Mass Effect 2

[ahleung]

http://www.vg247.com/2009/08/18/game...ght-to-behold/

[ahleung]

另一個同伴角色


BioWare Reveals New Mass Effect 2 Character!

Written by Dom on August 15, 2009 – 3:38 pm -


BioWare has revealed the new character for the highly anticipated upcoming sequel, Mass Effect 2, and he goes by the name of ‘Thane’.
The website for Mass Effect 2 states:

“In order to survive the mission, Commander Shepard will have to recruit the very best soldiers and specialists in the Galaxy. Meet Thane – hailing from the Drell race, he is one of the most feared assassins in the galaxy.”

Screenshots below.

Mass Effect 2 is heading for a early 2010 release for Xbox 360 and PC.

[ahleung]

http://www.vg247.com/2009/08/21/biow...s-in-the-game/


BioWare: Mass Effect 2 will run at 30FPS, no weird pauses in the game

BioWare’s Jesse Houston has told VG247 that Mass Effect 2 will run at a solid 30FPS. He also told us that any weird pauses you might have received during the first Mass Effect are now all gone.
“If you look at most good shooters, they lock down frame-rate at 30FPS: we’ve done the same thing. Bam. Everything’s 30FPS, streaming is fixed up,” said the associate producer for the game.
“If you remember in Mass 1, if you took a step backwards and you hit a weird stream and it’d pause for a moment. We’ve done a away with that. What you’re seeing here is pulled straight from the game.”
Catch our full interview with Houston, locked down here.
It’s out next year for 360 and PC.

[wing]

作者: ahleung

http://www.vg247.com/2009/08/21/biow...s-in-the-game/


BioWare: Mass Effect 2 will run at 30FPS, no weird pauses in the game

呢個真係好消息.

[Sar8]

全程30已經好好

[ahleung]

見到賣場有條新trailer, 24號上架的, 叫 "Grunt Reveal".
http://marketplace.xbox.com/zh-HK/ga...0-0000454108ce

[ahleung]

[ahleung]

Interview: Mac Walters, lead writer for Mass Effect 2

by Richard Mitchell { Sep 14th 2009 at 8:20PM }

At PAX, we had a chance to catch up with Mac Walters, the lead writer for Mass Effect 2 at BioWare. We discussed everything from the difficulties of penning a story for a game tons of choices to where BioWare currently stands on the portrayal of sweet, alien love-making.

Joystiq: All right. So. Biggest question. We sent around email to everyone saying, "What should we ask BioWare?"

Mac Walters: Right.

The big question we had is, "How do you write a story where all the characters from the first game, or a lot of them, could be dead when you start out the second game?"

You mean other than pulling out my hair and weeping at night, sort of, "Oh my god, how am I going to do this?" It takes a lot of planning, obviously, but essentially what we did is we looked at it and said, "Yeah we know that some of these guys are going to be dead. How do we account for that?" And the big thing was -- let's take Wrex for example -- we had to limit to some degree the roles that those characters are going to play because we have to say, "OK well they're coming back or they're not." And then we had to say, "Well what are their alternates?" So a lot of times there's characters that will fill their spot. But they don't just come in and go, you know, "I'm Wrex alternate," or something like that. It's a new character who has his own back story, who has his own role in the game and whatnot.
That's where the hair-pulling-out comes out, because now I've got to, I've basically got to account for two characters in one situation. And that second character is, for the cinematic designers who have to create the conversation you need, who are saying, "You mean I've got to have a scene with two possible different characters in it?" And then the VO [Voice Over] people have to come in and they've got, "You mean I've got to VO this scene twice, in different ways?" So yeah.
Gallery: Mass Effect 2

• 

Did it ever feel like it was wasted effort having to write dialogue and scenarios for characters that some players may never see?

Oh it's definitely not, I mean that's what, you know playing a game, you want to -- even if it was just the first game -- you want to feel like your choices matter within that game. And to then just say, "Well we're going to ignore all that for Mass Effect 2," we wouldn't do that. So I don't think it's wasted effort. I think what you're saying is you're looking at Mass Effect 2 as part of a greater experience sort of thing. So we knew going in to account for that. Yeah, it's going to be more work and it's a trilogy. Three is even going to be more, you know, like we're looking back at two games at that point and saying, "Wow. Okay, so what do we do now?"

We had people that were just in small quests and we realized, "Wow, the fans just latched onto that character. They love them. Why don't we bring them back?"

Well speaking of that, you know the second game and third game are being written together, whereas the first game was sort of written off by itself. Do you ...

Ah, not quite. That's not really true with the way we handle that sort of thing. Like, I mean we had, essentially, with the first one we said, "Here's the art for the three games." Now obviously what's in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 wasn't really fleshed out. We said, "We know basically where we want to go with it." But we wrote Mass Effect 1 with that in mind. You know, we said, "Here's where we want it to go." If you ask Casey Hudson, the producer, he knew where he wanted Mass Effect 3 to eventually end up. Obviously we had [Mass Effect 1] behind us. We still don't know where [Mass Effect 3's] going to go, and maybe it's shifting and changing a little bit based on where you want to be flexible too. But we still wrote it within that framework.

