Post by Gilvan Blight on Jul 27, 2009 14:17:15 GMT -5
This is some pretty cool news about Mass Effect 2. Though it still doesn't offset the fact that their montly DLC ended up being one mission that you couldn't even play if you had already finished the game.
"When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things," Hudson explained. "Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information. When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information."
The information pertains not just to what your ending was, but to "literally hundreds of things," Hudson said. "Anytime we have a plot or a character or situation in Mass Effect 2, we think about what you did, potentially, in the first game that might affect said plot or character or situation in the second. We can look at each variable and dynamically change what happens in the moment."
By way of explanation, Hudson described one encounter early in the first Mass Effect that can effect how a different plot plays out in Mass Effect 2:
"Conrad Verner was a fan of Commander Shepard's that you met in the first game, and it's like you meet this guy in an alley and you can be nice to him or you can be a jerk to him, and at the time you might have been thinking of it as just a trite role-playing convention, good-guy bad-guy, and that's that.
"Jump forward two years. Now you're playing Mass Effect 2, and oh my god, who's this, it's Conrad Verner! And based on what you've done, you realize that while the moment in the first game maybe seemed throwaway, now Conrad's back and involved in another plot in a game you're playing two years later...and what you did two years ago is meaningfully affecting what's happening. That's a small example."
"When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things," Hudson explained. "Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information. When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information."
The information pertains not just to what your ending was, but to "literally hundreds of things," Hudson said. "Anytime we have a plot or a character or situation in Mass Effect 2, we think about what you did, potentially, in the first game that might affect said plot or character or situation in the second. We can look at each variable and dynamically change what happens in the moment."
By way of explanation, Hudson described one encounter early in the first Mass Effect that can effect how a different plot plays out in Mass Effect 2:
"Conrad Verner was a fan of Commander Shepard's that you met in the first game, and it's like you meet this guy in an alley and you can be nice to him or you can be a jerk to him, and at the time you might have been thinking of it as just a trite role-playing convention, good-guy bad-guy, and that's that.
"Jump forward two years. Now you're playing Mass Effect 2, and oh my god, who's this, it's Conrad Verner! And based on what you've done, you realize that while the moment in the first game maybe seemed throwaway, now Conrad's back and involved in another plot in a game you're playing two years later...and what you did two years ago is meaningfully affecting what's happening. That's a small example."