-between, so the races that are there, some of them are way more powerful than you are. Some of them are at least as powerful. There's no really weaker point, but they might need you.
The entire game, outside of finding a home for the people in the Arks and all that is just finding your place. That question is even more obvious when you're the stranger, right? When you are the alien, and this is, again, if I pursue the theme of humanity and science fiction, one of the twists we wanted to give to the game is that you are the alien. We are the alien. Usually we always look at aliens as the people that come or the people we reach, but in this game, it's neither one or the other. You're the alien. You will be treated as an alien, and you will discover what it is on the other side of the coin.
Do you think in a way that's integral to the BioWare experience in that your characters typically are outsiders that band together? Now going into a new galaxy you're again the outsiders, so unconsciously were you guys trying to think it was another way of telling everyone that it's okay to be different? It's okay to find your place?
This is interpretation, so I don't want to dictate an interpretation, but it's one thing science fiction has always been about historically--it's not about the future, it's about interpretations of the society now. That's the context that we push forward, but it's about our modern society. Even if you started working in this game five years ago, it was number of questions around the refugees and all that. If you look what happens now when the game is actually out, I think it's even more relevant in that context. Now, how do you want to interpret what we do, that's up to you. I don't want dictate a sense to that, but obviously this, again, if you work in science fiction, you look closely at what happens around you.
You were talking about being outsiders and trying to find a new place for yourself and that kind of theme. It's a theme that's also reflected in the development staff at the studio. What was the mood in coming to develop Andromeda and knowing that you've got a diverse set of different people trying to work to figure out the future of a franchise that is beloved and is massive to so many people? Did you put yourself in there almost a little bit because that theme is reflected between you and the game, almost?
Yeah, I think, for some part, yes. In general, the other main theme was to do a fresh start, and yes, you can expand that general narrative, to the game, and probably to the team. There's a lot of things that you mentioned that is fresh, but even our engine was a fresh start. You can go there, not only in the game, you're right, in the development process and all that, there's a number of things that we actually change, and I think it does reflect the game, that approach. Even the characters, you can see how they carry that mission to find a new place to establish humanity and all that. Obviously, you can push that interpretation to where how the team looks to keep going with that legacy and establish the fresh new stuff for the legacy of the trilogy and a very, very beloved franchise and all that. Yes, you can absolutely make parallels with that. It's probably unconsciously or consciously for some of them. It's clear that there is a link between the situation.
After Mass Effect 3 shipped, a lot of the team seems to have gone on to BioWare's new mysterious IP. What made you come back for Andromeda? What was it about Mass Effect that you hold so dear that you'll spend five, seven years of your life on it?
Firstly, [it] depends where you are in BioWare. They [didn't] necessarily [go] to the new IP. A lot of them went to Dragon Age, for example; Montreal was mostly on Dragon Age: Inquisition, so the split was actually fairly broad across Montreal.
Mass Effect is a rich, deep universe, and I think there was no questioning that there will be more stories in that universe. We are a company of storytellers. When you build [a] universe that open to any kind of story, anywhere in that universe, why wouldn't you use it? [It] wasn't even a question to say, "We need to get in that universe and go deeper." And then it was important to go away, not stay to close from the trilogy, because I think you want to open the universe as a whole. The trilogy did that, put the basic fundamentals of an entire universe that could be explored for years and years. There's so many stories to tell in that universe. The important [part] was to place the pillars, and the blend between action and RPG. The importance of the character relationships, the role of space, and the notion of space opera, and the place of humanity; that will never change in any story you tell in Mass Effect so far. There's no reason to do that. That's Mass Effect, but it was obvious there was way, way more stories to tell.
The process started, and a group of people thinking about Inquisition or the new IP, they also explored new things, so Inquisition was probably the first BioWare game to be more open so you learn things there, and you keep going. I think every BioWare team has all of our franchises where they work because the rich universe and they have the way we tell stories have some common points and also some important differences between the franchise. It's the same team working on one another's, so we keep all that in mind regardless of which game you're working, you keep the next franchise in mind when you do that.
We talked briefly about how you felt about Mass Effect 1, and I'd like to do the same for Mass Effect 2 because I love the idea that you were a fan before you worked on the series. That's something that I find really cool, and I guess the audience will really appreciate that. Can you talk about your experience with Mass Effect 2? Obviously, it's a game that so many people hold dear. What did it mean to you when it came out and played it, and how did it factor into your ambition to work in games or developing games? What did it mean to you?
To answer properly that question, you need to understand with my personal background. I'm actually from movies. I have a diploma in film school, and I did a number of short movies, documentaries, music videos; anything in audiovisual, I did that for years. But the way I came to storytelling was across movies.
Then, life happens, I got [a] job when I'm young and need money, and I got a job with video games. Someone called me and said, "There's this big video game company. They're looking for someone creative to write scenarios and all that. Do you want to try for just two or three months?" I say, "Oh, what kind of video games? I actually have no idea how you do that," and the answer was, "Oh, they don't either." That was that time when nobody knew what they were doing in the late 90s, [there was] no school for video games, and it's like, "Okay." I went there, and that's how I started in video games, but the fact is I always have both views.
I always kept in mind, and I always looked very closely at obviously BioWare games because the quality of the storytelling. Companies like Quantic Dream already at the time because of the quality of the cinematics, and the way they actually try to go towards an interactive storytelling mode, so I had that in mind. I think Mass Effect 2 is probably one of the first to blend that nearly perfectly. They give you the emotional bond and impact of character relationship at an intimate level but presented it in a attractive way. You have to choose the character. You do that. You choose the type of emotion. You develop with the characters, and you like them or hate them. Suddenly, the possibilities becomes nearly endless on the player's perspective. For me, that was when it was the closest to the quality of the immersional bond of an intense two-hour experience. That's what [a] movie offers; it goes fast, it's intense, and it creates those bonds, at the same time, the length and the choices offered by the video game industry. It was nice blending, and I think that's what really struck me at the time for Mass Effect 2.
As someone who was a fan, you perhaps more than anyone else on the team were probably aware of the responsibility of taking on a Mass Effect game, right? Going from 2 to 3 was a big deal. You're following up one of the greatest games of all time, but going from the ending of the Mass Effect game to restarting a Mass Effect series, have you thought about that responsibility and how have you dealt with managing that? I imagine it must be incredibly stressful and overwhelming.
Yeah obviously at the beginning, when people tell you, "You'll be part of the guys who build the next Mass Effect. You'll have an important role in that." Yes, you have the weight of the legacy, and as you said I had also a fan relationship over it, a more emotional relationship that is not necessarily on the development side. You don't want to be the guy who screwed up Mass Effect, obviously. Yeah sure, I don't want that, but at the same time, you need to put that away fairly quickly, and that's when you do that. Yes, you got a period where you're like, "Okay, what's going on? How do we do that?" You replay the games, but at some point, you just have to sit and stop.
I know the trilogy. I know the universe. In my case, I also worked on Mass Effect 3, so that's probably be even easier than people who just jumped on Andromeda. I went through a development cycle of Mass Effect, and you have to say, "Okay. Forget it," because one thing Mass Effect is about between Mass Effect 1, 2, 3, is change. Those games change. You don't do the same game, and this time you want to push that further, so you know your basics. You have to trust yourself and be confident that you know the fundamentals. You know the basics, but what is important is focus on the story, focus on the characters, focus on what you're bringing to gameplay next. That's the only way to make a good game. If you look in the past continuously, not only it will hinder your progress, but it's also not Mass Effect.
Again, Mass Effect 2 is very different than Mass Effect 1. Mass Effect 3 is different than 2. The heart of the franchise actually helped move forward and say, "Mass Effect is about looking forward." Then it's a balance, right? You have veterans like Mac Walters, Mike Gamble, myself. You've got several people, and then the new guys, completely new, who also bring their own perspective saying, "Well, hang on." I played the entire trilogy, so I work on 3 again, so they played actually the entire trilogy as players, and they say, "Well the thing I remember is the Mako. It was clumsy, it wasn't all that, but man, I have fond memories of the Mako." Suddenly for people like us, we'll say, "Oh, okay. We thought it was clumsy. Maybe we should think about it," and that kind of thing.
So it's very much a case of allowing these new-blood developers to breathe new life into ideas that you may have had before and trying to give you an opportunity to take a second crack at it. It's almost like for the old guard, it's a second shot, another chance. For the new guard, it's like, "We're gonna do what you tried to do and create this new feature off the back of your work." How does it feel to have to relinquish some of that responsibility to people who are just figuring it out as they go along? It's like, "I'll figure this out. Don't worry about it," and it's like your baby that they're juggling with.
I don't see it that way, actually, the baby juggling. I think you're doing entirely new storytelling. It's a good reminder that every single person has a different experience, even if they're developers. Doesn't matter. Even the veterans, they don't see the game the same way. That's also key, and when you talk, you see the fundamentals. You see the thing that comes back. You see all that. I mentioned it earlier, but you learn really to focus on those aspects. Yes, the balance is hard because one of the things about the legacy is that when you come after the three games, obviously one thing you're trying to do is take the best of the three. You go back to exploration under 1; the character relationship, loyalty missions in 2; and push the gameplay of 3. Similarly, you have to balance the three elements in a single game when there's a trilogy involved, and you know, it takes five years.
Yeah, so it's long, it's a balance, it takes five years, but the development process also has to accompany that, so when you switch engines, you need to redo everything. No matter what. You need to redo your art assets, and to redo your schematics, and to redo your scripting, and to redo everything. That also, while doing that process, the game evolved; the game changed. It helps in a way to put your thoughts together.
Stepping back again, you've played Mass Effect 1. You loved it. You played Mass Effect 2. You loved it. Now, you're working on Mass Effect 3. Can you talk a bit about your feelings going into working on Mass Effect 3 as a fan? What were your feelings going into it as someone that's arriving to the story as its ending?
The team actually helped me because my very first day as a BioWare employee--and I was in charge of the levels for producing content for the missions--I came into a meeting where they were debating about the various endings, so I was spoiled, I was like, "Oh crap. Okay. Now that's done. I know the end, so [the] game is ruined. That's fine. I can focus."
Jokes aside, it's just weird, because I had all the old BioWare games, not only Mass Effect. I had old BioWare games at home, and when you're discussing with someone, and he tells you, "[There's] this production job at BioWare and I think you could be good for it. We should discuss," and all that. I was a designer at the time and I said, "I don't know anything about production," and then you go home, and you talk to your wife, and she's like, "Did you say 'no' to BioWare? The guys that you have all the games of on the shelf?" Then you think about it, you're like, "Oh."
The very first question is: Do I actually want to work on that, because I enjoyed it so much as a player. Then you put that in the balance and it actually enters in the balance. You know you're not going to play those games the same way for the rest of your life, you see what's under the hood and how it's made. Even if you leave BioWare, you know now how it works.
Then the other part is also [the] professional part thing. It's not about your CV, having BioWare on there. It's just about the values of the company. Do you want to work on quality games? Do you want to make games that are memorable? If you want to do that, you probably should take that offer. And then yes, as I mentioned, you get the stress the first days; [it's] extremely stressful. You've got all that. Now the good thing about BioWare is that there's still a lot of veterans. There is very small turnaround, so people stay a long time at BioWare. You're surrounded by people who have so much experience, and years of experience in the same studio that your learning curve is extremely fast. Also, the BioWare mentality is pretty much the mentality of a craftsman. It's craftsmanship, so they throw you into it ... [you] come in the first day, you've got a shitload of stuff to do. You're probably already late, so you enter into that. Again, at the time, I was already making games for years, so I knew some of the things. You switch your mind and say, "Okay, we need to focus on that, and we need to do that," and then this different approach.
So having finished the trilogy, and now some time later going into Andromeda, what do you think the biggest challenge is going into it? What were your biggest hurdles that you wanted to overcome?
I think the biggest challenge is to be up to the expectation in the sense that everybody expect[s] that you learn from the trilogy, so you have to take the best part of it, and that you provide a game that is as memorable as any of the trilogy. The problem is you come after three games, and everybody will have that level of expectation because those three games are a single experience. This is a very important point. People remember a single experience, not necessarily three different games, so suddenly the level of the experience you need to provide has to be in a way at that level that took three games to make. This is the first thing.
The second thing is, as I mentioned previously, Mass Effect is also about innovating between each number and changing. You don't sit on your laurels and move on. No, it's changing. That's one of the key parts of the franchise, so you have to be not only able to deliver that expectation, but you have to bring that element of change, and then it's that entire notion of a fresh start. You have to be true to that universe, interesting, and you have to deal with the fact that people have fond memories of a specific story, the Shepard story. Also, you want to bring players that have never played a Shepard story. You want to bring them into the universe that is now already rich. A lot of people are talking about it, and you don't want them to be intimidated by that universe which was the case, for example, in Mass Effect 3. A lot of people said, "Well, I love the game. I love watching people play the game, but it looks so complicated, and complex, and you know, I don't have the time." We also have to be appealing to those people saying, "Okay, it's a different story, same complex universe, but you'll be brought up in there smoothly, and you will actually enjoy, and we open the door to that universe." I think the mix of the two was the most challenging part.
The things that you're talking about with Andromeda is it's cherry-picking the best of each game, and it's bringing in the exploration, the characters, the narrative, and the weight of what you're trying to do as characters in the game. The expectation from fans is, "You've done this before, so when it arrives, it's going to be perfect. Obviously from your perspective as developers, you're a new team on a new engine. Do you hope that the fanbase receives Andromeda as, "This is our Mass Effect 1 again," but we're trying to lay the foundations again for an entire franchise? It might have some rough edges here and there, but we're building an ambition again or do you expect fans will be like, "No, it needs to be perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect"?
