Thread: Mass Effect 2... Decisions, Decisions.

Here comes the hype folks, prepare yourselves!

Many of you may have been disappointed with the apparent lack of impact your decisions from the original Mass Effect had on the story in ME2, well it appears that the development team will be looking to make the experience much more personalised in the third (and final) instalment.

Originally Posted by Casey Hudson - Project Leader for Mass Effect 3

We plan out the larger plot points of the story from one game to the next, but it would be impossible to plan it all in advance. More importantly, we’d never be able to plan as many creative opportunities if we’d do it all up front. Instead, we record what a player has done in a play-through, and then we have all of those choices available that writers can refer to as they build storylines.

Numerically, it’s over 1,000 variables that we’ll have access to for shaping the Mass Effect 3 experience for people who’ve played the previous games.

Also those of you hoping to scratch your RPG itch may also be disspaointed.

Originally Posted by Casey Hudson - Project Leader for Mass Effect 3

If you define an RPG as a game where you equip your hero by sifting through an inventory of hundreds of miscellaneous items and spend hours fiddling with numerical statistics, then Mass Effect 2 isn’t one.

In Mass Effect 2 we focused on what we love about RPGs: An awesome sense of exploration, intense combat, a deep and non-linear story that’s affected by your actions, and rich customization of your armor, weapons and appearance.

We had an overwhelmingly positive response to this approach, and while we’ll make further adjustments to it for Mass Effect 3, we're really happy with how it’s been received so far.

Because hours on end of planet scanning just screams "awesome"...

Still the game is still in it's early stages and I for one am looking forward to it.

Any idea of a release date? I heard rumours of early 2011 but that's a bit ridiculous :L

It likely will be mid to late 2011, & at this point they're better off not putting down a firm date other than '2nd quarter of 2011' type thing..

The odd things about ME2 (& I haven't played it, but did recently complete out ME1 using the wiki) there are a lot of choices from ME1 that have impact in ME2.. However theyre so tiny that most people wouldn't notice em..
eg, side quest of killing two slaving bosses & then the woman who gave you it takes over? - they're referred in ME2.. -

• If you didn't kill em, they're about in a passing news comment as slavers..
• If you killed em & she took the role, shes refered in the news comment about drug running or something.
• If you killed them, she took over but you charmed/threatened her to disbaned the gang, shes referred as now being some sort of charity type thing.
• If you killed everyone, there's no mention of them at all.

I think the perceived problem with ME2 is that there didn't seem to be major story arcs that are affected by the ME1 choices (exception of Tali?), instead its all tiny choices like the one detailed above. unless you where sad (or read a wiki page) you wouldn't know that these side announcements or tiny quests are actually linked back to ME1

I guess the difficulty in this is determining the payoff for the long time in-depth players against the newer first time players ( as well as players who didn't bother with side quests or remembering such things) - Having major story arcing being affected might well result in a huge ballooning of main story in ME2 that would have made the game unwieldy & thus have left far too many potential story threads open for ME3.

I agree the decision didn't really make that much difference it was a nice touch though all the same. Most games just start a fresh at least bioware gave it a little extra and carried the major plot parts into the sequel and hope they do it again in the 3rd which i am sure they will

I think that the lack of real consequence from ME1 to ME2 may be to prevent too much story bloat coming into ME3, then they maybe plan to really flesh out your decision making with multiple endings dependant on your actions in previous games.

If the multiple endings in ME2 were too radically different then it would have been a nightmare developing ME3, the different story ark’s would have diverged too much from each other or the transition would have been too jarring forcing people down the same path in ME3 no matter what their choices were in the previous game.