And who would have thought we would get the chance to talk to Kevin Meek, lead environment artist for Anthem, who was involved as the Character and Environment Director in the legendary edition. He is an alumnus if such varied title as “Mechwarrior Online”, “Transverse”, “Duke Nukem Forever” and now the “Mass Effect” Universe.

DP: To get a rough idea of the project: How many people were involved?
Kevin Meek: The “Mass Effect Legendary Edition” (MELE) was largely driven by BioWare Edmonton itself and here we have a fairly small, but quite senior group of people. Around a dozen developers, where everyone has at least 10 years experience. And the vast majority has already worked on the original trilogy. Then there was a handful of people like myself who came at it as fans and did not work on the original trilogy, but almost everyone has probably 20 years of experience working in games.

With a smaller size team, it almost feels like an indie team – just a whole bunch of people wearing a bunch of different hats. They’ve all been through the process before, so they know what they’re doing and just did get down to business really fast.

That being said, we also had a lot of external help – we were able to push some of the work to outsource studios and just find specific experts in certain fields. For example, Blind Squirrel (blindsquirrelentertainment.com) was a programming partner for us, because they have lots of experience with porting from other remasters and remakes – specifically with Unreal Engine 3, which we are using. They are very involved in the whole intricacies of taking something up onto DirectX 11 and getting it onto the next generation of consoles.

That’s a big amount of work for us regular developers of BioWare. We would be able to get our way through, but if you can find people who are experts in that field, we can bring them in and partner with them. Also, there’s a handful of experts in Unreal 3 from Europe called Abstraction (www.abstraction.games). They came onto the project for a couple of months and really added a lot. But everything went through the Edmonton Studio.

DP: With the “Mass Effect” trilogy being made in Unreal 3, did you have newer technologies from Anthem, for example, to add?
Kevin Meek: The last time we, as a company, used Unreal 3 – or Unreal at all – was with “Mass Effect 3”. At that point, “Dragon Age Inquisition” and then “Andromeda” and “Anthem” switched to Frostbyte. It’s almost ten years since any of us have touched Unreal … except for private projects.

DP: With 10 years since the assets have been active, did you switch to newer versions of your toolset, or did you use legacy versions on newer hardware?
Kevin Meek: Well, it’s a decade long trilogy, so the tools in ME1 weren’t even the same as in ME2 and ME3. Sometimes, in order to get a file to open, so we could export it into something current – for example a very specific version of ZBrush.

But we also didn’t want to dust off and maintain three different sets of tools with their respective underlying infrastructure and engine code, so one of the first things we did is unifying that. Generally speaking, that meant going up to the most recent version, so we went up to a more recent version of Unreal 3 – more recent than “Mass Effect 3”, actually. For ME1, that was a pretty substantial upgrade, for ME3 it’s a handful of newer tools and a few iterations.

For our underlying tools – like mesh exporters and so on – the latest version in which everything was working is 3ds Max 2018, so we just unified everything to that. There were even a handful of tools that required Max 2018, because we couldn’t get the old ones compiling.

For the rest of the pipeline, we used whatever the original developers used. We opened up the assets, and then there were mesh files, and ZBrush files, and Mudbox files and Photoshop files … the development ran from 2006-ish through to 2015. That’s quite a lot of time in the games industry for a lot of tools and different pipelines. And on top of that, people were still figuring out how to use certain technologies – how to make and incorporate normal maps and high-poly /low-poly baking, for example.

DP: Do you have any tips for getting older stuff to work again?
Kevin Meek: Yes, anytime anything was documented at all was such a lifesaver – if you ever work on something that has even the slightest chance of being remade, save copies of the installation files for the programs you use. Especially near the end of a project, get everyone to work clean in the organisation of assets. It is sadly quite common to modify the texture directly, and not go back into the Photoshop file. This might get the game done, but it makes the work for the remaster or remake a LOT harder, when you have to become a archaeologist, and scroll through final_2_2.xyz.