I think it's a mix of both, actually. For example narratively, yes, it needs to be like Mass Effect 1. It's a new start, something exciting, something brand-new. In term of gameplay for example, it needs to be the next generation of game. Regardless [of] how we support exploration or combat, it needs to be tight. It needs to be smooth. It needs to be all that, but at the same time, the universe has been built over the years. The universe is there, and there is absolutely no doubt that people will look, is it consistent? Is it true to the universe, which Mass Effect 1 didn't have by definition, so I think it's a mix of both.
You were talking earlier about not thinking about the legacy and the expectations from fans because obviously, if you think about it too much then it cripples you.
Yep.
You can do that in retrospect, you can think about the stuff that you've put out there and not reflect on it too much, but right now you're putting out trailers and it ignites this overwhelming response, whether it's on YouTube or Twitter or on a day-to-day basis. How do you create that distance when you have a fanbase that tries to get as close to you and your game as possible?
First, there is a big anticipation part, so Andromeda is probably the game we focus-tested the most. The number of people that saw things, played a thing before we released, and most importantly, across the entire development cycle we started literally years ago, that was probably the most intense one we did. Obviously, at the beginning, you're only with extremely core fans, a very small group of trusted people because we know also we're the champions of leaks often, so you do that in very small area. You test ideas as you bounce ideas and all that. Across the development, you spot the people you want to talk to.
Obviously for us, the challenge was to actually reach out to the non-Mass Effect fan early enough to understand what they want; also people who sometimes have no clue what Mass Effect is, actually. That's good. That's what we want. That's also a layer we added, and so there was that mixed spot. Anticipation helps a lot, so we can predict a number of reactions based on the first feedback we have. Then, we've always paid attention--so, it's part of my job, people like Mike Gamble, Mac Walters were especially at the forefront of listening to those guys. Yes, you're right, there is a lot of messages. A lot.
The fans are very passionate. The community's very passionate, so there are also people within the community that will tell us, "Oh, you should pay attention to what those guys are saying because I don't think they'll love it, and you shouldn't do that and..." So they help us [and] are in there. Then it's also tricky for us to find a balance, or "Oh, they're complaining about that, but we know what they don't know, right? So what do you want to adjust, change, or refresh?" This requires time. This requires focus. And it requires the ability to separate what you want to keep or keep out. At the same time, there's nothing worse than nobody car[ing]. Right? We don't have that problem. That's great, and this is something you certainly want to see. I think we can honestly say that we've also been surprised by how the hype kept up five years later. If you take our latest Mass Effect content really in the game, it's probably the last multiplayer map four years ago, something like that in Mass Effect 3. Nothing happened. We didn't release anything since, and it seems that actually the interest kept growing over the years, which is great. Again, it shows also the solidity of the universe, the symbolic universe, and it's about the love of science fiction and all that. I think it goes beyond just a game.
For newcomers and your long-term fans, what do you want them to take away from Andromeda?
That's a tough one. There's a lot of things. For me, and it's a personal answer, what I'd like them to take away is that the notion of humility. When you're there, and you're a stranger in a strange world, and you have to make your place, and you're not expected--you're not even wanted--and I think in the context that we live in today, politically and socially and all that, I think it's something I would... If that message could pass, and people can remember that, I'd love it, that notion of humility. Then the sheer notion of curiosity. If we can light that spark into people that will again to look at the stars and say, "I want to get there." I think the mix of those two elements, I'd love that takeaway.
You said earlier that you last content drop was a map for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.
I don't even know if it's true. Might be a weapon pack, maybe.
I think you might be right. The fanbase, the intensity and the passion has persisted right up until right now, and to me and to us as fans, that's because people live their lives by this franchise now. It's no longer just a game that you enjoy and then forget about. Fans wake up thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about it.
I do that everyday [laughs].
I mean, you have no choice [laughs]. They have a choice. Beyond that, it's also a franchise that, as you know as someone who started off as a fan, people connect with it on a deep and emotional level. They see themselves in there. They see their struggles in there. They see the solution to those struggles in there. How do you approach creating a game knowing that what you're putting out there is going to be read on a level much deeper than you may even be considering it? How do you approach creating characters knowing, "I'm not just making a character," but someone out there might be looking to find some sort of deeper insight in this character?
I'll do a very simple answer, a single word: "honestly." You just approach it honestly. It's just like the legacy. You don't think about all that consciously, at least at the beginning. Again, we are storytellers, so what you start doing is creating characters with personalities, stories that carry an emotional bond element, whatever it is that you need or you want in the story you're going to tell. All the characters in storytelling have a role to play. You got the foes. You got the allies. In our games, specifically, sometimes you can switch those. And this is also why you don't focus on the role, but on the emotional role that they will play among all the characters. You really start there. You focus there.
You got the story arc; you got all that, but even that is less important than the characters that you have, because they are the ones that will allow you to create those stories. Once you have that, usually anything that looks like even a political statement or a message that you're trying to pass isn't actually thought consciously before the character. It's a natural addition based on that personality. The only conscious thing is usually themes that we mentioned. Overall themes [we] mentioned is discovery. I mentioned humility, those kind of values. They're very high level. You can find that anywhere, but the specifics of the characters and when people write to us saying, "I call my son Garrus because [these are] values that I carry," and all that. Obviously, you don't think about that, and another guy will love Wrex. Doesn't matter. Again, it's about choices, but you really start at that level of intimacy because epic stories are worth nothing if you don't tell them at an intimate level.
As I mentioned, you honestly create the characters that you want and and then the audience, the players will do the rest. They will connect the dots they need to connect because you cannot predict what happens in people's lives. You cannot predict why they won't connect with that. Even if some characters are more popular than others, the reason why they are varies, and we can't tell. We get letters everyday of people like, "That guy changed my life," or "That character," and the reason I'm never, ever, ever the same because they see something in those characters that you don't plan for, and this is just great. If you do personalities rich enough, people will see a number of things, just like in real life. Your best friend is someone that maybe another of your friends can't stand, but you're still both friends with the other, and you don't see the same thing in each others. This is the same. Exactly the same.
I asked that question because I was just thinking about like at the time when the original trilogy came out was times when socially we were kind of developing in games. It was fuel for that development. The handling of relationships, same-sex relationships, the treatment of how humanity's place exists within the world, it helped people understand issues that they may not have considered before and kind of untangled them. Obviously, Andromeda arrives at a time when the world is more complicated than ever, so a lot of people will be looking at the game and thinking of it as something that will help ground them in the world and figure it out, whether that's political or [otherwise.] So the responsibility of that, is that something that's discussed within the teams? You said that you treated characters honestly, and it falls into place, but there's also people out there that will want to see that as responsibility for you guys now. Whether you like it or not, you've become a developer thats seen as offering commentaries on the social issues and characters. Is that something that you sit down every now and then and be like, "We have an opportunity to say something here. We should say it"?
I would say yes and no. So remember the context, for example, the same-sex relationship. It wasn't a political statement in the beginning. It became a political statement because people opposed to it talked about us and made us ... Our game was just about choices. That's one of the choices. That's it. That was it. Over the years, again, it became a political statement, but we didn't make it a political statement, but now you're right. Now with Andromeda, the trilogy's behind us, and we have that image whether we like it or not that we're a company that is socially progressive and obviously, that's what we are. Now, we have that in mind; it's a conscious thing when we write. We know that.
Now, I wasn't ever involved in a discussion that says we need to talk about that social problem, so that's why I'm saying yes and no. It never happened. It was never the beginning of a story to say we need to address that social thing. Now, if we have opportunities to address them, we feel an opportunity to pass a message, we do, but again, at the same time, we're about choice. Even for same-sex relationships, you can also just ignore them. It's the same for any political statement. We can always ignore it. In that game, the only thing you cannot ignore is the context. You're a bunch of guys that are seeking a villain in the galaxy, in a place that is not yours, and there are already people there, and you have to deal with that. Obviously this is no choice, but how you deal with that is your choice, and it's the same for all the rest. It's a game about choice.
Are we in the team, socially progressive [people]? Yes, absolutely. Do we know that we might have an impact? Yes, absolutely. But we don't sit down saying, "Yeah, we need to address that. Let's write something about it."
How do you feel about Andromeda and the state of Mass Effect now? What are your hopes and ambitions for the franchise going forward? You had a part to play on a small fraction of the original trilogy, but now you're here at the forefront of a brand-new era of Mass Effect. Where do you hope to see it go? Where do you hope it is maybe five or 10 years from now?
Obviously as I mentioned, the universe is extremely, extremely rich, deep. There's a lot of stories to tell, so what I hope is that we actually keep telling stories, and that we also actually keep setting a true science-fiction franchise in a sense that we're grounded with the world around us, and we keep telling stories where people can relate and that are accurate with people's lives, with the context we live in. That's beyond the franchise. It's just what science fiction is, but Mass Effect is our tool, and I think we should keep going there. I'd love also to remain over the years to come as a franchise and also keep evolving after each new installment, and we keep moving forward.
What's your fondest memory of the Mass Effect franchise? Is there a moment that sticks out to you?
That's a tough one. I think it probably goes back to Mass Effect 1, and that moment when you can actually explore the uncharted world, because they're kind of gated at the beginning. Suddenly you land with your clumsy Mako, and you go around, but it doesn't matter. The execution doesn't matter because it awakes something in you about the sheer curiosity and discovery. It awakes that in a place on this uncharted world, but you realize after, when you keep playing the trilogy, that feeling of curiosity to discover worlds actually applies to people, to the other characters. This is what Mass Effect 2 explores. So for me, the definition of Mass Effect at the personal level starts there, that little childhood sparkle that someone lights in you and say, "Oh, I just want to explore that," and then you want to explore relationships and then you want to explore something else, but it's that notion.
That's something that you've aimed to capture again in Andromeda?
Oh absolutely, yeah. Yeah. That's at the center of this game.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and its developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the interview material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game.
The interview below features Mac Walters, creative director for the Mass Effect franchise. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Can we start with an introduction and your history with the Mass Effect franchise?
Mac Walters: Just that little small thing?
Yeah, just a tiny small part of your life.
Mac Walters: Just my history with it, the last 12 years of my life?
Can you just summarize that in about 10 seconds?
[Laughs] Yeah, I'll do my best. My name is Mac Walters. I'm the creative director for the Mass Effect franchise. I've been with it since the very beginning. I started as a senior writer on Mass Effect 1. I was a lead writer. Then on Mass Effect 2 and on Mass Effect 3 as well. And now the helm of the ship at Mass Effect: Andromeda, so exciting times.
You guys started working on Mass Effect after KotOR. Right?
Yep.
What was the thinking of from going from a massive sci-fi property into being like, let's make a massive sci-fi property? Surely that must have been like an incredible feat and daunting task for you guys to come up with. Why was it a sci-fi RPG that you wanted to go into again?
Yeah, you know I think a lot of the vision for Mass Effect: Andromeda probably was inspired by the fact that we got to work on something as amazing as a Star Wars franchise. I mean it's so huge, and there's just so many stories you can tell in it. I think that just is one of the things that drove us. I know Casey Hudson was a huge fan of Aliens, Blade Runner, and that was a lot of his motivational space offers that sort of hearkening back to the 80s, and I think he wanted to do something that was a little bit more mature, a little bit more for the adult side of things, and something that was also a little bit more hard science.
Casey is an engineer. Star Wars is great, but it is very much science fantasy, right? Sort of being able to take science fiction seriously again I think was a big part of it. That's something that we always took very seriously in the opening days of planning out Mass Effect was the science should matter. This is something that's grounded in humanity. It's one of the possible futures of Earth and of humanity, and I think it was important for us to stay grounded in that.
Pictured: Mac Walters
Mass Effect came out in an incredibly busy year where some of the greatest games of all time and most influential games of all time came out. There's Call of Duty, Portal, BioShock, and a whole bunch of other stuff that defined gaming for the next following years. What was it about Mass Effect that you think made it stand out amongst all those games?
You know, that's a really great question. I think one of the things was right from the start we said that the trilogy anyway was going to be a trilogy, so that helped it stand apart immediately. We said that this is a story that's going to go over three different games, your choices are going to matter. We're going to carry that forward. We're going to have romances that carry from game to game, and that was original and new and people really hadn't done that.
I think then the other thing I would call it is just this cinematic nature of it. People really weren't pushing that, at least not in games. Certainly games had cinematics, and a lot of times you'd see them at the beginning of a mission, at the end of a mission, but they were pretty much pre-baked animations, everything that you'd see. It would be good, but we wanted to do that in-game. We had started to push that with KotOR and then even with Jade Empire which I worked on.
It was important that we really gave it a mature, cinematic feel to it, and part of that was of course remember the dialog wheel. That was also new. It's been a long time since we talked about this, but just hearkening back, one of the things that the dialog wheel was supposed to do was supposed to allow you to have a conversation in real time so that the paraphrase system that we came up with was, you don't have to read that line. You just have to get the gist of what's there so that while the NPC is finishing their line, you can be selecting your line, and then the conversation flows naturally so you don't get this awkward pause.
