If you’re wondering what data the BioWare team might be collecting, Casey Hudson (executive producer of the Mass Effect series) took a moment to explain about the data tracking, and provided an interesting statistic you’ll see below.
Seeing as the data sent to them is based off of events, I’m sure some players will be glad that there probably wasn’t a time-tracker within the Afterlife Club - you know who you are! Hudson went on to explain that the thought of tracking data started in Mass Effect 2, and wasn’t existent in the original game.
Look at it like this: If you could buy a blue pie or a red pie in ME2, and everyone went with the red pie, there wouldn’t be a blue pie in ME3. Their changes aren’t always that drastic, but hey, it’s an analogy with pies. Go along with it.
“Sometimes you’ll design something and think that it’s going to be used in a certain way and people will use it in a completely different way. And if you didn’t know that, then you would just keep making that system the same as you did before. But once you know what players like and what they don’t like, based on the way that they’re playing it, then you can make more of the good stuff and less of the stuff they weren’t interested in.”
It’s not surprisingly that this feature was mainly imported for the Xbox crowd, who built up a large fanbase around the original game. That said, Mass Effect 2 is a phenomenal game, and PS3 owners should look forward to it being released on their system.
There are a ton of different bits of data that BioWare is collecting, but they released this handy image full of random facts. Whoever the two people who played through Mass Effect 2 28 times on the PC are, we salute you.
The voice acting in the game is pretty awesome, and it really helps set a lot of tone and moods the game might not have been able to achieve otherwise - as we were told back at E3, the Star Wars: The Old Republic team were inspired by Mass Effect to put voice acting in to their game.
The voices in Mass Effect 2 make conversations more fluent and natural. Also, quit looking at that Asari.
This right here is a feature I wish more types of games would try to implement: porting over your character from one game into another is just awesome! It really helps with the continuity of a game and lets the story transition smoothly. Take a note, game devs!
We can only hope that the PC gamers did the mission out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because they downloaded some kind of sketchy texture patch to make Miranda more skimpily clad. Oh, you silly PC users!
Hudson finished up the interview with a simple explanation of the tracking technology, and still made it sound pretty awesome.
I’m all for it - if Mass Effect 3 manages to top the second one, I might as well stock up on canned food and live in my basement for a few years. And you know it? It’ll be worth it.
Source: IGN