DP: And how about technologies that weren’t possible when the games came out?
Kevin Meek: There are definitely effects, that you expect from the current generation of games. You expect some ambient occlusion, some sort of (at least faked) subsurface scattering, volumetrics …
Especially volumetrics, which came in the latest version of Unreal 3. It adds so much life and depth to a scene. We found that in ME1 and even in ME2, there was not a lot of movement and dynamic attributes to the levels. And that was largely technical constraints. Either the stuff hadn’t been invented yet, or the things were very expensive in terms of performance. Translucency and sorting and having half your screen filled up with transparent pixels. That’s still expensive, mind you – you can really catch yourself out with particle effects creating overdraw issues.

In MELE, we couldn’t go crazy, but consoles are ten times more powerful, and we have all this understanding what we want games to look like. And we could add that sense of life and dynamic. And since we brought all three parts onto one level, we could add certain types of tech into ME1 and 2.

There are other tools we had to write by hand – like our version of the ambient is custom. And the wrap lighting or the custom depth of filed is either custom, or ported back by hand from how you do it in modern day. Thankfully, with Unreal 3, there is troves of knowledge online on how to fake things like subsurface scattering these days – we took from well documented graphics bibles and user cases and tutorials. That’s one of the really big perks of working in Unreal – you just have to google it, and there’s the answer, sometimes in 10 different ways.

DP: When we look at the textures: How did you upscale all of those, and what tools did you use?
Kevin Meek: We used a number of things – we knew going in, that current AI-tools would be only level 1 for us. So, we did that as the first step – before anyone touched anything, we got that done. Myself and one programmer analysed a bunch of AI upscaling methods (Upres), and I was a bit of a sceptic before those tests. It’s like that meme “Zoom and Enhance”.

We did a lot of tests with textures, UI and FX, all the way to environment and character art. We had internal tools, and we had some out-of-the-box solutions. I was impressed with the results, but you have to test a lot and pick and choose, specifically for games.

We exported (and reimported) large batches of Targa files straight from the game files, so any last-minute changes were available – like I said, when you are close to finish, artists don’t always use the source-PSD-files, but work in engine.

Basically, we got everything from the game, and on that we ran the AI upres. At this point we had to pay close attention to the file-types, like normal maps and stacked textures. Every texture is a red-green-blue and sometimes an alpha channel. They usually don’t know about each other. So, if you upres, you suddenly get a lot of bleeding – because in the resolution change, they are not ignorant of each other, and they are suddenly mathematically incorrect.

Same thing with the stacked textures – basically a bunch of masks, for a character’s armour for example, where the different versions are just in some free channel in the texture. We had information about how shiny the armour is in the red channel and in the green channel you have the information which colours can go were. Or vice versa.

And if you process that, you get a lot of garbage – so we had to split those out into four different textures. Now we have four PNGs and then we upres those, and recombine them into a colour map and convert it back to Targa. There’s a little bit of a stepping processes.

With that approach, we ended up well north of 30,000 textures for the characters alone. But that worked really well, and bumped up the picture quality of the game. And we only upscaled one step in the source art – so from a 128-texture up to a 256-texture. Or a 1,024 to a 2,048.

DP: What was your pipeline for that heap of assets?
Kevin Meek: We had a really good tools programmer – and we tracked everything. The batch tool put the texture somewhere, split it apart, and create an Excel sheet of tens of thousands of lines, with “here’s the texture name, here is its new name (times four), here is what type of texture it used to be, and where does it go now”. And as long as you keep that Excel sheet saved, then all the tools can reference from that.

And we’d update the tools as we find things going wrong, and then you’d end up having to run the whole process again. A number of times we just reverted everything back to that “Safe Revision 01”. We babysat the AI upres and we only ran a few thousand threw it at once, just in case it crashed or anything went wrong. Largely it was just like a bank of computers working on that, as we slept or went home for the weekend.

