Mass Effect 3 - Meet the Doctors and More
IGN has an interview with the BioDocs, titled Meet the Doctors, with some silly thoughts sandwiched between the questions:
Me: That seems to be the biggest challenge facing game makers today - managing options and choices and giving people a real sense of consequence. How difficult is that as a storyteller?
Ray: We've done a lot of work on choice before but now we've really focused on having those choices have decisive consequence and emotional impact on you. If you go this way, well this is going to happen and it just hits you in the gut. It makes you sit back and say, 'holy crap'. It's emotionally powerful.Greg. For us this is a passion, this is a craft. We see it as an art as much as a science. So the team really takes it seriously. It helps that so many of us have been working together for a long time. That continuity helps.
Ray is clean-shaven. Greg is splendidly whiskery. Neither of these observations help me. I consider making some wise-ass comment about them being actual real life doctors. 'Can you take a look at my tonsils? Haha.' Perhaps not. The doctors are in full flow. I allow them to continue talking about how they crafted one of the year's biggest entertainment events.
Ray: There aren't any real tools you can get off the shelf to do this stuff. There's no book you can read to tell you how to do it. It's very much experiential. The fact that this has been an all-consuming goal for many, many years, from a largely consistent group of people has given us a lot of ability to do this.
It's really neat to see where we started and our original conservative goals, and how we have ended up way past where we thought we could get. There are emotionally engaging stories that we've done that I didn't think would turn out as good as they did.
It became a positive reinforcement to do more, so the actions that we take are very, very refined.
...and the BioBlog has a community interview with combat designer Corey Gaspur and producer Billy Buskell, focused on multiplayer:
How did the inclusion of multiplayer affect how you approached combat?
BB: From my personal experience, I think multiplayer ultimately improved the combat in the game as a whole. The more we played multiplayer as a team (every night at supper for at least an hour ) the better we were getting at dealing with enemies, using power combos, etc. Because of this extensive play testing, the team was really able to ramp up the challenge on the higher difficulties. To beat Insanity in the single player campaign, you’re really going to have to work for it! The same can be said for Gold difficulty in multiplayer. You’re really going to need to prepare for a Gold match much the same way as real life N7 operatives would. Know the battlefield, bring the right kits, and equip the best gear to get the job done.
CG: Everything in ME3 was designed to feel powerful but balanced; this philosophy applies to SP and MP. The big challenge was ensuring that fans felt that each character and race had unique powers and builds which in-turn make’s each kit interesting and fun to play. It was very important to us that each power and ability matched the characters race, playstyle and backstory. We pushed very hard to ensure there is very little difference between gameplay in Single Player vs. Multiplayer.
Lastly, there's a 15 second preview of a 90 second "Take Back Earth" ad that will premiere on the weekend on the same page.
Information about
Mass Effect 3SP/MP: Single + MP
Setting: Sci-Fi
Genre: Shooter-RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released