GDC 09: Mass Effect 2 -- Problems Solved?

BioWare knows there were a few technical issues with Mass Effect. Rather than putting the blinders on and forging ahead, the team took a step back and looked at what in the development process caused those problems to exist and then came up with a new process for the sequel. As Corey Andruko, project manager for Mass Effect 2 summed it up at the close of BioWare's talk on its iterative level design process at the Game Developers Conference, "We had a little bit of a hitching on the Citadel…maybe the loading on the elevators was a little long…We definitely feel we would have been able to resolve these problems."

So what has been changed this time around and how will that make Mass Effect 2 a technically superior process? Dusty Everman, lead level designer, and Andruko explained just that with the help of some work-in-progress gameplay footage of the upcoming game.

First, the juicy details. The two videos that were shown offered a montage of the phases of production Mass Effect 2 has gone through. The first video was all combat and began with just a blocked out level, before cycling through various levels of production until a near-final version was shown. Since everything was still a work-in-progress, it is hard to speculate too much about what was seen, but I will anyway. The heads-up-display looked different from Mass Effect, but the combat was largely the same. The player could be seen attacking a few enemies on the far side of a room with a gun and taking cover up against a few crates.

BioWare conveniently didn't use the traditional Shepard model in the combat video and the teasing got even worse in the next video. This one featured dialog, but never directly addressed the hero or offered the hero himself actually talking. The generic player character was wearing an N7 set of armor, though. The only talking came from a female Asari character named Seryna. The squad was in a flying car, moving on an air-highway through a crowded city. Seryna was giving a briefing on the upcoming combat mission which would involve storming a penthouse where mercs were sure to be waiting for some action. The scene ended with the hover car landing outside of the penthouse building and the group climbing out of the car. Perhaps more extensive planets and cities will be included in Mass Effect 2 that feature multiple locations to explore instead of just one main hub.

Now you may be wondering what these work-in-progress videos were used to showcase. To get there, we'll have to take a step back to the beginning. Mass Effect was created with a work-flow that began with the writer who would create both the plot and basic 2D level design. From there, production would extend to blocked out levels and then on to full production. At the end, each level would be optimized for performance.

You can probably see where the issues cropped up.

With everyone working in closed vacuums, or silos as BioWare described them, it forced people to focus on disciplines rather than the levels as a whole. This meant that iterations in one "silo" could produce extra work in others. This forced unplanned work to crop up, late reviews of content and sometimes caused content to be cut entirely. And as Everman explained, "...you would have intractable performance issues. It wasn't because we didn't try to fix those framerate drops... the way to do it would have been recreating entire swaths of content." As an example, Everman mentioned that the Caleston level of Mass Effect was originally supposed to be much bigger. Unfortunately, the production process caused level layout and story problems which forced major sections to be cut.

With Mass Effect 2, each level moves through phases of creation. The basic premises the team is working under include having every level always be playable, always built on a foundation and always be at performance. This means technical hitches cannot persist. "When the framerate starts dipping," said Everman, you must "fix them then and there."

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