DP: And, on the creative side, where is the tipping point where you need an artist?
Kevin Meek: Well, coming from the AI upres, we basically had the game up and running, and then the artists started coming in – and they used their trained eyes. Let’s take for example environment art: I would assign an artist to a level and they would own that level, play through it a number of times and create a list of assets they critiqued as not good enough. Those assets got ranked by priority, based on how bad it was versus how often is it used, or if it is a hero-piece, and then you just hit through your list of ugliest assets. When you play through the level again, the standard is raised – and you walk through that cycle a couple of times, and it is getting good.

But with iteratively getting the things better until the point where nothing catches your eye as bad, you still have to remember: A remaster is very art-focussed, but at the end of the day, “Mass Effect” is a story-driven game, with the characters and their interactions in the foreground – and therefore, our job as artists was to make sure that you are never distracted by the art in a negative way.

The AI upres gives us a great base to work off of, but it doesn’t make bad art good. If something is noisy or boring or shifted, you just have to recreate that texture. And then there is everything else we layered on top. AI upres is fine, but it isn’t doing anything to the meshes or the shaders or to the lighting. All of this stuff, the big-brush coating of the levels, which makes it feel more like a current generation game, has to be done by hand. There is no AI solution for relighting the level. Maybe one day there will be …

DP: Aside from the textures, did you re-do the riggs or the animations for finer details?
Kevin Meek: (laughs) Our animation pipeline did not do well after 15 years. Often it was just Perforce sitting there in the server, getting server dust on it. So, we found that often, if we would redo an animation and reimport it into the game, that took a long time just to get going in the first place. And then secondly, there were a lot of ripple effects of bugs that came from basically touching the system at all. That could be anything from underlying Unreal issues, where we’ve upgraded the version from whatever version it shipped on to the current version. Also, there were some mathematical changes, which happened a lot with lighting. Some piece of averaging, how light affects a character, changed, and now the system reacts differently. These might be little things that you don’t even pick up until you worked some time with it.

With the animation, we couldn’t really do anything about that, without devoting a huge amount of time into it and setting up the system again. What we ended up doing was change how the underlying system works with the animation – like animation trees. In a video game, you don’t animate every single thing the character could possibly do – you animate independently and blend the actions together through an animation tree – turn left, look up, aim at, these are animations that are blended, and there were a lot of issues in the tree for how things can blend together. That ended with a lot of cross-eyed moments – which was almost funny – especially when Shepard and the team go to cover, and you see their faces, and they would pull a gun and their eyes would roll up in their head. That kind of stuff, we were able to change and clean up.

The riggs stayed the same, but we had to reskin every single armour and piece of clothing we touched, because we upressed the meshes themselves. There are more poly­gons for smother shoulders and the details, that might just have been texture before, are now polygons and cut-outs and extrusions which catch the light. So, our tech-department reskinned the verts to the skeleton. These new polygons need to be connected to the bones to move with them.

DP: With your background in environment art: How did you treat the planets, some of whom were quite barren in ME1?
Kevin Meek: For the uncharted worlds, they were the most barren. They are all Unreal-terrain-based and not a static mesh. That gives you a few semi-procedural options, but still works well within the tools that existed in Unreal 3.

What we would do is like a scatter mesh system, instead of just green texture on the ground. Now we have green texture on the ground, which is upressed and looks better and has a better material to it. And finally, it is actually projected on the ground instead of UV stretched everywhere. But also, on top of that, there is an actual mesh on top, like of blades of grass or rocks.

That’s basically a system you tell “on this type of texture, given this angle allowance, how dense do you want these rocks to be”. Every time you load the level, it is different. But nothing so large it needs collision, so trees we would stay away from. That would have created a whole swarm of ripple effects, because you would be stuck on the tree, but it is not always there, because it is generated. So, we kept everything level enough that you can walk around without collision.

The mesh of the terrain we upressed, and the materials we used are now triplanar shaders on the terrain. In the original, it was just top-down-projection. A polygon on a cliff would have the UV stretched all the way down the cliff, because it doesn’t know about angles. But with a triplanar projection shader, it actually shoots the texture from X, Y and Z and then it blends those intersection points. So now your cliff actually looks like a cliff instead of melting rock. That’s not new tech, but it is much more expensive, and they obviously couldn’t have afforded that back in the day. But it makes a world of difference when you’re driving around those levels.