Of course, with all the big choices and decisions we put in there that we generated some pause as there were people who were not wanting to make their choice right away, but I think that combination of things and then taking an RPG genre and then trying to push it more into the shooter realm. It was a lot of unique elements that we were bringing at that time, and there's also just that indescribable magic that all comes together at the end, and it made something special and people related to it. It was amazing.
I think it's really interesting that you said that the idea that it was a trilogy was something that helped it stand out. For me it's ... I never thought of it until you said that, but like the idea of investing in a universe is what makes Mass Effect interesting, a what a lot of people are looking at Andromeda and thinking about. Right?
Right.
It's the idea of throwing themselves into a universe that is going to tell them a story over the course of initially maybe like 50, 60 hours, but then with the hopes of maybe two more games, three more games, whatever it may be. How do you guys approach knowing that there's people out there that are expecting so much from this game, having played this? When you first approached it, how did you go into it? Because, you know, you had the idea of making three games, and when you're doing it now looking at Andromeda and being like, there's people out there that want to throw themselves into this for years. How do you approach that?
Well, interestingly, I think it's hard to go back in time, but when we were working on Mass Effect 1 there was no Mass Effect yet. It's almost impossible going back and putting yourself in that head space where everything was possible. We didn't have anything defined yet and we weren't sure exactly where we were going to head or if people were even going to respond to it. We were just going on our instincts and looking to things that inspired us and really looking to the future and saying, "Well, what, what could we do with this, this franchise? What can we do with it?" I think it's a really good point that when you commit as a developer, as a creator, as an artist and say, "Look, we're going to do something that's big. And it's going to be around, and we're committed to it."
I think that probably resonates with people when they start playing it because they go, "Oh, well, this is amazing. Like, I love this world, I love the characters, and you're already telling me you're working on more, right?" I don't think we looked at it in that way. As ourselves we just want to try something new, we want to try something bold, but that's how people responded to it.
Then certainly when we started up Mass Effect: Andromeda, I think one of the interesting things is you would assume we'll talk a lot about the trilogy and how popular it was and it's highly rated. There is an assumption of, "Of course they'll do another Mass Effect," but hat wasn't an assumption when we finished. It was designed to be a trilogy, and we wanted it to end with Shepard's story, and even though the ending wasn't for some people what they wanted, and it didn't always come off ... It wasn't that great hurrah that we might've wanted at the end.
At the same time, there was a closure to it that we were like, "Okay. Well, we've done Mass Effect. That was, that was eight, nine years of Mass Effect. What now?" Myself and a lot of the Mass Effect team actually moved on to work on BioWare's new IP at the time, and there wasn't a for sure that we were going to do another Mass Effect. I think you give it a little bit of time and you give it a little bit of space, and it's such, again, much like what we're talking about with Star Wars, it's such a huge IP. There is so many stories to tell.
We knew that we wanted to start telling other stories in that sort of world, and then we just started to ask ourselves, "Well, if we were going to, how do we get back to doing it the way we did it before?" And I think that was one of the keys of going to Andromeda, was not so much to distance ourselves from the trilogy but to actually put the developers and everybody working on it in a place where they could be back to thinking in a space where almost anything is possible.
Obviously we want to keep as much of what's there, but at the same time you want part of that magic of the first one, [which] was the ability to just say, "We can do almost anything, and we can look to the future." I think one of the things we wanted to avoid at the beginning was we didn't want to just make a Mass Effect 4 if we were going to do this. We didn't want this to be looking backwards say, "Okay, well, we did this before, so we should probably do this now." We wanted to actually open up the possibility space quite a bit and allow people to really imagine and create.
You obviously you said that you spent eight, nine years your life working on the trilogy. Going into Andromeda, was it difficult to leave that part of Mass Effect behind? Like those characters, those stories, or was it exciting to make a new mark on that world?
Much more the latter. It was very exciting. I sat in several voiceover sessions at the end of Mass Effect 3 teary-eyed with actors and people as we read some of the final lines. That was really the closure for me. It really felt like it ended, and like I said, had the ending gone off a little bit more smoothly, I think we would've really personally, emotionally had that closure a bit more. As far as saying goodbye to the characters and the world, I had already done that. I felt like I had done that through the process of just putting that out there and developing it.
Once we finally came around and started talking about Andromeda, it was really that idea of, "Alright, anything's possible. What do we want to do?" We started to ask the questions of, "Okay, well, Shepard was like this. That was the core of our story. How do we create a protagonist that feels unique and different from Shepard? And how do we create a universe that feels like it's Mass Effect but at the same time explores different themes, um, and allows us to try new things?" That's where, going to Andromeda, I think really set the stage for that.
I know you said the excitement of having everything to do any possibility. The idea of someone working on a series for however many years you have worked on it, and then you had an opportunity to make a clean break, try and make a mark in a different way and work on a new IP with BioWare. What was it about that universe that made you want to come back and do it all over again? The idea that the stresses and the pressures of starting from scratch and knowing that the people out there are going to be scrutinizing every single bit of it and investing in it, like that would just much be just overwhelming. What was it about that made you want to go, "Yeah, I'll commit another 20 years of my life to this"?
Yeah. It's funny. For me anyway, I don't know if it's an artist thing or if it's just a creator thing or whatever, but every game I've ever put out, there's always been that nagging, "[I] wish we could've done this," and, "Oh, man. We were so close. We could've done this." Mass Effect 3 was the closest I'd ever come to feeling like, "Wow. We accomplished something that we set out to do," in the sense that Mass Effect 3 really fulfilled a lot of the vision of what we imagined Mass Effect 1 would be. It just took us a long time to get there, but as far as the way we developed the characters and even the gameplay that we imagined. We were even talking about multiplayer in Mass Effect 1, but we just couldn't find a way to make it work. All of those different things.
After a while, even though I'm working on this new IP, it's very exciting, you do have that nagging. It's like, "Oh, you know, we never really got to do this." Look at the Mako. It's just like we tried in Mass Effect 2 to improve it. We didn't quite get it there, and then we just said, "No. We're, we're going to give up in Mass Effect 3." That was one of those things where it's like--and I love racing games. I'm a huge racing fan, and to leave that like, "Eh, we never really got to do it as well as wanted."
Then also just seeing the promise of where we had taken the gameplay as well. I think the multiplayer was probably easily the single most thing that moved our gameplay forward. Obviously, I think the switch from more of a role-based sort of gameplay system in Mass Effect 1 to more of a twitch-based in Mass Effect 2, that was a big shift, but to actually ... It just felt like we finally achieved something in Mass Effect 3, and I really want to see where we can push the gameplay elements in that as well.
Stepping back a bit. You start this new IP with Mass Effect 1. What do you think is the lasting legacy of that game within gaming history? For us, for example, as fans it's the scope of world-building and the scale of it and the characters. That's what sticks out to us, and it's what we highlight as, this is what Mass Effect brought to gaming. I know we were talking about it yesterday. I was like, it's the first time console gamers could experience a world on that scale outside of, that was kind of like exclusive to PC MMOs at that time. From your perspective, as someone who authored the game and knows it inside out, what do you think is the legacy of that first game?
You've answered it well yourself, but I think a lot of it really comes down to the fact that it is not easy to create a new intellectual property, a new world that people can live in, and I think to build one that is so large and so many stories can be told and people still want to hear those stories in is really, again, it gets back to that magic. All the elements coming together in a perfect way and, you know, pushing into a fairly difficult genre to move into. Space opera, science fiction, there's been a lot of IPs that come and go in that in different mediums. It's difficult to hold on to that.
The heavy hitters out there are really heavy hitters, so finding your space in that and being recognized just as a legitimate, like, "This is a viable world that people want to spend their time in." We've done everything. Comics to books. We're talking to people about doing movies.
It was a real--I don't want to say stroke of luck because there's so much hard work--but when you see all of those elements come together, sometimes it's hard to explain. How did we achieve it? I don't know. I'm Canadian. I'm too humble. It's hard to look back at how we did it. Even when we were in the midst of it, we just look at each other and say, "Is this real? Okay, great. Well, let's do another one."
I think we were talking about this yesterday and we were trying to figure out how to express the way we felt after we finished playing Mass Effect 1. For me, I remember playing Super Metroid on the SNES and then being completely immersed in it. When I was done, I was holding the cart and there was this weird existential crisis, almost, where I was looking at it, I was like, "This plastic thing contains an entire world that I've just loved for the past, you know, 12, 13 hours, whatever it may be."
It was the same for me when I finished Mass Effect. I was holding a disc and I was like, "I don't understand how the world works right now, because I'm holding a galaxy in my hand and I love it on a, on the scale that I loved people in this game more than I love actual people in my life right now." It was like magic and that kind of thing. That is a thing that people expect from the series now. Do you think about that when you're creating something like Andromeda? How do you approach that, knowing that people are going to derive so much from it?
Yeah, that's a hard question. I think that it does come back a lot to that sense of, we always want to do more than what we've done in the past. That's not just me. I know all the people at BioWare feel that way. That's one of the things I think that allows us to keep striving for quality, even though it seems like it'd be easy to go, "Well, look at, look at Mass Effect 2. 96-rated game [on] Metacritic. Let's just stop now, right? There's no need to go forward."
For all of us, we felt, "No, no. There is more that we can do," and I think when we start building the worlds, we want them to be as rich and detailed as possible. We are all, up until the last possible minute, until they drag it out of our hands, we're continuing to fill those worlds with the things that excite us. I think that's part of it too, is, on Andromeda specifically, one of the things I found that was really new and interesting with that was that a large part of the team actually had never worked on a Mass Effect game.
Many hadn't even worked on a BioWare game, but they were fans of the franchise so they had only ever seen Mass Effect as a player, and they'd come in and that's how they envisioned the world. They were able to bring a whole new passion but a whole new perspective to the world-building and to how we wanted to build this game out.
It was great because, like I said, we wanted to look forward, we want to keep an eye on the future but, at the same time, I had these people that are ardent fans and they would very much let me know--it's like, "Well, I feel like maybe we're drifting too far away from what Mass Effect should be," and we'd have a discussion about it,and I think that really helped us find that fine line between something very fresh and very new but also very clearly Mass Effect.
There's a poetic reflection in that you've got this team that's filled of new people and veterans and you're trying to find this new home in the game and also as a franchise. As someone who's been there for a while, how do you balance however you control that stuff? Because I imagine you have this personal connection. You're like, "This is what we should be aiming for." Then you almost have to leave it to the new guys to make their mistakes and figure out a new future for this franchise. How do you approach that?
Ideally what you do is you set out a very strong vision, and it's not something that's very prescriptive in the details. It's just something that's clear and everybody who's working on the project, whether they're an artist, whether they're a programmer, writer, they can look to that vision and the idea is like a north star that they can head towards. Within that, they're very free to interpret what their contribution to the game is.
That's where I find the best result comes from, because you don't want to constrain people. You don't want to constrain their creativity, but at the same time, there are parameters. There's a bounding box within which we have to work. Some of that is time, some of it is money, and some of it is a vision as well, right? Where we actually go, "Okay. Well, this is what we're trying to accomplish."
I think, for Andromeda, it was things like, we want this to be a slightly lighter tone from the get-go. We want to also make this about exploration. That was one of the key themes. There are other things about [how] we wanted to make sure that we did, in some ways, narratively cut the ties to the Milky Way so that people weren't always wondering, "Are the Reapers going to show up here?" It's like, "Nope. That's never going to happen." Making sure that some of those things are very clearly spelled out for the team and then just give them free rein. They know what Mass Effect is. If they don't, they've got so many people around them who can help them identify what that is. And then see what they come up with.
The best things that I've always found are, when you challenge and say, "Okay, this is something that we need. This is how I envisioned it," and they come back and they present you with something that you hadn't even thought of. That's the beauty of this collaborative experience that we make games in. That's how the magic happens, really. It's when you let people do that.
Going back to Mass Effect 2. You finished Mass Effect 1. You got this universe, almost a framework of a universe, laid out. What was your discussion going into Mass Effect 2? Because Mass Effect 1 is strongly about exploration. Mass Effect 2 seems, from my perspective, strongly about characters.
Characters, yeah.
Mass Effect 3 is almost like ending that. Bring it all together and capping it off with this climactic event. What was your approach for Mass Effect 2 and what were you thinking about when you're going into it? Was it always like, "We need to build characters right now in this game"?
We always started off again with the discussion of what worked, what didn't work. Mako, you know, we took another kick at it, but we didn't want to lean too heavily into those worlds. We didn't feel that we had the ability to really double down on what we've done now in Andromeda, where those worlds could be rich and full and you can really feel like there's a lot of story and characters on those worlds.
What we did find was that people had once again in a BioWare game gravitated towards those characters and really loved this ability to really feel like they were not only interacting with them, romancing them, but also even just shaping the way some of those characters like Garrus behaved or Wrex, right?
I think, for us, when we came up with this idea of a suicide mission, we said, "What's going to make that important to you as a player is if you care about the people you're going into that suicide mission with," right? We looked at movies like The Dirty Dozen and things like that to inspire us for that.
At that point, that's when the characters became so key to us. It was challenging because we'd already created some amazing characters in Mass Effect 1 and now we were like, "Well, let's double that or even add more to that. And how do we keep them all unique and how do we keep them all interesting and so they all have their quirks?" I think that's where ideas of loyalty missions came out, so it's like you got to spend that time with that character and it was focused on that character.Same with the acquisition missions. Then also some of the conflict stuff we did there to really bring those characters to life more, where some of them just wouldn't get along. If you couldn't get them to get along, that was going to mean trouble for your suicide mission later.
