Mass Effect 2 - Hundreds of Variables Imported

In an interview at PC Games with Matt Peckham, Casey Hudson explains "hundreds" of decisions are included in the Mass Effect 2 save import feature:

GO: How significant are the variables being indexed in the save games, and how threaded throughout the Mass Effect 2 experience are they?

CH: It's completely different from anything you've played before, because it's literally, potentially threaded into everything that happens. When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things. Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information.

When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information. And it's not just what your ending was, or a couple of the big choices, you know, where we could have stuck a conversation at the beginning and asked you what you did and moved on. This is literally hundreds of things. [...]