DP: When you remastered all three parts: Did you use assets from ME3 in ME1, since they were already better quality?
Kevin Meek: Yeah, actually there were a lot of assets that are shared between the entire trilogy, so as they finished work on “Mass Effect 1”, “Mass Effect 2” would start and they have the library of assets to start from and a number of those made it through all the way up into “Mass Effect 3”.

Certain ones got improved in Mass Effect 3 and we were able to use those as a starting point. Especially with characters and also placeable props. Your job as an artist would be to ask: “Does this exist in ‘Mass Effect 3’? And does it look better in one of the other games?” It was baked into every single character armour and faces with the morph head system and wrinkle maps and all of your character customization options and more. But all came from whatever the best version was, which is generally ME3, but not always. Then we improve that and then brought it across the trilogy. But crates were unchanged. Some of the crates, which are so prevalent in a cover shooter, were the exact same crates that existed in “Mass Effect 1”, and it was kind of rough, but it was the exact same asset in ME3.

DP: What are you telling your colleagues working in upcoming games, now that you finished the remastering of a decade–long project?
Kevin Meek: I think for any game that we’re working on, it is good to have naming conventions and documentation – and get the artists to understand the best practice for that. The original Devs of the “Mass Effect” trilogy did a really good job with those. We can go back into the original Perforce and search files.
On the other hand, there is no documentation whatsoever of how to rebuild lighting in the levels, which is like a baked static lighting. But what layers do you show? And in what order? All because there’s just not a single page somewhere in some internal wiki that says: okay, here’s how to do it, guys.

It was all tribal knowledge, so that’s the main thing: Always assume that you are off the project in a week and that your tribal knowledge is going to be lost with you. I think, if you take that approach to everything and just over-save and over-document, then you’ll be in an okay state 15 years later, when someone says you’re amazing game is worth remastering.

The post Legendary Scaling – Mass Effect Returns first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

This article by Bela Beier originally appeared in DP 06 : 2012.Luis Alonso, Senior Technical Artist at BioWare, spoke at FMX about the game “Mass Effect 3” – DP was there and grabbed Luis Alonso after the presentation to ask him a few questions.

The game “Mass Effect 3” is the furious finale of the game saga about Commander Shepard. The third instalment of the series, which began in 2007, concludes the storyline that began there and relies on legacy storytelling like almost no other game: team members and NPCs from all the instalments appear again and again and have a strong influence on the plot. “Mass Effect 3” was first presented with a trailer at the Spike Video Game Awards on 11 December 2010. The multiplayer was developed by BioWare’s subsidiary in Montreal, while Digic Pictures from Budapest was responsible for the cinematic trailer. DP spoke to Luis Alonso, Lead Technical Artist at BioWare Montreal for “Mass Effect 3”, about the game and its challenges. He began his career eleven years ago and has since worked as a modeller, in special effects, animation and rigging. On “Mass Effect” he was responsible for the setup of the pipelines and the development of various tools.

DP: What were the challenges with “Mass Effect 3”?

Luis Alonso: Firstly, the legacy management. Since practically everyone who plays “Mass Effect 3” has also played “Mass Effect 2”, we had to be very careful here, both with the code and with the pipelines and setups. One example where we had to develop a lot was character customisation. There was a veritable cornucopia of problems here. For example, during testing it was possible in some areas to make the cheekbones protrude so far that they penetrated the helmet. We then had to try out all the variants to avoid this. Because there’s always someone who just pulls all the sliders to the maximum to create the ugliest character. In addition, we generated a code for the adjustments to the face that practically describes the deviation from the starting position and with which you can share your “face” with others – and there are now sites on the net, for example http://www.masseffect2faces.com. The codes for the faces were exchanged here – so if you wanted to play the game as “Kate Beckinsale” Shepard or as “Obama” Shepard or something similar.