I often hear, I'd say more often than not, that Mass Effect 2 is people's favorite, and I think that's probably why. It was because, in a world where you're invested in characters and whether they survive or not and you know that there's another game coming after it, it just had all the recipes for letting people really dive into the thing that they love most.
That investment of character is like, there's a lot of people out there that they invested in characters in Mass Effect in a way that's unlike any other video games they find. They see themselves in there. They see the ability to push through their real-world problems, of stuff like depression or anxiety, that stuff, or racial things that they might be going through, they find solace in Mass Effect. Is that something that you're thinking about going into Andromeda, and the pressures of that? How do you deal with the pressures of knowing that you need to create characters? Or you're creating characters that people will almost live their life by. How do you approach that in a game like Andromeda?
Actually, I think one of the things I started to even realize over the course of the trilogy, and 2 is probably one of the points where I went, "Oh, yeah. This is what we need to be doing," is that a lot of times people call BioWare a story company or story-based video games, and it's true. I mean, story is important to us, but where I was at with writing was it really just, again, it doesn't matter if you don't care about the characters, and I kept pushing us to be more character-focused and less story-focused.
That's not to say that we didn't care about the story, but it was like more of a situation of let's create a scenario, let's put these people in it, and then let's see how they react. That's where we're going to get the juicy bits. That's where we're going to get something really compelling and interesting. That's something that I focused a lot on on Andromeda, which was every character and, if you think to it, if you have a lot of people who are coming onto the Andromeda and Mass Effect series for the first time to work on it, how do I live up to this? How do I create a character that's so different and so unique and so interesting?
A lot of times I would say, "Look, don't worry about it being the most interesting character ever. If you start with that, you're actually going to just spiral and and spin on that forever. What you need to do is take a character who's relatable. Think about something in them that people--it doesn't have to be everybody, but somebody; you, someone you know--can relate to. Now put them in a crazy situation. You're going to another galaxy and then everything goes pear-shaped. What would that character do?
That's where the interesting moments come from, and I think that's one of the prevailing principles I try to push on people, which was everything that we present in the game should be represented by a character. If there's a system or if there's a world, who are the characters I would meet there, and how did they embody what you want the player to learn about that world, and then what's the experience that they're going to have when they're there? That, of course, applies to the player character as well.
Over the course of the trilogy, there's always been these characters and situations that have helped people. [We] mentioned anxiety and depression but, more often than not, like sexuality and stuff. What kind of stories do you hear from the fanbase when they are sharing their own experiences with the characters? When you're going into a game like Andromeda, do you feel pressure that you need to recreate those for a new audience, or do you want to just tell the story you want to tell?
I'll answer the second part first. I don't feel a pressure to create characters or stories for that purpose, because then I don't think it's genuine. That gets back to my previous comment. As a writer, or as a character artist who's putting their love and passion and effort into creating these characters, I want them to just bring out whatever is there. Like I said, I think the story will help shape it, and I think the world that we built in Andromeda is one where it is relatable. We want relatable characters. We want them to be going through things that are common struggles, but maybe in a unique situation obviously, again, in Andromeda.
That stuff just finds a way to bubble up. I looked at some of the stats before; I think Mass Effect 3 had something like 670 unique characters in it and Andromeda has over 1,200. The dialog lines, we just want to look at that, as far as content, [Andromeda has] basically Mass Effect 2 plus Mass Effect 3.
We've doubled down on characters, and yet our story isn't necessarily, like the critical path story, I would say, isn't necessarily that much longer. It's probably on par with 3, which is one of the shorter ones, actually, but then there are all these worlds with all these characters. They all have their stories and there's unique and interesting narratives happening on these worlds. I think, just with the way we've designed it, there's going to be something for everybody, people are going to find something.
The characters you guys built, you defined your studio as a studio that makes characters now and the reaction to the Mass Effect 3 ending was focused on the broader narrative, which we would kind of dismiss as just a framework, a setup for it. How do you approach Andromeda knowing that people are paying as much attention to the nitty-gritty of a broader narrative outside a lot of the key characters within it that you focused on?
For me, with the trilogy, what I found was it was the narrative, the story, that was bringing everything to a conclusion, which ultimately meant that the characters themselves were concluding. I think that's the thing that I would assume, from the outside looking in, you look at and you go, "Well, why would you end it that way? I don't like that story." That's the thing that you can call out as not being what you were expecting or wanting or whatever.
For Andromeda, I think, again, this is a fresh start and that was one of the key things we wanted to do with the story. It's a fresh start for the characters, as well. This is very much more of a hero's journey, as opposed to Shepard was very much the hero already when we met him or her, and then they became a legend? Versus this is, "Nope. You are about to become a hero."
I think the other aspect of that is, this is just the first step. Although we're not calling this a trilogy, it's a series, and we've infused the story and the characters with a sense of permanence, like this will continue. Other things will happen, and we want people to become invested in those characters so that they are curious about, "Well, okay. Well, what would happen next?" even after Andromeda.
One of the things that we were thinking about yesterday in relation to the ending was like, it felt like a suicide mission for BioWare. Like you guys have to account for so many variables in ending a story, which means it's almost impossible to do that. You have a series about giving people the options to make decisions, to find their own characters, create their own path for a story, and then to end that, to put a full stop in that story, you have to take that away from them for a moment and wrap it up. It's difficult to see how it'd all end well. How are you thinking about that for this game and perhaps the games that follow it? You're given more options to create your own story than ever. Inevitably, you're going to reach a point where you'll need to wrap it up. How are you going to do that and try to avoid the same mistakes again?
I think one of the things is we're approaching each game to be a little bit more standalone, even though I said there's a lot of mystery in it that will carry forward, but we want each game to stand on its own and feel like it has a satisfactory conclusion. Even just the type of game that we're making now: This is the first Mass Effect game we'll make where, when the story ends, the game continues. The world continues and there's much more you can still do.
Whenever we get to, we'll call it the last Andromeda--for now--game, it'll very likely be a game that feels like it continues even past the story and people can still stay in the world and see the characters that they love and be invested in. I think, even just that in and of itself is probably going to change the way people perceive it. Who knows? By then, maybe people will be ready to go back to the Milky Way.
What do you want people to take away from Andromeda?
For me, there is this thing that with exploration where I remember as a kid, less so now, looking up at the stars and just wondering what's out there. In that real sense of what I'm seeing now, like when they're putting rovers on Mars and SpaceX is talking about going to Mars and all these things, it's invoked that wanderlust in me. That wanderlust, it goes beyond just travel on Earth, but what could possibly be out there?
That's one of the key things that drove just the inspiration for Andromeda. I really hope that people take away that sense of wanderlust and what's possible out there. That sense of exploration and discovery and really going to a place unique for the very first time. Also just, I talked a bit about the mystery. I think that's a big part of it too, which is we won't tell you everything when you go there the first time, so we want people to come away going, "And now tell me the rest."
What's your fondest memory of the original trilogy? Is there a specific moment that really sticks with you? I know we all have our own ones to that line; I had a discussion with Thane, Lucy has her own one. What is your one that you look back on and say, "This is what Mass Effect is. This moment is what Mass Effect means to me. Like it's the most personal part of it for me."
That's a really good question. It's hard because, as a developer, I've never had the opportunity to experience the games as games. In fact, I'll be honest, I've never played the games after we've shipped because I've played them so much during production, and you're finding the bugs, and then it's almost painful to go back and look at all the bugs. I played elements of them, but I've never gone back and fully completed them again.
That said, the moment as a developer that really struck out to me, and I'll try to think of some from each game so I don't show favorites. In the very first game, and this probably speaks to where we are now with Andromeda, when we finally got the worlds, the uncharted worlds that you could drive around on, because they were just barren for a long time. The Mako worked, but there was nothing there. Then one day, all of a sudden, Art just did a pass like that and it was... I literally probably spent a week not doing my job, just driving around on these worlds, and I was just blown away. I was like, "This is incredible. I am now somewhere." That fulfilled it for me. That was really incredible.
For Mass Effect 2, it was not so much a moment but it was the creation of the Illusive Man. We hinted at Cerberus,and working on the Illusive Man, I loved the grayness of this character and what we could do with him. We'd come from KotOR, Jade Empire, and we'd gotten to this state of binary good and evil a lot, and even Paragon/Renegade was based off of that. To have this character who you think, "Eh, I don't know if I can trust him, but he seems to be doing something right," I just loved playing in that. Aria was very similar in Mass Effect 2. She was one of my favorite characters I got to write and create.
Then for Mass Effect 3, it probably was a moment. It was actually the Anderson death scene, that whole sequence there. Personal for me because it felt very special when I wrote it, but then working with Martin Sheen and the other actors in those scenes, the Shepards, it was pretty memorable. It felt palpable, when we went through that moment. For me, anyway, it embodied bringing all of this trilogy to a conclusion. In that moment, there's a line there. Anderson says, "You did good, kid." There's something very special about that.
Now that you've worked on Andromeda, have you seen moments that really stick with you in that game?
Yeah.
Do you anticipate seeing people coming away with it from that game being like, "Yeah, I remember this moment from Andromeda"?
Yeah. You know, there's a lot of those moments, and the trick in Andromeda is that it's such a big game. One of the things we've really been focusing a lot on is freedom, and it is more of an exploration game, so trying to find those moments--even as the guy who should know where all those moments are--I still get surprised. I'm still finding moments in there. There are definitely some great moments.
One of my favorite narrative threads is what we call the Ryder family secrets and, without giving away any spoilers, but it deals a lot with obviously the Ryder family: Your sibling, your father, but also the strange connection that you all have with SAM, the AI. SAM is like this conduit between you that all of a sudden gives you access to parts of your family's memories that you shouldn't have in a normal world and all the interesting things that that creates.
It creates these really interesting moments that not only talk about families and the things that people are struggling with as they make these big decisions. Do we go to another galaxy or not? Then it layers in this whole other thing with, well, does that mean that SAM is somehow either part of us or is SAM sentient? Is SAM alive if they can share these and express these with us? That whole blurring of the lines between what is life and what is not life. For me, it's this story that I think is very compelling but also very unique.
I imagine, going into Andromeda, you were seeing the legacy of the series as being quite daunting. Regardless of how confident you are in your vision for a new game, the idea of living up to that is probably something that you think about. Now that you've completed Andromeda and you're looking back on it, do you feel like you're in a position where you live up to legacy and you feel that fans will really hit the expectation of fans and everything that they want? The fact that they are so ready to throw themselves into a universe that they appreciate what they see there, and are you confident in it?
Yeah. It's always hard to know until it actually is in the hands of the fans. That said, we've done more focus testing on this game than I've ever seen before, and we are always very inclusive of our fans. We want to bring them in and get their opinion on it. So far, everything I'm seeing is that they're loving this as a Mass Effect experience and also enjoying the fact that it is a fresh start, a new beginning. I feel very confident now that we're going to strike a chord. We haven't strayed off the path. This will be both something that scratches the Mass Effect itch but also sets up the franchise, the character, everything for more going forward, and people will continue to be excited about where Andromeda will go next. Yeah, I'm feeling really good about it.
Where do you see Mass Effect five years from now, and where would you like to see it? Where do you hope it is five years from now, or maybe even six years from now?
You know, I think the interesting thing is that Mass Effect: Andromeda, even though it's the fourth in the series, is really, like I said, I've said it several times, it's a new start. It was a new start on a new engine. It's a new console cycle. It's a new team. More so than any of the games since Mass Effect 1, this one feels like it's got all of those things that we wish we could have done because we were really doing them for the first time. Even though we knew what a Turian looked like, it wasn't like we had a Turian built that we could use. We actually had to go and re-concept it and rebuild it and put it in.
We spent a lot of energy and a lot of effort literally just rebuilding the universe so that we could portray it here, plus bringing forward all these new things. Now that we finally got it to that stage, it's like, "Okay, now we can really play." I really want to see where we can take it. That's what you saw on the trilogy. It was like, the first one, it worked, it was all there, all the pieces were there. It was great, but then we really started to have fun with it with the loyalty missions. We start to push the engine and see what it could do, both in gameplay and in story and all those things.
For me, it'll be more of the same but really taking a lot of the elements a lot deeper. We've introduced crafting, we've introduced exploration, vehicles again. How deep can we take all those elements and really improve upon them so that your next Mass Effects are even more immersive?
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and its developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the interview material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game.
The interview below features Ian Frazier, lead designer on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: So can we start with just an introduction, your name, what you do on Andromeda, and your history with the series?
Ian Frazier: Yeah. My name is Ian Frazier. I'm lead designer on Mass Effect Andromeda, based out of the Montreal studio, and I'm a huge fan of the series, been playing since the first one came out. It's actually the only game series I've taken time off work to play after each one has come out, and it's been really exciting for me to get to actually make one now.
Yeah, so can you talk a little about where you were when the first one came out and what it meant to you as a game? Cause we kind of like reflect on the impact of the first Mass Effect and it would be good to hear that from someone who now works on the franchise. So what did it mean to you and what do you think it brought to gaming?
When Mass Effect 1 came out, I was actually working at a company here in the Boston area, called Iron Lore Entertainment. I was working on a medieval or, not medieval, Greek fantasy game and the game came out, and I was already a big BioWare fan at the time, any new BioWare game I wanted to pick up, and it came out, I set some time aside, and said if this was half of what Knights of the Old Republic was I'm going to be very, very happy. It came out and it was just amazing to me, because it was a new universe, and even then, new IPs come by so rarely, and new IPs that are compelling like that, it just never happens. So finding this new universe and all these different alien races, and the interesting mixture of RPG elements and more shooter elements they'd combined, it was unique, it was new. I found it really compelling.
