But I think one of the reasons people want to see the best possible path when they played through the original Mass Effect trilogy is they maybe didn’t want to invest another 40 hours playing through again, to save a dead character so they could see everything.
How do you solve that? And are the choices still really meaningful if there’s not a major critical path difference between them? Are people just going to have to do six or seven play throughs to see everything?
Fabrice Condominas If they want to see everything, then yes. But the idea is to get away from the more judgmental position. This is where the binary thing opens. The choices you make influence the story and the plot and all that. But the idea is to get rid of the A versus B, because that’s how you create the idea that one thing is better than the other.
When everything is more nuanced, and the consequences of the choice are less obvious than going Paragon or Renegade, it’s focusing on the journey. It’s focusing on your journey and the choices you make now.
“You’ve got the freedom to make the choices you want, it has consequences and it builds your story. So you will replay only if you want a different story.”
If you fix yourself goals like, I want to [see every possible outcome of every] loyalty mission, then obviously you have to replay the game. But if you knew in the Paragon/Renegade system that a character was definitely Paragon, then you’d go through full Paragon in order to have it. But again that’s the gamification, and it has a judgmental aspect to it that we’re trying to get away from.
The idea is: you’ve got the freedom to make the choices you want, it has consequences and it builds your story. So you will replay only if you want a different story.
But won’t that be frustrating for people? If there are no obvious cues, and they get locked out of the outcomes they want to see.
Maybe, but if that frustrates you, you probably shouldn’t play the game. Because that’s exactly what it is about. There’s no way you’ll know all the possibilities and all the paths you can take.
Sure there is. There’s wikis and stuff. It’ll get online. We’ll all know soon enough.
Sure, maybe, after ages and ages. It’s funny you should say that. For the first time in my career – I’ve been doing games for 15 years – this is the first time in my career I haven’t played myself through all the possibilities in a game I’m going to release. Just because it’s too much – it’s too time consuming.
You have spent five years working on this so I imagine there’s quite a lot of it.
Yes and over those five years, all the branching wasn’t done! And I also had to make the game, so.
So does Andromeda still have those big dramatic branches though? I mean, when you talk about judgmental and better paths – in Mass Effect 3 a lot of people were really disappointed that they didn’t save both the Geth and the Quarians. I did, and that was definitely the better path. Will Andromeda have that same sort of hugely impactful decisions? Or is it just like, oh, you’re a sarcastic Ryder or an aggressive Ryder? Do you like, change worlds?
Absolutely. Situations like that exist in Andromeda.