So we asked ourselves at the beginning how we should deal with this: Do we add more customisation options or do we limit them to make it easier to program the characters, or because it’s just out of date. Because if the fans have already created databases with faces, as a developer you naturally want them to be able to continue using them. So if we no longer support these codes, the players are disappointed because they can no longer use them. If we don’t change anything, others who were hoping for something new will be disappointed. In the end, we went with an interim solution – even if that means that we still have to “Realism depends on the details” in the update after the release Luis Alonso Senior Technical Artist, Bioware had to make some improvements because the hair colour or eye colour could not be changed in some setups. And this is where Legacy becomes an important point in development.

DP: And what was the challenge for you personally with “Mass Effect 3”?

Luis Alonso: For me, the armour was the biggest challenge, because parts were constantly pushing into each other. The Reckoning armour with the spikes in particular cost us a lot of effort. The armour plays a major role in the story – especially the battles. The different classes and species have as many different armours in the third part as the first and second parts combined.

DP: And how are these classes structured?

Luis Alonso: On the one hand, we have the flexible armour – that is, armour for characters that can assume many different poses – and on the other, characters with relatively little armour. The biotic class (which is found in almost all species), for example, has powers like the Force from Star Wars, which it uses in contortions, but hardly any armour. In contrast, the soldier class is heavily armoured. And here’s the problem: How does it move? How much of the armour is flexible, and how much can be flexible at all and remain “armour”?

DP: Can you show us an example of this?

Luis Alonso: No problem. For example, the Geth (see the Geth character model at the bottom left of the first page of the article) have cables protruding from the neck. When I saw the concept, my first question was of course: Do I have an extra bone or do I have to think of something special for the deformation? Of course there was no extra bone in the model. But we are creating a character that has an overall structure. The bones result in the movements and deformation of the model, and we can’t just add bones at will. If things go wrong, this can affect missions or even the entire game.

DP: Do you think we will be able to work with 300 or more bones in the next generation of consoles? And where is the limit where it still makes sense to use them?

Luis Alonso: At the moment, we have more than enough with 140 bones – perhaps even too many. I think it’s much more important to develop twisting further. For example, if you take a twisting forearm, you currently only need two or three bones to get a twist with acceptable volume – including the twisting. To expand that from “acceptable” to “good”, we’re adding more bones that aren’t actually necessary to avoid the “candy wrapper” look. And I think in the future we will make such adjustments more via progress in skinning.

DP: How do you design at the moment?

Luis Alonso: My workflow is – in stark contrast – to create systems that prevent exactly that, minimising interpenetration and managing flexible elements. This is also the big “creative” decision period in my job – to decide which parts are flexible, also taking into account that it is “space technology”, and which parts are not allowed to be flexible at all as “armour”. In “Mass Effect 3”, for example, we included various non-flexible plates in the main character’s belly armour, which then overlap and overlap in places.

This creates the impression of a solid material that can still be flexible within certain parameters. If you overdo it with something like this, the armour will eventually look like a swimming costume. The realism of a character depends very much on the consistency of the details.

DP: So when is the Mass Effect Swimsuit Edition coming?

Luis Alonso (laughs): Fans have already designed it.

DP: How are these ideas being received by the players?

Luis Alonso: They naturally ask – especially in the test phase – why some pieces of armour look so flexible, and then we know that we have to improve the design. For example, making the individual parts inflexible – which of course means that the parts penetrate each other when the character moves. The classes already existed in the first part. Depending on this, we defined the animation and how the individual types and classes move, and then developed the armour from this.

However, this doesn’t always work, because users can not only select the class, but can also buy armour or take it from other games such as “Dragon Age”. And combine this with the character, which has also been customised. And suddenly we have huge spikes on the shoulder piece that protrude into the head, which of course quickly becomes a bug.

DP: Would it be possible to include a “misdevelopment” in the game that affects the player?

