14 DAY TRIAL // Jonathan Perry, who is the lead developer working on cinematics at BioWare talked to an audience at the Game Developers Conference event in San Francisco about the “contrastive juxtaposition” technique that the company uses in order to inject emotion into its cutscenes.
The developer showed the scene which ends Mass Effect 2 and said that the emotion of the moment and the fireworks that surround Commander Shepard are contrasted with the silence and the muted color pallet used as the protagonist meets his final fate.
Perry told the audience that, “I like to think of contrast in terms of polarity. We have positive and negative polarities that we're all familiar with--good vs. evil, light vs. dark. But they don't have to be good and evil -up and down, for example.”
The polarization is linked to the content that BioWare games deliver to the player and creates situations where it is easy for the development team to introduce emotion and meaning with just a few images or conversations.
He added, “We do this a lot in BioWare games, and the image we swap out is determined by your decisions as a player. We can manipulate the order, the context of events to enhance meaning or create meaning where it would not have been otherwise.”
Perry also talked about the intro for Mass Effect 3, saying that the contrast between the Reaper invasion and the little boy playing with a model starship is at the core of the entire game experience, showing how Commander Shepard needs to make tough decisions while also keeping contact with the core of his humanity.
Mass Effect 3 has been launched last week on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and the game has managed to attract almost universal praise from critics, selling close to 1 million copies in just one day.
A heated discussion about the ending of the game has already been started on both official and fan forums.