So for my perspective, I was quite a console gamer at the time and I missed a lot of PC games, both in BioWare's legacy and generally a lot of PC games by and large. So when I played Mass Effect it was the scale of it that really overwhelmed me. That was the kind of thing that was exclusive to MMOs at the time, that was the kind of thing that Blizzard did, so having that on a console was what blew my mind. Is that something you felt as well?
The scale was definitely impressive. Not just the physical scale, the amount of places you could go, although, yes, that was cool too, but the sense of like, no this is a whole galaxy you can actually explore that has been around a while. You have an important part to play, but this universe exists without you. It has its own history and characters have a thing going on, and I liked that even, if you remember the intro to Mass Effect 1, at the beginning, you're a big deal in your own right, but you're not the grand high king of everything. You were second. Someone else is captain of the ship. I thought that was really cool.
Pictured: Ian Frazier
And then Mass Effect 2, kind of similarly, where were you at the time when that came out, and what were your feelings on it?
When Mass Effect 2 came out, I was actually working at a different studio down in the Baltimore area, and when it first came out, I had very mixed feelings actually. I started playing it, and it was like, oh they've changed a lot, and it shifted more toward action in a lot of ways, and I think for the first maybe five hours of the game, I was like, I don't know, what have they done with my Mass Effect. But as I got deeper into it and really fell into love with the characters, actually, this is awesome. I thought that they took some elements that weren't working very well in the first one, and they said we don't have the time to take all these and make them amazing, so we're going to remove some of these elements and what's left is going to be outstanding.
So I loved the focus of Mass Effect 2, the character-driven focus of Mass Effect 2, the gameplay obviously improved tremendously, I think all the ideas of conflict and romance went up a whole level in Mass Effect 2, and they took characters and they really expanded them. Like in Mass Effect 1, Garas was cool, Tali was cool, but Mass Effect 2, they really come into their own and they become what we now think of as those characters. Just very memorable. And the suicide mission, the whole, spoilers, the whole setup of Mass Effect 2 and all these choices that factor in in a very meaningful way to your final mission, I thought was really cool.
And Mass Effect 3, what was your opinion of that game? Cause I'm one of the people that really loves it and I'm one of the people that, for example, doesn't take any umbrage with the ending at all, like I remember the characters, the moments I had with them, and the kind of broader narrative and the way it kind of all shook out at the end wasn't important to me. But as a fan, that someone on the outside and who was working on the game at the time, what were your responses to it and how did you feel with what BioWare achieved at the end of Mass Effect 3 and overall?
Mass Effect 3, I think I was still in Baltimore when that came out. It was really exciting to me because it took all those threads that had been going for closing in on a decade, and you knew those were going to finally come together, so seeing the payout of all those choices over all that time was amazing to me, because it had just never been done before. The entire trilogy where you were playing the same character, with all these continuous elements, so I was just extremely excited to see how it would pan out.
I think the gameplay, it's funny, when I kind of stop, before working on this game, I'd stop and I'd go, oh, Mass Effect 3 gameplay was about the same as Mass Effect 2. It really isn't. I played a lot of all three of them while working on Mass Effect: Andromeda, and you compare them side to side, Mass Effect 3 did a lot to improve the core gameplay, and then of course they did multiplayer which, I am an old school single-player RPG guy, that's very much where I come from, I'm not much of a multiplayer gamer as a rule and saw Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and I was like, all right, okay fine, because it's got Krogan I'll try it. I'll just try it a bit. And I just fell in love with it. It's the only game that's like that that I've gotten personally really invested into. I've spent far too much money on Mass Effect 3 before working on Mass Effect: Andromeda, and just had a great time with it with some friends, several of whom actually came over to the studio and ended up working on Andromeda with me. It was really compelling.
As far as the story panning out, I think I got the ending that I wanted, but there were some loose ends that I really wanted to get tied off and then conveniently, they did the extended cut ending, and then I went back and replayed the ending, and I was much happier after I had that whole experience. And then Leviathan, the DLCs, it filled in a lot of the different bits, and the timing was good because the Citadel DLC came out, which I think of as the real ending, it's chronologically in the middle, but emotionally, as a catharsis, it's very much for me the ending of the trilogy. That came out and I interviewed for this job the next week. So it was this really nice transition between really feeling Mass Effect had come to its close, and now we're ready to start a new chapter, and oh, I get to do that. That's cool.
So coming on to work on Andromeda, that first day, how were you feeling? Was it like really anxious, or really, really excited?
A little bit anxious. Honestly, I've been there four years now and it's still, the inner fanboy, you see my hoodie here, is very much present. You talk to a lot of people that have been around for 10 years, for 20 years even with Bioware. The guy that hired me in Montreal, Dean Anderson, he actually was art director of the original Dragon Age, he worked on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. In fact, we had our first Christmas party, not too long after I had started, and I met his wife. I was like, she's very familiar, why is she so familiar? His wife was the basis of Imoen, the character Imoen in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. They actually used her as the model for the face in the first game and you just have lots of these moments where as a long-term BioWare fan, it's a little surreal.
I still fanboy out pretty often. It's great working with great people, just like any other studio with really good people, but BioWare for me has always been something special. So being a part of that's been really cool.
Did it ever dawn on you like, oh crap, the responsibility I have now, going from a fan to being a Mass Effect developer? Not only a Mass Effect developer, a developer working on a new era of Mass Effect, almost redefining it and finding a new future for it?
Sometimes it does dawn on me. It's a big responsibility. And then I try really hard not to think about it. Sometimes I drink. And eventually you can get past it, and then completely forget. It's great.
That's pretty good. But as in like, you must be seeing fans, cause I know that for example, and they kind of come back to you, and be like "these are the people I'm working for and I really hope that I can meet their expectations." Is that a thing that worries you, or fuels you?
It's some of both. It's always pressure and stress, as I think for all of us on the team, we wanted to make the best game we can, we want the fans on the trilogy to be excited, and to enjoy it, we want new players to have the experience that I had on Mass Effect 1, to come into and be like, this is amazing, this is unique. We want them to feel that. At the same time, because we're trying to do something that is new, that is a new step in the universe, we can't just cookie cutter stamp the trilogy, we have to find new elements that get people excited and get us excited. And it's been interesting over the last few years, trying to peg that balance between the two, capturing perfectly the feeling of Mass Effect but not straight-up being the exact game you already played.
Coming to work at BioWare, were you afraid that maybe as a fan you'd kind of lose some of the magic of BioWare games because you'd discover the magician's secret?
That was honestly my biggest reason to not take the job. Talking about it, I was like, well there's different factors, different job opportunities, and that I'm going to spoil Mass Effect for myself. That was the biggest "Do I really want to do this?" The balance I've struck is that I have almost nothing to do with the Dragon Age franchise, and I am able to stay almost entirely in the dark. We have tons of people working on it in the studio, and they will try to share things with me and I won't let them. So although I am hopefully spoiled on Mass Effect, I'm still able to experience my other BioWare love Dragon Age fresh every time one comes out.
How did you feel knowing that when you got there, okay I'm going to be working on the new Mass Effect? How did you feel about returning to Mass Effect? Cause outsiders and us fans were like, oh, they're going back to Mass Effect? It's easy to see what you could do now, but the worry is, there's such a legacy there and it's almost perfect, why would you risk that again, come back to it?
It's fair enough. When I initially got the call, it was "Hey, would you be interested in being a lead designer on Mass Effect?" And of course I thought they were joking. Partially cause it was me, but also partially because the franchise, as you say, it was ended, it was this nice, solid thing. I was surprised that they were going to do another one at least in this timeframe. So when I interviewed, I talked to them a lot about the narrative premise of the game, what was the setup, what were we going to do?
It was interesting, because they were actually looked at, right before I got there, several different possible setups for the game, and it was solidifying right around when I interviewed. As soon as I realized what we were now doing as the setup, it was like okay, this is definitely a way to let us have something that feels like Mass Effect, is Mass Effect, has lots of carry over, but doesn't require us to handle the 50 billion choices you may have made over the trilogy. So it can be new, but also carry over the old. Okay, I could see that working, I'll do that.
Okay. Obviously you've got a long history in working in RPGs and stuff like Kingdoms of Amalur and that kind of stuff. What did you bring from that to Mass Effect Andromeda that kind of re-energizes the franchise and what is it about Andromeda that kind of distinguishes it from the previous games?
So there was a couple from previous games that not directly, but in various forms we've tried to bring over. Cause it's not just me, it was a few of us from previous studies I've worked at. One big one you'll see is a sense of freedom in the game. I think Mass Effect 1, you had a fair amount of that, of different places you could go, and it tapered off a bit over the trilogy. Because narratively, the world's coming to an end, the reapers are coming, again, spoilers. So there wasn't as much you could do as far as going out to explore.
We no longer have that problem. With the new story and the new location we're able to open it up, and so looking at the last few games I've worked on, we've tried to focus a lot on exploration, on options for the player character. One of the big things for me with Reckoning was letting the player build whatever kind of character they wanted to. And we looked at Mass Effect and went, well, why not do that in Mass Effect? Why not let players, instead of just having that class choice in the beginning, you're going to be a Sentinel for 60 hours or whatever, just say, no, you're going to get to decide a thing and then morph and change and expand that over the course of the experience, and it ended up fitting really, really well.
In terms of the changes to the systems and that kind of stuff, were you ever worried that ... You've got a fan base that is very, very attached to what they have, and doing things like shifting, it feels like more a shooter now than ever, and the big question we have or we see is, does this mean the RPG stuff is gone? Is that what's going on here? People are reluctant to change, more so in the Mass Effect fan base than anywhere else. Was there ever a worry that, oh man, we've got this weird jump movement, everyone's going to freak out when they see that.
It's always a worry. You're always kind of threading a needle with this stuff. It's interesting. With aspects of game design, you do have these spectrums of like, how much is it an RPG versus how much is it an action game. If you go fullblown turn-based, you are obviously not an action game. Done. There's this clearcut separation. With other aspects of the game's design, it's really not either or. You can kind of handle those things as separate vectors. And that's what we've tried to do with Andromeda.
So on one hand, I think we are, as you say, more of a shooter, more of an action game than any of the previous Mass Effect games. We've tried to do more with your moment to moment before, with the jump, with locomotion in general, how you get around the world, with some of the gunplay, and the powers and the way you intermix them. In that way, it is more of a shooter's shooter than it used to be. At the same time, we looked at a lot of what Mass Effect 1 wanted to do and wasn't able to do. Mass Effect 1 was supposed to have crafting. It got mods, but they were never able to do crafting with the time they had to make the game. So we looked at things like that, like upgrading the Mako was something they wanted to do with Mass Effect 1, and we went, well, that would be pretty cool.
So it took several of those RPG elements that the trilogy never did before, and we've amped those as well. So rather than just having the tug of war between action and RPG, we tried to bolster both.
The guys that we spoke to yesterday mentioned similar things like bringing about things like that they attempted but were never capable of doing. What's it like to be the people that are trying to realize the original vision for Mass Effect? What's it like to be those people and be around the people that are watching it happen again, like Mike Walters and Mike Gamble and that kind of stuff?
It's really interesting, because I worked on games before coming here, and what I see from a lot of the folks that have been around for the trilogy is kind of how I have been on previous games. As a creator, you get really hung up on certain things that work, certain things that don't work, and you have a very different perspective, that authorial perspective, than the player at the end of the day. For myself, and some of the other people new to the team, new to the brand, we come in and see something like interrupts. If you remember the interrupts in Mass Effect 2 and 3, I loved them to death, a lot of my fellows who've joined the team love to death. A lot of the developers are like, oh, you know, this one we didn't telegraph well enough, and that one was a pain in the butt to implement, and this, this and the other thing, so there was a lot of a feeling within the team of the folks that had been around a while of, well, I don't know about doing those again.
And then folks like me come in and we're like, well, yeah we're doing those, you're not going to get rid of that. So there's been a lot of that. The perspective of a developer who's suffered the pains of implementing a thing, but then the perspective of a fan who's like, nope, that thing is awesome, that is worth keeping. And it's been cool having that tension. Cause we learn from the folks who've learned what does and doesn't work, but at the same time we bring some of that fan enthusiasm to the table.
Okay, so you can you talk a little bit about the mood in the studio, having this new team? Cause that's one of the things that I imagine a lot of the fans are kind of anxious about, having a brand new team. Of course, from one perspective, it's like brand-new team, brand-new ideas. But what's it been like to have this makeup of veterans and new blood working together?
It's been interesting, and it's evolved over the course of development. This is actually the first BioWare game that was fully built across three different studios. We had Edmonton, Montreal and then even Austin joined later in development. Each successive wave of developers joining have been a different sort of culture and a shift in the feel in the floor. I think Montreal, we have a lot of new people, there are a lot of folks who are either new to the franchise or new to BioWare altogether. It's generally a bit more frenetic on the floor, Edmonton is a bit more solid and stable, a little bit quieter. At least earlier in development that was the case. And then things started to calm in Montreal, and then you got the Austin folks on, and they're the folks that are the more frenetic and passionate and energized, and you get this constant kind of loop that goes back to Edmonton and works it way back to the studios again. Successive waves of passion moving through the team.
