Mass Effect - Where The First Mass Effect Failed And Succeeded

Drew Karpyshyn was one of main writers in the beginning of Mass Effect. As we all know he left before he could finish the trilogy. In this interview from Kotaku he shares what the story should of been like. I found it informative, and I hope others here do also.

“When we started planning out Mass Effect, before we started development on the game, we had a very small core team,” remembers Karpyshyn. “I was one of the people. Casey Hudson, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, David Falkner, were the key leads on the project. We spent about a year trying to find out exactly what kind of science fiction universe we wanted to make. We were all about the same age and all kind of grew up with those classic ‘80s what we call the Golden Age of sci-fi movies. Things like Alien and Aliens, and Terminator. A lot of us were big Star Trek and Star Wars fans too.”

“We were very familiar with the archetypes of science fiction or the standard stories that get told over and over again,” Karpyshyn told me. “We got together and took our favourite ideas and thought how do we combine these into something that will capture the spirit of that Golden Age of science fiction but still maintain a fresh look to it?”

“If I’m going to play 30 hours of a game and invest my time and effort, I want to make sure that the payoff is worth it. Now it doesn’t necessarily have to be saving the entire galaxy, but I want the end to feel like the time I invested makes me feel like I accomplished something worthwhile,” he observed.

”Whether I’m good or evil, Paragon or Renegade, or whatever I’m trying to do, I want to feel like, ‘Yes, that was worth spending hours and hours and hours of time to get there to the end.’ Not that it wasn’t a great game, but the days of Mario lets the princess in the castle [in Super Mario Bros.] probably are done in some way, because it doesn’t necessarily feel like that’s enough of a payoff for the kind of time and effort you would put into playing a game.

You don’t want to do a bait and switch on the fans. If they’re expecting one thing, you don’t want to give them something completely different. It’s OK to have surprises, or even twists, or things that go in different directions, but you still have to fulfil those basic needs that they’re looking for. If they’re looking to be the epic hero, you better make sure that they’re an epic hero by the time everything is said and done.”