14 DAY TRIAL // BioWare's Casey Hudson has given some insight on designing the story in the Mass Effect games, especially about the third and final installment that the company is working on. The player's decisions are what complicates the process a lot, as the development team has to take into account all the possible combinations and try to keep things coherent across the multiple kinds of playthroughs that can be achieved.
“We plan out the larger plot points of the story from one game to the next, but it would be impossible to plan it all in advance,” he told PC Zone in an interview published in issue 224, via CVG. “More importantly, we'd never be able to plan as many creative opportunities if we'd do it all up front. Instead, we record what a player has done in a play-through, and then we have all of those choices available that writers can refer to as they build storylines. Numerically, it's over 1,000 variables that we'll have access to for shaping the Mass Effect 3 experience for people who've played the previous games.”
According to Hudson, Mass Effect 3 will keep the streamlined action focused gameplay because his team wants to concentrate on other important aspects of the role playing genre. “If you define an RPG as a game where you equip your hero by sifting through an inventory of hundreds of miscellaneous items and spend hours fiddling with numerical statistics, then Mass Effect 2 isn't one.”
He continued to comment that the sense of exploration, the intensity of the combat and a narrative that can take multiple paths depending on the player choices were what mattered in the Mass Effect franchise. Furthermore, giving players the chance to customize Shepard's appearance, armor and weapons really enhanced the sense of immersion in the game's world. BioWare is planning to refine this approach, but not to fundamentally change it for Mass Effect 3. No release date has been mentioned at the moment.