It's been cool, cause as we sort of gradually formed from three studios doing their own thing into one cohesive team building the game, we've gradually, those waves have stopped and it's become sort of one group.
And like we mentioned earlier, we were talking to Yannick yesterday, and he was, he got the opportunity to found the studio, and has been populating it with developers that kind of stuff, and for him, this game is almost like his statement for the studio, a kind of transition from working on different projects to being like, we are the guys that now define Mass Effect. Have you been thinking about that? How does that weigh on you as a studio and a developer working within it, having that responsibility?
Absolutely. I think a lot of us, when we were hired four or five years ago, that was the talk of the times. Okay, we've done Omega, we've done some support for ME2, ME3, and we're staffing up, we're going to become the Mass Effect studio, the home for the franchise. That was in and of itself extremely compelling and terrifying. It's like, Okay, how can we do that? So I think this whole project it's never been just let's get this game out the door, it's always been, let's lay a foundation that we can build on. We're going to own the franchise now, we're going to take this forward. So it's been a terrifying responsibility, but at the same time exciting. It's not a one-off, we're building a future for sci-fi, which is weirdly cyclical.
Obviously, Mass Effect is a game about a bunch of races trying to find a new home and exploring unfamiliar territory, new responsibilities and pressures, it's kind of like your story as well now. Is that something that you've thought about, the theme between you as a studio, BioWare, and the game, what's happening in there?
Not deliberately in our design, but it really comes up as a joke sometimes. We had at one point, I can't even remember what it was, but something that we were bickering and arguing, debating over how we were going to do something with the design of the game, and then a bunch of the same people who had been in that discussion sat down the next day, and we reviewed a mission from the game, or a piece of content from the game, where all of the people leading the nexus for the initiative are bickering and arguing over how, what the right way forward for the settlers is, and we're like, oh, yeah, maybe we should get on the same page. Okay.
What do you think has been the biggest challenge for you in starting fresh and cutting ties to the Milky Way and Shepard and that kind of stuff? It's easy to see why you did it, but what are the challenges that have arisen because of it?
I think the biggest challenge is just knowing how much to bring over. You want it to feel like Mass Effect, but at a certain point, its' like, you have 48 guns in the game, and every single one of them is something you've seen before. Well everyone's going to be disappointed. At the same time, you need to bring over a certain amount of the races from the trilogy or it doesn't feel like Mass Effect. But I don't think anybody would be happy if we came here and it was like, yep, here's all the races you already know, there's nobody living in Andromeda, it's empty. Just going to settle on that rock and call it a day. So yeah, but you never have infinite time, money, budget, whatever is so ... We can't do all of everything and trying to hit that balance of how much to do of each has been a recurring challenge over development.
As a fan, if I was in your position and working on this game brand-new, I'd be like, damn I wish I could bring over Rex, or something like that, or bring over a character that I love. How hard has it been resisting that, and have you tried to do that?
We do actually have some references in the game to stuff from the trilogy. You'll play it, you'll see what we've got there. Obviously, though, we can't have Rex, cause Rex was doing stuff in Mass Effect 3, if he was alive, so we can't ... And the whole question of if he's alive or not is a thing we didn't want to deal with. So couldn't do that. I think what's been exciting for us is that, we look at the game, we're like, oh you know what, we'd really like to bring in Kasumi, and we can't, and that's sad, but we go, well why are we sad? We're sad because Kasumi was able to be built up into this amazing character over a span of time. We get to do that. We get to make new characters that other people are going to be attached to in hopefully much the same way as they were Kasumi and Rex and Liara and so forth. And that's compelling.
That's an interesting thing. The first Mass Effect came out, and you had these characters that you liked, but as you said, Mass Effect 2 is when they turned into the characters that we know and love, and then Mass Effect 3 is where all the payoff happened. So now the reputation for the Mass Effect series is, it gives you characters that you fall in love with. But people forget that there was that stage where you may not have loved them all that much, they had this ...
Well you didn't know them, right?
Exactly, you didn't know them. But they're coming to Andromeda wanting, expecting to love the character off the bat. How do you deal with knowing that we might need more time, we might need more than one game here to figure that stuff out?:
It certainly might end up being more than one game, but within this one, first we've done a lot more front loading. So if you think about Mass Effect 1, you didn't have that much content with Garrus and Rex really in the game. By the end, you did. But early on, you didn't really know that person. We've tried to have more relationship moments and stuff to do or things to say with our squadmates and crewmates and other characters pretty early, so you can get to know them more early on, get over that initial hurdle.
The other thing is that the game's just bigger. I'm not allowed to say the total number, but it is large, how many hours we have to play. It is substantially larger than any previous Mass Effect game. So it's kind of like you're playing two or three Mass Effect games in one, in terms of stuff to do and play time. So just intrinsically you get a lot more time with these characters within just the one game. So I think people are going to be able to build pretty good attachments to our crew.
Reflecting on the series as a whole, do you have a particular moment that stands out to you as being specifically very memorable to you or personal to you that you come back to?
Oh yeah.
What is it and why?
Obviously there's many. But for me the biggest one has always been, again with the spoilers, the very end of Mass Effect 1. You've defeated Sovereign, there's the pile of rubble. Shepard, who basically never smiles in the game, very strait-laced, and I was paragon, so very straitlaced, by the book, no smile through the entire game, limping his way out of the rubble, and then just having that little bit of a grin as he's made it out of the victorious ... I'm getting chills right now recounting this to you. Just so good.
What do you want people to take away from Andromeda as a game? When they finish playing, what do you want them to think when they're done?
Honestly, I want them to think the same thing you were getting at with your earlier question. I want to see more of these characters, can I do more with these characters, can I continue with these people? I want people to be hungry for more, whether it's more of Ryder, or more the crew, the squad. If you come away with this, and you're like, more, give me more, I need to see more of these characters, then I'll be very happy.
Similarly, where would you like to see Mass Effect five years from now, ten years from now?
So many different options. One of the things about Andromeda is that because it's a fresh start, we're not really locked into a particular plot line or even a particular part of space, we can explore outward from the Helius cluster. I don't want to tell you, because we might end up doing one of the things I have in my head.
The latest in GameSpot's documentary series explores the story behind Mass Effect: Andromeda and its developer BioWare Montreal. As part of this video feature, we travelled to Boston and spoke to various members of the development team, ranging from studio executives and writers, to designers and creative directors.
While some of these interviews are featured in The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a great deal of the interview material was unused. In light of this, we decided to publish each of the interviews in full and make them available to anyone interested in reading more about the development of the game.
The interview below features Michael Gamble, a producer at BioWare. Further interviews are available through the links.
GameSpot: Can you just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your history with the Mass Effect franchise?
Michael Gamble: Sure. My name's Michael Gamble. I'm a producer at BioWare. I've been with BioWare for going on eight years now. Been there since Mass Effect 2. Joined during Mass Effect 2 as it was in production. Finished out that. Did a lot of DLC for Mass Effect 2. Moved on to Mass Effect 3. Finished out the trilogy. Did DLC for that too. And then moved over to Andromeda after that.
So you joined with Mass Effect which means you got to experience Mass Effect 1 from an outside perspective. What were your memories of Mass Effect 1 and what was your feeling about that game?
So I bought Mass Effect 1 on launch day. And, you know, I'd always wanted a massive space opera type RPG to play. And I'd always been a fan of the BioWare guys before that. Before I ever worked at BioWare I was a huge fan. Played Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter. I was just Jade Empire everything. But I was always a science fiction nerd. So I loved that.
And so when Mass Effect 1 was announced I remember it just being on the top of my radar, playing it, just getting into it. It was changing for me. It changed how I looked at sci-fi video games. The amount of inspiration that I drew from being able to meet all these new aliens for the first time in a galaxy, I think, was awesome. That was the major thing, really feeling like you're telling a human story but in this brand new area of all these different species I had never met before. It kind of invoked a lot of the feelings I had with Star Wars and properties like that before.
Pictured: Michael Gamble
What was it about Mass Effect specifically that elevated it above other games, RPGs, and also science fiction games?
Well, I mean, I don't think it was any particular one thing. It was a lot of different things that kind of came together, your ability to make choice, your ability to see consequence in those choices, your ability to assemble a really cool interesting squad, the art style, the clean idyllic look. It was all very, I mean, it all kind of came together and really made it magic for me.
Right.
Yeah. I wouldn't say it was any one particular thing, but definitely the choices that sold me on it.
Okay. Can you talk a bit about how you went from being a fan to being someone that's working on the games and kind of like what that meant to you.
Yeah. It was interesting. Whenever you see something as a fan and then you see how it's made it really changes your perspective on it. Some of the magic goes away essentially in how these things are constructed, the mathematics behind the choices and how things are basically put together, how the QA is done, how the production is done. It changes some of the magic of it, but then again, you have the ability to look at it and say, "Oh, cool, I understand why they did that" or, "Wow, I totally see how this was so hard to do." Whereas, you know, as a player you think it's so easy to put together. And you see, man, they must have spent months and years to put this idea together. So you earn respect for it even more of a respect than before.
When I finished playing it and stepped away from the first Mass Effect, the second Mass Effect, and the third, each time it kind of blew my mind that entire galaxy of people and places were contained on this tiny, little disk. There was just this magic to it. Did you feel the same way when you were playing the series? What was your take on the expansiveness of the game?
Yeah. You know, it's like any IP. Well, it's not like any IP actually. Some IPs capture this, like you said, it's like a magic, right? And you wonder how did they come up with all this stuff. How long did it, how many people in a room for how long did it take them to think up what a Thorian looks like or, you know, why the Genophage affected the Krogans. You come in and you look at it and you say, okay, well, there's very intelligent minds behind that.
And one of the things that I noticed while I worked at BioWare, is that unlike any game company that I worked at before, people were more passionate and creative about what they were putting together because they had an opportunity to reinvent something, to make something new for the first time. And I think that shows in the product. And with Mass 2 and Mass 3 it just continued it. And it finessed the story more and it made it tighter in nearly every way, right?
Mass Effect came out in 2007 among some of the best games of all time like Call of Duty 4 and BioShock. What do you think the impact of Mass Effect was on the industry?
Oh, I think it changed RPGs. I mean, there's a couple a of major take aways for me as a player anyway when I saw it. So the Dialogue Wheel fundamentally I think changed how an RPG can be conveyed, so the ability to have different types of choice, show that choice in different ways, have your squads reflect your decisions and what they say, things like Paragons and Renegades and Interrupts, which came later. The whole wheel itself made the player feel like they were making more choice, better choice, better thought out choice. That was a major thing for me.
Also, during that time, you know, RPGs have always been a, I guess you can call fairly niche market depending on who you are, right? Mass Effect, in my opinion, was one of the ones that brought it to the mainstream, right? A lot of people were talking about Mass Effect, myself included at that time.
You know, you mention a couple of the other games in that window. None of them quite hit that RPG, that role-playing element quite like Mass Effect, I think.
Right. You can look at the popularity of stuff like Dragon Age coming after that, and the way that was being enjoyed on a level like far greater than previous fantasy RPGs and trace that back to Mass Effect almost.
Totally. Yep.
It kind of became the gateway to an entire genre.
Yeah. And the other cool thing about those is BioWare was making this for numbers, years and years before that, right? They were developing the RPG craft. They were getting better and better at telling stories. And with Mass Effect and Dragon Age origins, as you mentioned, I think that was kind of just a watershed moment for BioWare. Okay, we finally have the technology. We finally have the teams. We finally have the IPs that we know to make these things great. And it just all came together, right?
Yeah. And it's quite surprising that they did it coming so soon after Star Wars as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You go from working on a sci-fi game to being like, alright, we're going to make our on universe. Star Wars took years to reach the point where it had all that lore. But the first Mass Effect game, by the time you're done you're done, has an overwhelming amount of history and lore.
Yeah.
It's like almost rivaling Star Wars at the time.
Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. I mean, we have a talented team. If they know how to work together. And many of those folks did work together on Knights of the Old Republic before that. Making a game the most important currency that you have is a team who's made a game together. If you have a team who's made a game together and they can roll onto another game, whether it's a new IP or whether it's, you know, something from an existing IP, there's magic in those relationships between the people. And they can create awesomeness. Whereas, if you have a new team, you know, you gather together the most talented people from across the world, put them in a room, you just might not get that magic, right? But the Knights of the Old Republic team before that were able to bring that to Mass Effect.
Where does the Andromeda team fall then? Because it seems like it's a little bit of both. You've got new people and you've got people that worked together before.
Yeah. Andromeda was actually a good opportunity to build a new team because, first, we had the established IP, right? So we had Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3. Then we were going to Frostbite. That was the other big thing where, folks might not know, but changing engines, whenever you're doing that in a game, is a pretty big deal, right, because you've got all the tools that you're used to working with. I mentioned the Dialogue Wheel earlier. The ability to write and project that stuff on screen takes an entire set of tools to move that over to Frostbite.
So doing the Frostbite thing, having the existing IP, and wanting to have Montreal as a huge part of this game made it a perfect opportunity to have a big team and a new team. So we have a number of people who've worked on Mass 2, 3, 1. So that's kind of the folks who know and love the IP and want to help bring that into a new generation of players.
