Mass Effect 3 Interview, Part Two

CVG published the second installment of their in-depth interview on Mass Effect 3, and this time they quiz lead sound designer Rob Blake, and senior environment artists Don Arceta and Noel Lukasewich. Here’s an excerpt:

How do you think the music will change with the arrival of your new composer? (Clint Mansell, who worked on Black Swan and movies like Requiem for a Dream)

We work with a lot of composers. Over the whole Mass Effect franchise we’ve worked with about eight different composers. It’s always outsourced but we work very closely with them and they’re always following our original vision – that retro futurism style we’ve built for Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is this mix of old and new in a lot of ways so we spend a lot of time with new, cutting edge synthesis mixed with old, modular analogue synthesis, trying to create really unusual and interesting sounds. Our big thing has always been an orchestral sort of feel but with some elements replaced with 70s and 80s synths.

So there are those two very specific technical things but composers often think more emotively so we work very closely with the writers to find out what the feel for each level and each narrative moment is; and how the player is supposed to be feeling when experiencing things.

(…)

What sort of interaction is there between the gameplay guys and your team?

DA: It’s a lot of back and forth. We let the designers know exactly what’s important to us on the art side – maybe the way the sun hits inside a room or something that we just don’t want to lose – and design will work with us exactly how to keep that.

We have a lot more integrated cover, so you don’t walk into a room and immediately know there’s going to be a combat there. It’s about making these spaces feel natural and not forced. It shouldn’t ever feel forced, by gameplay or art – it really should be this perfect marriage.

NL: Yeah, you don’t want to walk through a room and go, “okay nothing’s going to happen here. There’s no cover for me here,” and then you walk around the next corner and you just see a sea of these chest-high things – you basically see the fight ahead.

That’s something few cover-based shooters get right.

DA: Yeah, you play a game like Gears of War and they just have sandbags everywhere, and we really don’t want to do that. We really want to get away from arbitrary things placed just for the sake of gameplay.