14 DAY TRIAL // Mass Effect 2 is now released on the Xbox 360 home gaming console and on the PC in North America, with Europe still having to wait until January 29 to actually play the science fiction role playing action hybrid BioWare created and Electronic Arts published.
Initial reviews are very positive, saying that the sequel manages to fix everything that the original game in the series got wrong, and it seems that BioWare was consciously interested in making the experience as criticism-proof as possible.
Adrien Cho, who is the lead producer working on Mass Effect 2, has told Gamasutra in an interview that “We wanted to make sure that absolutely every issue that was brought up was addressed... so the press had nowhere to go, and all the critics had nowhere to go, because we had made an attempt to hopefully address all those issues in some capacity.”
The producer says that the main focus after the first Mass Effect shipped was to take out all the feedback offered on the official forums, in the gaming press and in other fan-made outlets and compile a huge list of things that needed to be improved in order to make Mass Effect 2 as close to a perfect experience as possible. Once the list was compiled, “it became really clear. It became a blueprint. It made making the sequel really easy.”
The only problem with making Mass Effect 2 a videogame so close to perfection that it allows no space for critics to move around is that BioWare will be hard pressed to improve on it for Mass Effect 3, the last installment in the planned trilogy. It seems that the development team might face one very philosophical question: how can one improve when the starting point is perfection?