Then you have this team of amazing people who've come from all over who are very talented at what they do and were fans just like me coming into it, which can bring that level of passion, that new kind of blood into the franchise. And combining both of those, it's not easy. It never is especially over multiple locations. But the Mass Effect team on Andromeda is one of the biggest Mass Effect teams we've done and I think has the most, the freshest new ideas. We have people who worked on Halo. We have people who worked on Reckoning. We have people from all over, right? So taking those ideas and working with those ideas and creating something awesome is what we've been trying to do for the last five years.
So you came into the project as a fan. What were your feelings as you were coming on to work on Mass Effect 2?
Intimidation, really. You know, I got to work with these greats like Casey Hudson, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, like the guys who invented this IP, trusting me and others to kind of help, you know, continue on that. It was a big thing. And I'm forever grateful for the opportunities that they gave me, but it wasn't easy. It certainly wasn't easy.
And there's a high expectation bar in terms of quality that BioWare's always had. And when something's not good enough you have to keep going and doing it over and over again until it is, right? That was something new that I hadn't seen before.
Do you have a personal moment from the game that has stuck with you?
It's hard having worked on it and seen these things. For me, actually, this is more of a employee type answer, not as a fan. But when I saw how complicated it was for who lives and dies, so basically, you know, at the end, the math and the charts behind that and the things that you have to do and not do in order to make sure that people live or die, that blew my mind after I saw how that was architected because it's a lot more complicated than you might think. And when I saw that, like, wow, wow. There's so much to this. And then, of course, continuing that on afterwards with all the DLC with Kasumi and Zaeed and stuff like that. For me, as a producers, that was probably one of my prouder moments where we started to really flesh out the universe for nearly a full year after that adding to the whole dirty dozen concept with Kasumi and Zaeed and putting out more adventures. I thought that was pretty cool to be able to continue to magic throughout the next year.
Similar to what I asked about Mass Effect 1, as someone who now worked on Mass Effect 2 what do you think the legacy of the second game is?
For me I think Mass 2 was able to take something that was very heavily steeped in RPGs like Mass Effect 1 was and make the combat system work in a great way with that RPG backing. You have the RPGs which were like, okay. So this is clearly an RPG. Everything is kind of turn-based behind the veil and that's how combat works.
Mass 2 basically brought the shooter into the shooter hybrid thing. That was a big thing for us because we put a lot of work into it. We saw a lot of the feedback from Mass Effect 1 and we figured we had to change it. And we did. And so looking back on it, that was one of the biggest moments in being able to make that the cool shooter RPG hybrid that it was.
So you've done Mass Effect 2 now and you're going into a Mass Effect 3. What was the mood in moving into the concluding chapter of the story?
Nervous. Nervous, because any time you finish any sort of story arc you have a lot of things to do. You have a lot of loose ends to tie off. You have a lot of people who have a lot of invested time in this. And regardless of what you say about the ending it was a lot of pressure on us. And we put a lot of time and a lot into tying off those story threads. But you never know, right? You never know. What we think is like, oh, that's going to nail it, that's going to be awesome, everyone's going to love this, some people might not.
Yeah.
Right? And you don't really know until you put the game out. So that was the feeling kind of going into it. But we had a plan. And, like I said before, we had a really solid team who'd worked for now three games together. We had a really great engine. We had a lot of support there. EA and Bioware Studio put their backing behind us. So the cards were stacked in our favor, but you're just nervous. That's all.
What were your feelings after Mass Effect 3 shipped?
Well, depends on when. So two days after it shipped, after the things that were happening, there was a little bit of, oh, we weren't happy. We weren't happy because this was our baby as much as it was anyone else's, right, wanting to send it off and make it the satisfying thing that people wanted. But as time went on and as things died down a little bit and we looked back and we continued with some of DLC in the Citadel, we're still very, very proud of it.
We're still very happy with what we did. And I think it set the stage for the future because it formalized for us that Shepard's story was done.
And that we told all we wanted to tell in that universe. So it kind of prompted us to look forward and say, okay, well, what's next from Mass Effect. Do people want another Mass Effect? Yes, they do. All right. Okay. Good. So how can we start, how can we bring Mass Effect to something new? And then we go from there.
Andromeda has a lot of fresh starts. It's developed in a new location in Montreal. It's a new galaxy. It's a whole new team. What did that fresh start kind of mean for you guys? Was it like a blank canvas of opportunity or was there mounting pressure to sort of make something that lives up to the legacy of the trilogy?
It's more actually of the former. The fresh start, I mean, because we didn't have to release another Mass Effect game, right? We did it because we think that people would love it and that we wanted to. So being able to kind of be free of that in the very beginning from the ground up and build this thing and conceptualize and on where and when and how, that was liberating for sure. We weren't tide into any previous sequels. We didn't have anything that we had to do. We were able to start fresh. So it was good.
Of course, I mean, people love the trilogy and they always will. And there's some pressure there to make sure it feels like Mass Effect, but we don't want it to feel like Shepard's story. We want it to feel like Ryder's story, right?
Right.
So that's liberating in itself, right?
Having that full stop for a lot of people would, for many, be an opportunity to say, "I'm going to step away from this now. I'm going to think about something different. I've immersed my entire life into this one story, one universe. I'll maybe go and work on another IP or try and find some."
Yep.
What was it about Mass Effect that made you think I'm going to commit another four or five years maybe even longer if it carries on?
Well, like I said before, I came into it as a fan. And I still am. Personally Mass Effect means a lot to me. Like we say, when we create something, we put it out, it is like putting your own child out there, right? That feeling still exists. I mean, eventually I'll move on to another IP, I'm sure, eventually. And I had the choice even previous to this, right? But for now, Mass Effect, it's too special to me. And it's too important, I think, to RPGers in the gaming community. I mean, who wouldn't take that opportunity to do that, right?
And, like I said previously, I mean, starting fresh, starting new, there's a lot of fun in doing that, right? I mean, this is Mass Effect, but at the same time, well, our imaginations are the limit of the new stuff that we can add, right? So there was a lot of cool new things that we could have done, too, right?
Do you feel like it's an opportunity to kind of rekindle that kind of love and create kind of a comeback story for Mass Effect? The way 3 ended, for better or for worse, people now have this sentiment towards the entire franchise that's, "Yeah, it was great for two games, but that last game was like..."
Yeah. Sure. I mean, in a way. Okay. So I actually wouldn't call it a comeback at all. I'm very happy with how the trilogy was. I just call it a continuation of something awesome. So that's not to say that we did everything that we wanted to do on the trilogy because a lot of stuff we didn't, but I feel like it ended in place we were happy with.
What was the mood generally from the studio and the different people working and going into Andromeda? Was it like trepidation or were you exited?
Something that we always kind of band around the studio and the office through the numerous long nights and years of development. It was always how much people wanted the game. Any tidbit of information or news would gain traction, anything about the game because they're so hungry for another Mass Effect. That in itself fuelled a lot of people, myself included.
If you have a property that has a very small audience or that people don't know about yet because it's a new IP you don't get that feeling of, you know, rabidness from the gaming community, but for something like Mass Effect we're lucky. We do. We see it. And that fuels us. Be like, oh, people are going to love this. Oh, they're just going to love this. And we have to get this done. And we have the finish this. And we have to make sure this is awesome quality because of all the people out there. That makes it easier. And so that brings a general sense of excitement, anticipation to the team.
And I'm sure, you know, people wouldn't be working on this franchise if it didn't mean something to them.
I don't know anyone that I work with that is on the Mass Effect franchise to get a paycheck. They're there to create something. From the programming team to the artists, the designers, the production team, everyone on the team wants to create it. And that just helps fuel the constant creativity that we go through all the time.
You always read a lot of things that people say, you know, Mass Effect helped me come to terms with my sexuality or some other real life issue.
Yeah. Yeah.
What's the most memorable sort of fan encounter like that you've had?
Again, there's so many of them that it's hard to pin one. People have gotten married based on meeting each other in Mass Effect Multiplayer. They've, you know, gotten numerous tattoos because, you know, we've given them confidence to be able to come out to their parents or things like that. I hear stories like that all the time at conventions, like PAX, and it makes it worthwhile.
Specifically for me, I do a like the ones where people, they met online in Multiplayer or their love of Mass Effect brought them together. And then they have like a big Mass Effect theme wedding. That's cool. We share pictures around the studio of stuff like that. People get really jazzed about it.
Yeah. So for me it was seeing Zaeed and connect on a little more of a personal level. And the same with Thane and his religious beliefs.
Yeah.
And for Andromeda most of my time was spent talking to Suvi.
Good.
Because she was talking entirely about her religion and that kind of stuff. And then you released the trailer recently and revealed her name, Suvi Anwar.
Yeah.
She was like another Middle Eastern name. And I'm like, yes. They did it again. There's more of us in here. So it's like moments like that are kind of like really impactful. But from your perspective, the pressure to have that must be just overwhelming--knowing that there's so many people that are deriving some personal value from it. Your game potentially has the ability to help someone through some depression or make them rethink a political ideology. Do you think about that when you're making the game and how does that pressure weigh on you as a team?
Yeah, we definitely know about it. We definitely think about it. All I can say is that we do the best that we can. We know what it means to people. We know what it's like to be excluded. We know that our game helps people feel included in many ways. And then we just kind of go with that.
We do make specific actions to help be more inclusive, right? And we've been even better with Andromeda on that than we were on the trilogy. We can't make everyone a hundred percent happy all the time because that's kind of impossible, but at the very least we start out knowing that it means a lot to people. And we plan accordingly for that, right? We have a lot of people at BioWare who care very much about inclusivity.
The writers, for example, they make it so that everyone gets included in romances. And they kind of make sure that that's spread throughout the game. And it's not done in a cheap, half cocked manner, that everyone is given the same amount of time and love and effort and lines to bring their things to life. So that kind of just ebbs and flows throughout the entire team. But it is special to us. And so we hope the people continue to trust us with that kind of stuff. All we can say is we do our best.
And how do you kind of approach it when, for example, when you're releasing your game at a time when, you know, there's a lot of strife in the political world, real word, and there's people who are being excluded, do you approach it and be like, "Let's just work on it naturally and whatever happens happens," or is there an opinion that, "We should try and give something to these people, maybe some solace for these people within the world that we know are currently going through something"?
Yeah. I wouldn't say we try to put a political message in. I would say that, and if you talk to one or two of the writers they can probably tell you their creative process around it.
But what's important to an individual creator, whether it's a designer or writer or producer, whoever, they put a little bit of themselves into that. So if a writer, for example, is going through some hardship in a certain way they'll write a character to maybe be more inclusive in that, right?
What I think makes a BioWare writer different is they're not afraid to reflect that in the game. And we encourage that kind of reflection to be put into the writing and the design. And so I think when it naturally just comes out in the game people are happy. And people see it and they're like, oh, oh, you were clearly thinking about me. Like no, we were trying to make it so that everyone can feel like they can be part of this, so.
So what do you bring from the original trilogy into Andromeda? What were the big lessons that you were looking at from back there and bringing forward to your new game?
Well, there's a couple things that we learned. I mean, we did learn from the ending issue. We learned about, well, creating a compelling ending. And hopefully people look at Andromeda and they like what they see.
We learned about the importance of characters. Also remember, you know, that when you play Mass Effect 1, when you play Mass Effect 3 you've had three games of Garrus. And you're like, yeah, I went through so many things with Garrus. Garrus is my buddy. But back in Mass Effect 1 Garrus was like a random Thorian, right? So we understood the hardships of being able to have to build those characters up from the ground again because they're all new characters, right? But we do realize the importance of characters and we try and put extra special care into them especially since this is the first one.
Couple very easy things. Exploration in Mass Effect 1. That was cool but it just wasn't done the way that we wanted to do it in the end.
Andromeda, I think we were able to learn a lot, build that out. Loyalty missions, same deal from Mass Effect 2. People love those. And that's why we brought them into Andromeda. So there's a lot of bits and pieces from the franchise that I think when you bring over and you kind of connect them in a cool way they can create that magic again.
So one of the things that you mentioned was having characters that progress all the time. They kind of developed into what everyone loves over to course of three games. How do you approach making a character as memorable within one game now?
Well, I mean, it's tough, right? You don't really know. You don't really know, but we try to make our characters varied enough where we think that each of them add a little bit to the overall mix.
So, for example, Drack, he's very Krogan but he's very old and wise and sage. And he's got, he's been through some stuff. And he brings that to the table. But then you've got PeeBee who's, you know, lighthearted, playful. Two very different characters. And some people, they'll appreciate Peebee and not appreciate Drack. And some people will appreciate Drack and not PeeBee. And so that dynamic is important to us. If we give that from the very beginning I think you'll find a lot of people liking the characters more and more. And, of course, you know, we hadn't said that you'll never see these characters again after Andromeda. So we do have an opportunity to evolve their personalities throughout games, too, should we want to do that.
You guys had an impossible task ending that franchise. The more I think about it the more overwhelming it becomes because it's a series about allowing the player to define their own story.
Uh huh.
And as a fan, my worry is what if that happens again? I'm looking at Andromeda and seeing everything you're trying to allow us to do, but is it on the same trajectory as the original trilogy where you're like, "How do we bring all these decision back together so we can put a full stop on this story?"
Yeah. To tell you how I'm approaching it's probably going to involve some story spoilers line Andromeda. So I don't want to do that too much. Once you play Andromeda and you see Andromeda ends you'll see that we've taken a couple things away from how the trilogy ended. And it puts us on a nice forward trajectory to be able to tell more stories in Andromeda.
