Mass Effect: Legendary Edition - Interview with Mac Walters

Polygon interviewed Mass Effect: Legendary Edition writer Mac Walters.

What was the most surprising thing about going back and revisiting the trilogy?

Two things. One, how much there is. You can’t understate how much content is in there. With the three games, let alone the single player DLC, every time you make a change you have to test everything and man, it takes a long time. When you’re making multiple changes you realize, Whoa, there’s a lot here, and like you brought up earlier all of the different choices and paths people can take. It’s just massive.

The other really interesting surprise for me was Mass Effect 1. I struggle to go back and play any game I’ve shipped because all I can see is the bugs. It’s very difficult for me to turn off the developer head and get back into it. Even when we were working on Andromeda, and I wanted to re-experience the trilogy, I was like Oh, man, this is a slog.

So it’s been a while since I’ve been in there. When I started playing, I was like, I can’t believe what we pulled off. You know, back in 2007 when it came out ... we were building it in 2004, 2005, right? And all this physics, gameplay, just everything we had been able to achieve. As clunky as it was in some things, I was just like, Wow, amazing.

I’m very lucky and fortunate that I now had the opportunity to go back and revisit Mass Effect 1 and take some of the lessons learned from 2 and 3 and apply those to 1 so we can get those rough edges off and let the amazing things we did accomplish shine through.

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