Interview: Ray Muzyka

Are you planning more Mass Effect novels, and what can you tell us about recent movie rumours?
We’re very interested in both of those. We’ve done a couple of novels already and we might have more in the works. Movies – we’re very interested in doing movie extensions of any of our IPs, like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. There’s a lot of interest from Hollywood – a number of directors and producers have approached us. In fact we have some partnerships defined that we haven’t announced… the key for all these things for us in any extensions, of ancillary products or brand extensions to new media movies and television, is finding people who are incredibly talented and passionate about the art and craft of what they do, and we try and partner with the best and brightest whatever we do. That would be true if we were to do a movie as well, and if you do that I think you can achieve amazing things.

Which elements of Mass Effect 2 are you most proud of, and were there any changes you didn’t anticipate?
We listened to fan feedback and press feedback very seriously when building Mass Effect 2 and we ended up with a lot of points of feedback – the good news is we implemented everything we planned to implement, without exception so I’m very proud of the team for that. I’m also really proud of the rigour that they applied to that process of “what’s going to make the most difference to players?” We ended up putting things in three major categories: one was the intensity of the shooter experience. We wanted to make the action incredibly personal, intense and emotional.

The way we did that was by implementing many of the best features of the best shooters. We have a cover system; you duck behind cover, your enemies do so as well, your party does so intelligently. You can deploy your troops on the field in different places, which allows you to use really interesting tactical manoeuvres and combat, like flanking your enemies. We have more tech and biotic abilities, more types of ammo that can all be deployed tactically. Location based damage – shooting at different parts of the body makes a material different to the outcome of battles – all these things together just create intensity. If I was going to sum up the party experience, it’s just more intense.

The second category of improvements was technological. Locking the framerate at 30 fps, making sure the textures load in seamlessly with no popping, really smooth, faster loading, removing the elevators – al these additions were stuff we got valid feedback on from the players and we implemented it all. The third category was the fidelity and the integration of the optional content, like uncharted worlds. We wanted it to be simultaneously closer in fidelity and hand crafted, really unique, personalised and valuable even though it’s totally optional. There’s a ton of it in Mass Effect 2 – I think it doubles your play time if you do it all – and it’s very high quality. It also has an impact on the main game, so it’s optional but changes your endgame. So you’ll have a different experience than if you didn’t do it, which is really cool.

Mass Effect 2 is released in the UK today, and is out now in the United States, priced at £49.99 on the Xbox 360 and PC.