Mass Effect News, Walkthrough, and Screenshots

From the blog of: Preston Watamaniuk,
Principal Lead Designer

Time for an update! I have been asked to step in and give Casey a break. Given all the talk about character classes, I thought I would comment on some of the decisions that go into their design.

We built the rule set for Mass Effect from the ground up to emphasize the ranged combat employed by weapons, biotics and tech. Two ideas drove the rules and eventually the class design at the high level:

1. Core Mechanics (what you can be skilled at)
2. Active Gameplay Mechanics (what you can actually do to enemies)

Core Mechanics
We built Mass Effect around three core sets of capabilities:

1. Weapons and combat training
2. Biotics (dark energy) abilities
3. Tech abilities

Classes within an RPG fundamentally determine how you will play the game. We built each gameplay mechanic first, and then built character classes that used them. As a result, classes feel more naturally integrated into the overall game but have different gameplay. The strengths and weaknesses of enemies are based around these mechanics instead of around things like damage types. In Mass Effect, an enemy will be vulnerable to biotics, not fire or cold. The effect is that playing through the game with different classes causes the combats to become more or less challenging, depending on the combination of character classes in the squad. It means that your squad members are important parts of your strategy for overcoming difficult scenarios that play to the weaknesses of your current character.

Recently, a combat situation we encountered in our daily gameplay review highlighted the importance of balancing the squad with different classes. A squad was put together to fight a Krogan Warlord, one of the toughest combat opponents in the game. He is heavily armored and shielded, and he takes a lot of punishment before he dies. He is the Soldier�s worst nightmare. The squad had a heavy emphasis on weapons instead of biotics or tech. When combat began, the Krogan Warlord blasted apart the squad in no time. I knew that the Krogan Warlord would have been much easier to overcome with an Engineer or Adept in the squad.

Active Gameplay Mechanics
We wanted the gameplay in Mass Effect to be as active as possible. Instead of making the game a dice-rolling simulation with turn-based combat, we wanted to move toward a simulation with rules support. For example, the Lift ability allows you to remove the effects of gravity from select targets, making them more vulnerable to physics. This opens up emergent gameplay possibilities for you. We want the various possibilities that different abilities open up to mingle and produce unexpected results that we never anticipated.

I came across a really interesting instance of this during the X06 playthrough. I was scaling the side of a crater when I encountered an enemy entrenched on a hill. I moved my squad to safety and ordered them to target the enemy. They were unable to get a clear shot at the enemy because of their lower elevation, so I used Lift on the target. He rose into the air, making it easier for my squad to pick him apart. I never designed this outcome; I never even imagined it before that instance. It was really cool to see two very different systems interacting in a way that allowed me to overcome a difficult situation. Each class in Mass Effect is built around its own set of active gameplay elements. The way you build your character and squad will determine what you can combine to overcome various situations.

A lot of other elements went into making our six character classes but these two factors formed a basis for many of the other decisions that came afterward. We have been iterating for months on the special abilities of all the classes and things are getting really fun. Combats that were previously considered to hard or impossible are now tactically challenging using a balanced squad and some thinking. We are still hammering on balance, pacing, and similar issues but the decisions we made two years ago are really paying off big in the game today.

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