Mass Effect - Interview @ NZ Herald

BioWare's Casey Hudson has been interviewed in the NZ Herald about Mass Effect.  It covers familiar territory but here's a bit on the effort of modern graphics:

We're starting to see some amazing games on 360 using the next-gen graphics and other possibilities. How did you find the challenge of pushing these boundaries?

I'm reminded of the famous phrase, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times." We finally had the graphical power to do things that we had been looking forward to for years, such as extremely realistic lighting and self-shadowing that allows us to light characters as though they were real actors on a set. We had the ability to create materials that were never before possible, and could use real-time physics to create vehicular gameplay as well as powerful and chaotic effects during combat.

 

But at the same time, these opportunities made every aspect of development an order of magnitude more difficult. Character models had to be detailed down to individual wrinkles; combat animations required an incredibly complex blending system to create smooth transitions between motion-captured movements... The quality bar was incredibly high, and much of our work went into fine details that we didn't have to worry about in previous generations.