Mass Effect 2 Preview

VideoGamer.com: The Mass Effect series is a cinematic experience. How have you spent the past two years refining storytelling and improving virtual acting?

CH: Mass Effect 1 was really the game we did to try and extend what we did in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. We knew where we could get to with the technology. We had an idea of it anyway. But the technology didn't even exist. The Xbox 360 didn't exist when we were developing Mass Effect 1 for a good portion of the project. We had to guess where things would go and how far we could push the acting. The big difference with Mass Effect 2 is we don't have to guess anymore. We know we can have a character respond and deliver an emotional blow without saying anything. In Mass Effect 1 when you reprimand Ashley at the beginning of the game and she looks back at you with a hurt expression on her face, you realise, wow, I think I hurt her feelings, and she hasn't even said anything. Now we know we can do that kind of digital acting.

We've built a much more movie like approach to the script and the dialogue in Mass Effect 2. And then we've also been able to do some technology improvements that allow us to do different things with the conversations. You'll have conversations in cars and shuttle rides in space, conversations while you're ducking under gun fire or walking through a prison facility, and they're all interactive. We're able to do a lot more interesting things with how we tell the story. It's that combination of having done it before artistically and knowing what we can do on a creative level, but also having the technology there that advances things a little bit beyond what we saw in Mass Effect 1.

VideoGamer.com: What's BioWare's approach to breathing life into science fiction through the Mass Effect series?

CH: The goal is you don't want to be derivative. Everything is like something, we know that for sure. No matter how original we make something, if it has three eyes then it's like this alien from that property. If it has four eyes then it's another alien from another property. In general we try to not base anything on any property out there, and just come back to first principles. It starts with absorbing our favourite influences. Obviously there are things we love about the best books we've read, or the great science fiction. A lot of Mass Effect is inspired by the feeling of the movies from the late Seventies and early Eighties, like Blade Runner, The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that early, ambient eerie idyllic future. What we do is we take those magic moments or feeling and influences and boil them down to their principles. What are we going for? What do we like? It comes down to ideas about art style and what makes a great character. Then using those principles then we build back up into something that's original and come up with our own story, our own ideas for aliens and things like that. That way we avoid being derivative of something else.

At the same time, once we start developing things then we start to look for thematic symmetries, where we go, what is the high level concept really about? What are we trying to say with the story and the universe that we're developing here? We try and make it a lot more cohesive. That's how we end up with something that's a nice combination of being familiar enough, because it's based on these principles that we all appreciate about great science fiction, and yet it has fresh and original ideas in it. And then at the same time it holds together as one thing, because we've looked for those symmetries and themes that all tie it together.