Norman has a number of obvious reasons for the change to the ammunition – speed, pacing, making it more like other shooters – but there are reasons which aren’t so obvious. Some of the best ideas in ME2 happened that way, where a passionate member of the team took their own time to try something they thought would be great, and it eventually passed harsh scrutiny to become part of the experience.”
Then when he pitched it to me, I was against it until I played it for a while and was convinced as well. The Lead Designer was against the idea, but tested the ‘ammo’ version of the game for several weeks in total secrecy before concluding that it made a huge improvement to the tension and pacing of combat. “It was something that wasn’t part of the main game design but instead was implemented as a test by a gameplay programmer. “One of the most controversial changes to the combat was probably how ammo works,” Hudson goes on. For the sequel, combat was overhauled with some specific goals in mind – it had to be playable in real time without any need to pause, cover had to matter, and weapons had to be useful from the moment you picked them up without ever needing to level up. In the first outing, careful aiming was largely irrelevant – if your crosshair was over a character the game would do some RPG math and work out if you had scored a hit or not. Norman’s team turned the RPG systems off completely and spent 81 calendar days tuning how combat would work in Mass Effect 2 using the original Mass Effect as a foundation. The changes started with the combat system.
“But we forgot labels and made a great game. It was a small percentage but we noticed,” says Norman.
“We had thread titles like ‘Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG’ and ‘BioWare ruined Mass Effect’ on our forums. “What do you generally expect in a sequel to a successful game? Usually, you’d expect polish and building on a lot of the features that were already there, but we did something radical with Mass Effect 2.” Where Mass Effect was what Norman calls an ‘action RPG’, ME2 is an all-out shooter RPG and has left a handful of forumites complaining that BioWare had stripped the RPG out of Mass Effect altogether. “In Mass Effect 1 we had a successful game,” Norman – ME2’s Lead Gameplay Designer – explained to us.
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