14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Mass Effect 2 was announced as being in development by BioWare, one of the more interesting features unveiled was that the game would be able to take the data out of a save for the first game in the series and reflect the choices the player made in the initial stages of the sequel.
With the release date for the role playing game getting ever nearer, Casey Hudson, who is the lead producer on the title, decided to reveal a bit more details related to the feature.
Talking to PC World, he stated that “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. 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.”
It seems that one of the “tricks” that BioWare is planning to employ is to take rather marginal characters from the original game and place them in important roles in Mass Effect 2.
This will mean that interactions that seemed unimportant to the player now come to the forefront and shape the way the sequel is being played. The developers are also taking into account the big choices made by the players and creating a game space that reflects them fully at the beginning of Mass Effect 2.
This basically translates into truly hardcore role playing fans being tempted to replay the original game, trying out a variety of endings and choices, to see the effect that they have on the sequel. Expect sales of the original Mass Effect to surge when the new game is released.