I would agree with you that it is a very, very hard task, right? Because, you know, in any other type of medium, film, for example, you control the player journey completely, right? You control everything they see and they don't see, but in a game you don't. So it's more than just about variables, right? It's also about satisfying. So if we look at satisfying as the most important thing you can still create a satisfying ending regardless of how many variables there are. And that's where we're going with Andromeda.
Okay. So how, you talked earlier about releasing a tiny bit of information and the world just going absolutely mental for it. What kind of level of intimidation must you feel right now as to kind of have to live up to the original trilogy? How are you guys feeling in terms of looking back at your legacy and also trying to plot a new feature from the franchise?
Yeah. This is the absolute worst time because the game is done. And now we're just waiting for it to come out, right? So, you know, review copies are going out. Fans are starting to see more and more. It's a normal hesitation that you get before launch.
The living up to the trilogy, I think we all feel pretty good about that. Most if not all people who play it say this feels like Mass Effect. This feels like a game that is Mass Effect and it has new stuff. So that's good enough. We feel like we're good.
We know that Shepard and his story's done. We've been very outspoken about that. So I think it's a good place. It's just we don't know yet. You never know before you launch a game.
What do you hope people take away from Andromeda?
For me, I hope that they, it breeds new life into Mass Effect for the next however many years, right? I hope that people see this as, oh, this is a really cool property that I didn't see before because I thought maybe I had to play all the other games and I couldn't get into it. I hope Andromeda is like, okay, well, good. So if you really want to start start now because there's new everything, new characters, new space. Everything's different. So I hope they take that away. And it kind of, we get a whole bunch of new fans and they can, we can be having these same conversations in ten years from now about Mass Effect.
If Andromeda is laying the foundation for a future for Mass Effect where do you hope it goes from here? And where do you hope to see the series maybe in five or six years time?
Well, if people like Andromeda I'd like to see more Andromeda or maybe another area of space. I mean, to be honest, we haven't dug too far into the, whoa, what's the future look like for Mass Effect, but at the same time, if I know these fan and if I know people, they're going to love it. And they're going to want more. And we just have to maintain a balance between kind of adding new and cool unique things to the franchise and still making it feel like Mass Effect. And that's a challenge for another day.
It's comforting to see that you guys are confident about what you got.
Well, do you know what helps? The fans. And I'm not just saying that to be producery. It's like, no, if you go to the PAX show floor tomorrow you will see tons of Mass Effect Cosplay. You will see hundreds of people who care desperately about the franchise. Most other developers can't say that they have a magic like that built into their fan base. So they kind of lift us up, right? It's them who make the possibilities for the future. It's not, you know, us or the money or anything like that.
The Dark Knight might not face Deathstroke in the upcoming DC movie The Batman. Following the news that the film won't start production until 2018, actor Joe Manganiello has stated that he is unsure if he will now appear in it.
In an interview for Pittsburgh Today Live, Manganiello was asked if he was still part of The Batman's cast. Without giving much away, the actor threw up his hands in a resigned way and said: "Maybe. We'll see." (via Comicbookmovie)
Last week, Variety writer Justin Kroll, who first reported the movie's delay, tweeted, "any casting rumors you hear are likely BS." This certainly suggests that Manganiello's involvement is not assured.
Deathstroke first appeared in a 1980 issue of The New Teen Titans, and the armored mercenary has gone on to appear in a wide variety of DC comics over the years. He is associated with Batman and is a main adversary to the Green Arrow. On TV, he recently appeared in Season 2 of the CW show Arrow, played by Manu Bennett. He also featured prominently in last year's Batman: Arkham Knight.
Pokemon developer Game Freak's current project is unknown, but we may have just received some small clues.
A new job ad (translated by Siliconera and IGN) reveal that the company is hiring temporary employees to work on a "globally popular RPG" whose platform will be "console."
The job requires someone with experience in creating character models to the level of Wii U and PS Vita, reports Siliconera. The title of the game is not stated, but it is apparently "an RPG game that is popular on a global scale," that "just about anyone knows."
It should be noted that the job ad is found on third-party job listing site Indeed. Similar ads can be found on Game Freak's site, though these do not state the information found in the Indeed listings.
Game Freak is best known, of course, for developing the mainline Pokemon games. Outside of the critter-collecting phenomenon, the company has made smaller titles like HarmoKnight and Tembo the Badass Elephant, the latter of which released for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Mainline Pokemon games have always been exclusive to Nintendo consoles, however.
Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has shared what could be the first ever picture of Luke Skywalker. Hamill tweeted the image of himself on the Star Wars set, on the very first day of shooting in 1976. Check it out below:
Taken in Tunisia early morning Day #1 waiting for my 1st shot (emerging from home for robot auction)-Perhaps the very 1st #LukePic#SWpic.twitter.com/WMCGnWCotP
As Hamill notes, Star Wars began production in Tunisia, where all the Tatooine scenes were filmed, before moving to London for the rest of the shoot.
In response to that image, Hamill was asked by Warner Animation publicist Gary Miereanu how he was feeling at the time: "At that very moment, were you thinking 'This is gonna be my big break' or 'Crap, it's early, dusty and way too bright?'"
Hamill replied by saying, "Judging by my clueless expression, probably both. Crew was kind but thought #SW was 'rubbish.' I kept telling them: 'We're on a winner!'"
"I think we are all going to be very upset if he does not win an Oscar, and no one more upset than Mark," Abrams said, possibly not entirely seriously.
The first official poster for the upcoming fantasy movie The Dark Tower has been released. The film hits theaters in July, and this poster suggests that it will deliver something spectacular. Check it out below:
The Dark Tower is based on Stephen King's classic series of fantasy novels. The movie was originally set to hit theaters in February, but the release date was subsequently moved back to July 28. At the time, it was reported that the ambitious post-production process meant that hitting a February release would have added millions to the budget, so Sony decided to delay the release instead.
The film stars Idris Elba as gunslinger Roland Deschain, while Matthew McConaughey is playing demonic sorcerer Walter Padick, aka The Man in Black. The movie is directed by Nikolaj Arcel, who previously helmed the Oscar-nominated A Royal Affair. Check out The Dark Tower's first official images here.
Last September it was also revealed that Sony are planning a Dark Tower TV show. It will be an adaptation of 1997's Wizard and Glass, the fourth book in King's epic series, and will feature both Elba and his 15-year-old co-star Tom Taylor. The pair will form part of a framing device for the central story, which is set many years before the events of the film.
The Dark Tower encompasses eight novels, which King published between 1982 and 2012. The books blend classic western themes with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands has finished top of the UK physical sales chart for the second week running. Ubisoft's open-world game was the biggest UK launch of 2017 so far last week, and it has held on to the No.1 spot for the week ending March 18.
Below Wildlands, Lego Worlds rises one position in its second week on sale to No.2, which pushes Sony's PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn down one place to No.3.
Next week's chart may be be shaken up by Mass Effect: Andromeda, which launches in the UK on March 23 (March 21 in North America). For now however, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Lego Worlds, and Horizon Zero Dawn are enjoying the podium positions.
You can read the full top 10 sales chart below. Note this table does not include digital sales data, and so should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.
It's been nearly five years since the last entry in the Mass Effect franchise. Mass Effect 3 launched in 2012 to mixed reception, with fans disappointed by BioWare's ending to the trilogy and characters they'd grown to love so dearly.
The latest in the series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, brings the series to a whole new galaxy, with new locations and new personalities to explore. We recently interviewed BioWare about the controversy surrounding the end to the original trilogy and how that affected the development of Andromeda--check out The Story of Mass Effect: Andromeda - Episode 1 and Episode 2 to find out more.
For now though, let's dig into reviews for BioWare's latest sci-fi adventure. In our own verdict, critic Scott Butterworth said the game "feels like a vision half-fulfilled." He said it contains "a dizzying amount of content, but the quality fluctuates wildly." Find out more in our full Mass Effect: Andromeda review.
For a selection of other critics' opinions, check out the roundup below--or for a wider view on critical opinion, you can take a look at GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
"In many ways, Andromeda feels like a vision half-fulfilled. It contains a dizzying amount of content, but the quality fluctuates wildly. Its worlds and combat shine, but its writing and missions falter--and the relative strength of the former is not enough to compensate for the inescapable weakness of the latter. As a Mass Effect game, Andromeda falls well short of the nuanced politics, morality, and storytelling of its predecessors. For me, the series has always been about compelling characters and harrowing choices, so to find such weak writing here is bitterly disappointing. Yet even after 65 hours, I still plan on completing a few more quests. The game can't escape its shortcomings, but patient explorers can still find a few stars shining in the darkness." -- Scott Butterworth [Full review]
IGN -- 7.7/10
"Mass Effect: Andromeda is an expansive action role-playing game with a few great moments that recapture the high points of the landmark trilogy that came before it, and energetic combat and fantastic sound effects contribute to a potent sci-fi atmosphere. Without consistently strong writing or a breakout star in its cast to carry it through the long hours and empty spaces, however, disappointments like a lack of new races, no companion customization, and major performance problems and bugs take their toll." -- Dan Stapleton [Full review]
Game Informer -- 8/10
"When taken as its own journey (and not in comparison to Shepard's saga), Mass Effect: Andromeda is fun, and the important parts work. The narrative isn't astounding, but keeps you invested and drives you forward. The combat is entertaining whether you're in single-player or multiplayer. The crew isn't my favorite, but I like them and they have some good moments. Even with its other problems, these are the largest forces shaping your experience with Mass Effect: Andromeda, and they make it worth playing. At the same time, I was often left looking through a haze of inconveniences and dreaming about the game it could have been." -- Joe Juba [Full review]
Polygon -- 7.5/10
"After a number of complaints, it might seem odd to end on such a positive note. Let's be clear: I'm conflicted about Mass Effect: Andromeda. There's a lot of roughness throughout the game, and the technical issues, while not game-breaking, are often incredibly distracting.
"But it's my time with the cast that I'm still thinking about, and the mysteries about the world that haven't been answered that make me feel like I'm waiting once again for a new Mass Effect game. And if I'm judging a game by where it leaves me, Andromeda succeeds, even if it stumbled getting there." -- Arthur Gies [Full review]
PC Gamer -- 80/100
"In the end, Andromeda still manages to be more than the sum of its parts. As a critic I can point to the things that don't quite work, the things that could be better, the things that should be better after 10 years and four of these games. I can also appreciate where improvements have been made, the basic pleasure of an improved combat system and a full-feeling, spectacular sci-fi world to explore.
"Yet I'm also aware that when I'm in Mass Effect's zone a lot of these dry pros and cons don't seem to matter as much. This is a series that has always been good at getting under your skin, that has built its reputation on the moments when all of those disparate elements, good and bad, cohere into an adventure that feels like it's happening to you. Andromeda can still do that. It's not perfect. It's not consistent. But for a story about vast journeys and fresh starts, it also feels a little like coming home." -- Chris Thursten [Full review]
Disney's newest live-action movie, Beauty and the Beast, had a massive opening domestically and internationally. According to first-weekend box office estimates posted by Entertainment Weekly, the film made $170 million in the US for the Friday-Sunday period.
This performance topples Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ($166 million), which was the previous first-weekend record-holder for March.
Internationally, Beauty and the Beast pulled in $180 million for its opening weekend, giving the movie a total of $350 million. In just three days. It had a reported production budget of $160 million.
Rounding out the top five movies at the US box office this weekend were Kong: Skull Island ($28.9 million), Logan ($17.5 million), Get Out ($13.2 million), and The Shack ($6.1 million).
You can see the Top 10 March 17-19 estimates below, via EW:
Super Mario Run will launch for Android platforms on March 23, Nintendo has announced.
Back in January, Nintendo confirmed that Super Mario Run would arrive for Android in March, but this is the first we're hearing of a specific date. The game arrives with the Version 2.0.0 update, though no other details about what the update will contain were shared (via DualShockers).
The game's free download comes with a sampling of levels, but you need to pay $10 to unlock every course. According to Nintendo, five percent of players have paid to buy all the courses, meaning the game has brought in many millions of dollars in revenue so far.
We've teamed up with Hi-Rez Studios to give away 5,000 closed beta keys for Paladins to redeem on PS4 (Europe, Australia and New Zealand ONLY). This is an instant win and you will receive an email with the code within 24 hours.
If you're a reader based in North America, South America, and Canada, follow the below links to grab keys that will work for you!
Paladins is a team-based shooter with strategy elements and deep character customization through its unique use of collectible cards. These cards amplify and augment a character's core set of abilities in many interesting ways.
GameSpot and Five Star Games are very excited to give readers the opportunity to win the sold-out collector's edition of Persona 5: the Take Your Heart Premium Edition!
Honestly, we're annoyed we can't just keep this for ourselves.
One lucky GameSpot reader will get this rare collector's edition which includes a copy of Persona 5 in a Steelbook case, soundtrack, hardcover art book, a collector's box, a 4" Morgana plush, and a replica of the Shujin Academy schoolbag carried by the game's protagonists!
Additionally, two runners-up will receive a copy of Persona 5: Steelbook Launch Edition, which contain the game and a Steelbook case.
To enter, simply fill in the form below and provide an answer to the following question:
"You get to pick one, and only one Shin Megami Tensei demon to be your linked Persona for the rest of your life. Which one do you pick, and why?"
GameSpot staff will hand-pick the winners based on the creativity and/or humour of their answers. This competition will close on Monday April 3, 2017.
This competition is only open to residents of Australia. All entrants must be over 18 years of age.
Please use the form to enter the competition, answers written in the comments section are invalid.
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