Luis Alonso: That would definitely be interesting – it could also be incorporated into the game design, and these restrictions would not be so difficult to implement. You then have to see whether the players recognise such errors and enjoy adapting them or whether this becomes a disruptive factor beyond personalisation.

DP: In “Mass Effect 2” there was also a reset from “Dragon Age”. Would it be possible for the studio to standardise all assets and prepare crossover events?

Luis Alonso: The “Dragon Age” armour in “Mass Effect” is based on the design, but was created and implemented by the “Mass Effect” artists. Even though we would like to do this, I don’t see it happening at the moment.

Most of our games use different engines. So it’s not just about a Maya or 3ds Max-based workflow, but the fundamentals of the games are completely different. “Mass Effect” uses the Unreal Engine, and “Dragon Age” uses an in-house engine called Eclipse, which the team worked on – with all the assets – for seven years.

“Mass Effect was only built on the Unreal Engine from the beginning, so we can share some assets between the projects, but unfortunately not everything. During the “Mass Effect” series, we used Aurora, Eclipse and Infintiy, among others, in parallel with Unreal. We are trying to harmonise this in the near future, but it will take some time. And if we include “Star Wars: The Old Republic”, for example, it will be difficult – because it uses a completely different engine that is designed for MMOGs.

DP: And what about the aliens or other species? For example, the various Husk variants?

Luis Alonso: It’s always the case that the closer you are to humans (as opposed to aliens), the more critical and attentive the users become – the “Uncanny Valley” is not only relevant for faces.

And with aliens, you’re a bit “freer”..

DP: And human-like figures, for example the Banshees?

Luis Alonso: The Banshee rig was made by Ray and Kevin in Edmonton – but what I’ve seen of it is very similar to the usual “female rig”. The difference with these characters – apart from the obvious different proportions – is not in the rig, but in the animations we created especially for them.

DP: Do you make sure that the rigs will still be usable in five years’ time?

Luis Alonso: Definitely. I would say that you can still work with the existing rigs in a few years’ time, or at least use them as a basis for further developments. Of course, Legacy has been a big point now, and that certainly creates exciting problems – but I generally think it’s better to tie a “franchise” to a character and then not dilute everything further here – as other stories have done. But technically, we could definitely continue working on it straight away.

DP: How many revision runs did you need for the more technically complex parts, for example the hair?

Luis Alonso: As with every major project, we organised this in stages and also formalised it very well. At the end of the first design/drafting stage, we can say whether the character – to stay with the example – has any hair at all. It would be completely out of place to consider the dynamics of the hair and its technical realisation at this stage.

With simulations and physical contexts in particular, it is important to ensure that development runs in parallel and that the various departments do not overtake each other. Otherwise corrections will be extremely time-consuming. To stay with the example: We tried procedural hair in the second phase of implementation. We were able to do quite a lot there, for example side characters. But once we had passed it on to the animators, we realised that this wasn’t the case. After that, we first did the setup for the simulation, because it could have been that the procedural solution was sufficient.

DP: What is it like to work at BioWare and how can we imagine the daily routine and the employees?

Luis Alonso: Working for us is something special. On the one hand, there is a pleasant atmosphere in the company. What I also find very good is that we hardly have any freelancers. Those who are with us are with us and stay with us. This means that it takes us longer to find new employees, but they are better integrated into the workflow and the team. I don’t think much of these two-weekly colleagues. And the few who are really freelancers have been with us for a long time and are all from the region. After all, working together also involves physically meeting up, discussing things and sometimes going out partying together.

DP: Canada is slowly becoming one of the focal points of game development. How strong is the community, and can you still throw stones without hitting VFX artists?

Luis Alonso: In Montreal, it’s often the case that you meet up in some clubs or pubs. In an industry that is so mixed, everyone knows everyone, so it’s normal to meet people from other companies. But realistically, it’s still a relatively small society within Montreal, where practically everyone knows each other. And then there’s the fact that Montreal isn’t that big.

DP: And what is it like to work as a studio for EA or Microsoft?

