Mass Effect 2 - Shooter Shift Explained

BioWare's Christina Norman and Armando Troisi have presented at GDC on the Mass Effect series, resulting in a bunch of articles about the relationship with Mass Effect 1, the shift to more focus on being a shooter and the plan for Mass Effect 3.

Let's kick off with GameSpot with Mass Effect 2's Shooter Shift Examined:

As the engineers were preoccupied with other work, Norman and her team did their initial prototyping using the original Mass Effect's engine, making changes only to specific values like weapon damage or accuracy. And though the work ended up being mostly throwaway, she said that the experiments helped them get a better handle on the limitations of their current setup.

Getting into the brass tacks of design, Norman said that it became paramount to build great shooter gameplay. To do so, she said that they completely turned off the game's RPG system so that they could focus on crafting the shooter elements, a move Norman called the most important of the project.

The Escapist has a similar article:

According to Norman, the biggest issue with Mass Effect 1 was that players were often confused by the vagaries of the RPG-inspired combat system. In other shooter-like games, a player could pick up a rifle and shoot things right away, but Mass Effect, borrowing a trope from Bioware's bread and butter, RPGs, started players as a "level one character," meaning that when the player picked up a rifle at the beginning of the game that player was a "level one rifle shooter" and couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Not until the player leveled up, after a considerable amount of time in the game, did the player's ability to aim and hit improve.

From an RPG perspective, this mechanic makes perfect sense. But, as Norman says, Mass Effect is more than an RPG.

"Looking at [Mass Effect 1] gameplay footage," she says, "it looks like a shooter, but it's a shooter where you can't hit anything."

IGN explains that Mass Effect 2 has 700 hooks back to the ME1 plot, based on another presentation:

Troisi described Mass Effect's built-in ability to read your game save files as the series' "uber-feature," and said there are roughly 700 "plot hooks" in Mass Effect 1 that carry over one way or another into Mass Effect 2. To illustrate just how granular BioWare gets with these player choices, he showed a brief segment of Mass Effect 2.

In the scene, a male Commander Shepard walks up to one of the advertising pillars on the Citadel, and a trailer for a fictional film begins to play. Because this particular Shepard had chosen to let the Citadel Council die in the final moments of the game's ending, the trailer reflected that and announced that the film would have a fall release date. Then Troisi showed the same interaction with a female Shepard who had chosen to spare the Council. The trailer played out differently, and a summer release date was given.

Meodia has a slide presentation on the changes and Joystiq takes the same presentation but adds a little more detail:

The streamlined gameplay and GUI of Mass Effect 2 made it a huge critical success, but Norman pointed out some major criticisms from vocal members of the official BioWare forums. Threads titled "Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG" and "Gears of War with interactive dialogue" were highlighted as examples of fans disappointed by the strong shooting focus of the second game.

As with the transition from the first Mass Effect to the second, BioWare is taking these criticisms to heart for the third game, with Norman hoping the third will offer "richer RPG features" and "more combat options." What we can probably expect less of, however, is the mining minigame, which Norman described as the part that "nobody liked."

A nod to Omega for some of these links.