Mass Effect 2 Has Been Phoning Home, BioWare Admits

Game developer BioWare has talked about how it has been tracking player behavior in its action role playing hybrid Mass Effect 2 in order to see what decisions gamers were making in the game in order to get information for the planned third installment in the science fiction series.

The developers have emphasized that all the collected information is anonymous and nothing can be traced back to the players.

Casey Hudson, who is an executive producer working on the series, says that the team has been looking at what Achievements players collected in the first video game in the series but wanted even more information from the second one.

Talking to IGN he said that stats “don't always give you the answers, but it sometimes raises questions or gets you to ask the right questions.”

He went on to talk about some of the stuff BioWare found out, stating, “More people played the soldier class than all of the other classes combined. If you know that, then you can start thinking about future games. Is that good? Is that a problem? Should we look at the other classes and start thinking about ways to make them selected as often as soldier?”

BioWare now also know that the average time taken to complete Mass Effect 2 was about 33 hours and that only some 50 percent of those who bought the game actually took the time to get to the end.

There were two players gaming on the PC who completed Mass Effect 2 28 times and four gaming on the Xbox 360 who went through it 23 times.

Around half of gamers got saves from the first Mass Effect that brought them into the sequel and although the game has quite a lot of text only 15 percent of the conversations were skipped.

Mass Effect 3 is now in development at BioWare but its launch will only come after Dragon Age 2 is out in early 2011.