Luis Alonso: Since I used to work directly for EA, it’s quite easy. And especially with the second and third parts of “Mass Effect”, we were able to work very independently. We proved that we were good at it, and now we could do it the way we liked it.

DP: Can you describe what the relevant qualifications are for your job?

Luis Alonso: There are many terms for it – but in the end you are the interface between animation, technology and design. This means that you are always involved in how the visuals are implemented and realised, and how the programmers and animators deal with them. In addition, there is the transfer of data and communication – and that’s why you ideally need to have worked in this area yourself – as a programmer or animator, so that you understand what the people who build the assets are talking about. Because you are always a kind of support for this step, you have to be able to make the leap between the different programmes and therefore know and understand the work of both the artists and the animators.

Normally, this is the career path of an artist or animator who at some point wonders how everything works in the background and how it can be linked and used efficiently. Before you know it, you’re working on the things that nobody wants to do – implementing the assets in the game.

And little by little, you become the artists’ best friend – because you are the one who brings their content into the game and programmes the tools they need to work well.

On the other hand, the programmers are happy to see you because the assets you deliver usually work. So if you do it well, you’re their best friend at every point in the workflow – and that’s nice.

DP: How do you feel about the decision to offer “Mass Effect” on Origin, EA’s Steam competitor?

Luis Alonso: I believe that competition brings something – a monopoly always becomes sluggish quite quickly, doesn’t bring any new features and rests on its laurels. And we as gamers are left staring down the tube – while two providers try to outdo each other.

DP: “Mass Effect 3” was one of the few games where gamers physically protested in front of the development studio for a different ending – and 300 people is not exactly a small number…

Luis Alonso: Yes, that was interesting. Personally, I would never have believed that anyone would actually leave the forum discussion or the customer service/feedback forms. That’s why we reacted to it and explained the ending in more detail with the extended cut. It has to be said, of course, that our fans are generally relaxed, civilised people – so it was a protest, but neither stressful nor aggressive. And there were also student demonstrations in Montreal at the same time, and the contrast couldn’t be greater.

DP: How do you see the ending? Is there ever a perfect ending for a game?

Luis Alonso: Of course you always wish for a fourth, fifth or sixth instalment. You’ve already spent an enormous amount of time with the character at this point, and you’ve grown fond of both his environment and his “personality” – otherwise you wouldn’t play it for so long – and then it becomes extremely difficult to let go.

But I think there were two problems with our ending in particular: Many people didn’t realise that there were not two, but three choices. However, these only became accessible if you had expanded your “readiness”, i.e. the number of allies, accordingly in the game.

In addition, “Mass Effect” is simply a different kind of game. Solving the entire conflict alone in a Rambo-like manner contradicts the basic idea. Even a science fiction universe can stick to the basic premises of consistent stories.

And then to have an ending that comes as a finale after such a story, and the hero simply walks off whistling into the sunset? That would be inappropriate.

The post Happy endings are inappropriate | Retro article first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

The cinematic trailer offers a first taste of the full video, which will be released on Xbox Live on 22 December. The trailer can be viewed at http://trailer.masseffect2.de.

Become weightless with Mass Effect 2

EA and BioWare are giving away a voucher for a parabolic flight in Florida worth more than 15,000 euros. The winner and their companion will experience weightlessness on board the Zero-G Boeing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre. An extensive supporting programme, return flight and overnight stay in a hotel round off the adventure of a lifetime. The entry form can be found at http://werdeschwerelos.de.

Mass Effect 2 will be released uncut on 28 January for PC and Xbox 360. Further information on the game is available at http://www.masseffect2.de.

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The mission resembles a suicide mission – at least that’s what Shepard’s superiors think. But the situation is explosive. All hopes rest on the experienced soldier. He can’t possibly do it alone, so he puts together an elite team made up of equally unique and courageous comrades-in-arms. They all know how to fight, are loyal and always ready to give their all.

Further links:

• Trailer
  Raffle
  Game website

The post BioWare shows first cinematic trailer for Mass Effect 2 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.