Mass Effect 3 Interview

CVG managed to corner BioWare’s David Silverman during this past weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con for a brief Q&A about Mass Effect 3, particularly about the threequel’s expanded RPG elements, sales expectations, and how the story will continue beyond the trilogy.

Would you say it had more traditional RPG elements than in ME2?

Absolutely. Hands down. We get this question a lot. Mass Effect 2 won 150 Game Of The Year awards, right. How do you improve on that? One of the things at BioWare is that we don’t look at that and kick back: ‘Job done, let’s give them that again.’

We’ve done a lot of research about what people like about Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and other games too; what do they like about Gears Of War? Why does that game do what it does? Same goes for Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Call Of Duty and lots of RPG games too… we’ve looked at all these games to see what’s resonating and what’s not.

On the one hand, we don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole where Shepard starts rolling dice, but on the other hand we don’t want to ignore that coolness – where people can customise parts of their character and making them feel that it’s them in the adventure. We capitalise on that in spades in ME3.

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The DLC for Mass Effect 2 didn’t review quite as well as the game itself. Are you mindful of that this time around? Have you learnt any lessons from that?

I think it’s a slightly unfair question – I’d argue you’re never going to see DLC that can match [the main game]. You’ve got a title that’s epic and years in the making that’s 30-hours long and you’re going to compare a 2-hour DLC pack to it? It’s not going to stack up. I’d hate to see the game where the DLC is better than the main title. What we’re really trying to do is create more experiences for people to play in this universe; to feel more strapped in and get more context if they want that – whilst still maintaining the core beliefs that make up Mass Effect.

It’s still keeping an epic story and lots of choices with major consequences. The fact that Shadow Broker gets a 90% vs a 96%, we’re not losing sleep on that. But at the same time we’re not resting on our laurels, and making sure that feedback we do receive on content is absolutely weighing in on how we design our games moving forward.