Mass Effect

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Lord knows we'd wash with sandpaper for the opportunity to take Mass Effect home this weekend, but we'll just have to make do with the first hour we sat through with BioWare co-doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

For our reaction to the game click on over to our eyes-on preview, but in the meantime here's what we managed to get out of the two BioWare bosses in our post-viewing Q&A...;


Mass Effect is an incredibly ambitious title. What measures are you taking to make sure that one area of the game, say the exploration, role-playing or combat side, doesn't fall short of the others?

Ray Muzyka: That's a great question. Over the last few years we've been really focusing on what a BioWare game is and for us there's four core activity pillars, as we call them. These are the pillars of the game, the tenants that we're really focusing on. We focus on all of them to varying degrees and in different ways in different BioWare games.

In Mass Effect like in all BioWare games we're focusing on the story, the character and amazing digital actors. We're focusing on making really accessible, fun action combat. We've got exploration, the galaxy map, uncharted worlds and your own rover to drive around in.

There's also customisation options; the way you change yourself, the way you customise your characters at the start of the game and who you bring with you on your travels.

All of those aspects of the game are being developed in parallel. Right from the start they were part of the original vision of the game, so they're not separate elements, they're a unified whole. So we're not building separate parts of the building together, we're sort of chaining them together. You really feel compelled to go from a story area to an exploration area, to combat.

Greg Zeschuk: I suppose the simple answer is; we play it. We play our games, we finish them multiple times. So it's the judgement of the team and ourselves to make sure it's good simply by experiencing it. It's hard when you do it multiple times to get a sense for it, but we really do make sure it holds together and that a super high standard is always maintained.

Ray Muzyka: We just don't let a game out the door until we're sure and have finished it multiple times. It's got to be polished, it's got to be great and each game has to be better than the last. We're really confident this is going to be the best game BioWare has ever done.

You've managed to shoe-horn the game on to one DVD. What are the consequences of that? Has anything had to be held back for downloadble content?

Ray Muzyka: We haven't revealed any plans yet for post-release content; download, episodic. But Mass Effect is a natural fit for that kind of thing.

For the longest time we were pretty sure we were going to have to fit the game content onto two DVDs, because there's just so much content in the game. Right now it looks like we're going to get it on one and it's been difficult because there's a lot of content. It's a very ambitious title.

The voice throughout the game as well; for the main character, all the party members; everybody talks.

Greg Zeschuk: There's so much. We're probably going to have multiple languages per disc as well - we're still working that detail out. There is again, so much voice talent and stuff going into the game.

Speaking of voice talent, can you tell us about the actors you're using?

Greg Zeschuk: There's over a hundred I think. There 300 characters; it's pretty crazy in a good way.

Ray Muzyka: It's all about conveying the personalities of the characters. You have to have credible characters, the dialogue has to flow. We've got some famous actors for the voice acting as well. We haven't announced who they are yet but you may be able to pick them out.

Greg Zeschuk: Someone actually guessed one or two in the last demo. We're not saying anything about that!

The animation work on the characters themselves is impressive. Are you motion capturing you voice actors' movements at all?

Greg Zeschuk: Oh yeah. The cut-scenes are all motion captured. This has actually been an amazing learning experience for us in terms of the voice acting. It's more conversational than we've ever done, it flows.

Sometimes the actors are together in the studio but often there not, so we've had to do a moderate number of re-takes to actually make conversation flow and to make it sound like a real conversation. You kind of imagine that it's all acted out and people voice their lines after, but we're literally just going along and creating it in real-time.

It's very exciting. We have very solid scripts but sometimes just to get that conversational sound you have to alter it.

Ray Muzyka: The dialogue system is a proprietary system we've created, and the reason why the conversations are all part of that is because it's so easy to make choices that constantly map. For example, there's an angry option on the bottom right and there's a nice option on the top right. The system allows players to have the dialogue conversation flow.

Greg Zeschuk: You can purposely interrupt the conversations as well, so it's almost as if you're kind of role-playing the conversation. I remember when I first played with the dialogue system I was like, 'wow'. It really does feel like you're in the scene dictating what your lines are. It really brings you in to the experience.

How difficult has it been to make each world in the game different and distinct?

Ray Muzyka: We have a big team. We have a lot of people working on this; it's the biggest team we've ever fielded. We've got 130 people working on it, so that's a lot of content creators, a lot of testers. We're on the polish phase now kind of finishing up some content, optimising and fixing bugs. So we've had a big team for a long time and it's a grand vision, and to achieve that vision you need a large group of talented people.

Part of the vision was to have a galaxy to explore. You have to have variety in the worlds; ice worlds, swamp worlds, desert worlds and things like that. There's a whole range of choices in the places you can go. You can just focus on the mains storyline and the critical path, but the offroad path is just so tempting because there's so many cool things to explore.

There's full quest-based planets, there's planets with dungeons to explore and there's planets where you just walk around outside and find some cool loot and take off.

Greg Zeschuk: There was also a very long conceptual phase for the game. In other words we spent six to eight months in the beginning conceiving how things would look. A large amount of work was spent with the ground work and visuals, so if we did actually end up building it there was a real clear idea what the armour looks like, what the environments look like and what the monster look like.

Ray Muzyka: We've got some amazing art up on our wall. All the concept art is just plastered all over the place. We've even got screenshots up on the wall and that's the best part; it really has been achieved. You can put the screenshot next to the original concept piece and that's what it looks like. The team's done an amazing job on the art side.

Andy Robinson