Were you tempted to, or did you have to, retcon some of the characters into the second game?

No not necessarily. I think actually one of the things that we said was -- for some of the big ones, you know the people are going to expect to see them back -- but who are some of the smaller characters? We had people that were just in small quests and we realized, "Wow, the fans just latched onto that character. They love them. Why don't we bring them back?" So let's bring some of those guys back and then the only tricky ones were if it was a character that people loved and they could be dead.

Right. So there's no experience like Alien 5, like someone just gets magically resurrected or cloned or something like that?

Yeah. Yeah. If they're dead in your game, then they're dead.

Obviously can import your saved game from the first game. Import your character. What happens if you don't do that? Does the beginning , does it change at all?

We figured it out, we're not commenting on how that happens but we do have a plan for it. If you don't have a saved game, we had to account for it. Some people might just pick up Mass Effect 2 and play it as their first experience. So we do have a plan for that and how that'll all play out. I think people will be happy with it.

click to increase mass

And if you do import your character, you said that he's going to get sort of get zapped back down to level 1.

Again that's another thing that we're not really commenting on. Also there is a plan for it.

Is Shepard going to come into the second game and get "Samused?" Is he going to have all these badass abilities and then get zapped by some energy field and then loses all his powers?

I don't think we would ever do anything exactly like that but, again, we do have a plan for it.

You've written a lot of dialogue. Do you have like a ballpark figure? Like how much dialogue you've done? Like hours, pages?

I can tell you line count. So Mass Effect 1 was about 26,000 lines but that includes things like sound sets, that includes all the lines of dialogue that we have, everything that's VO'd. We're close to about 30,000 on Mass Effect 2. Yeah. So we've actually gone up. It wasn't our intention, but what we've talked about already was the choices, right? We had to account for multiple variations of things. And the game is a bit wider. There is a bit more options. So I think that's partly why it bloated a little bit. It's funny though because we actually, I think the take back is one of the things we tried to do was reduce the overall words per line; trying to make it a quicker dialogue experience. So I think the word count is similar but the actual line count is higher.

Now talking about the different choices you could make, there was a little bit of a controversy in the first game when the whole sex scene came out. And some people blew that out of proportion, but did that affect how you approached Mass Effect 2 at all?

I mean we always take critical feedback and player feedback into account. We know that some people are always going to take certain things out of proportion. I mean if you go to certain regions, they're going to be opposed to the violence. If you go to other regions they're going to be opposed to the sexual content. So it is a fine line, but I mean we also want to make the gaming experience that people are used to and go that way.

Mass Effect 1 was about 26,000 lines ... that includes all the lines of dialogue that we have, everything that's VO'd. We're close to about 30,000 on Mass Effect 2

Along those same lines, if you made that choice in the first game, any alien babies in the second one? Something like that?

I think the level artists, or the model artists would kill us if we decided to start having babies, so unless they're a baby that comes out at six feet tall. No.

Have you found any difference in the relationship when you want to touch material like that moving to Electronic Arts?

I haven't encountered anything like that as far as writing. The process that we go through it feels very similar to me; just because it's the same concerns. It's like I said, certain regions are going to be leery about things that are extremely violent, other ones are going to be ... so I mean I think overall the tone is going to feel very similar to Mass Effect 1.

Now you've joined up with Mythic. Is there any potential for crossover there? Are you going to start writing things for them?

[The PR representative informs me that BioWare won't be answering this question.]

Well outside of, obviously, sci-fi, what are some of the inspirations that you look to when you're writing for a game like Mass Effect?

Anything in experience that, you know, it doesn't have to be Sci Fi. If I saw a really interesting scene in any movie anywhere, I think we can draw that into our universe. I think one of the things is that we have a setting, which is sci-fi, and obviously there are certain restrictions to that, but I think people are looking for making choices and looking for these interactions with people. And that's common through all the themes. 2,000, 5,000, as long as there's been people around, there's always been these interesting interactions with people. I think that's where the real medium comes from, in getting these emotional scenes. It's just the interaction between characters. And I think yes, they may be wearing a space suit when they say it, or something like that, they may have a blue alien head, but it's still the same emotional contact that we're trying to make.

Well what is the actual process when you set about writing a game like this. Do you just sit down in your room at a typewriter and bang out the overall story for Mass Effect? You have a lot of planning meetings? How does it work?

So, generally what happens is that early in the projects -- so early Mass Effect 1 or early Mass Effect 2 -- myself, Lead Designer, Preston Watamaniuk and then Casey Hudson, the producer, we'll sit down and we'll work on the big picture stuff. What's the art? Where do we want Shepard to start? Where do we want him to go? What are the obstacles that he's going to face? And we'll bash that around for a bit and then I'll take that back to the writing team and get feedback, and they get to contribute to it as well. But once that gets hammered down, then we start looking at "What are the different levels? What are the smaller areas?" And a lot of times that's when each individual writer starts. You've got control over that level, make it work. And then overall I'm just making sure that it all fits a theme.

Yeah.

And what we're trying to do.

That's got to be a lot of work to make sure that all the individual sections fit together properly.

It is. It is one of the biggest challenges really just to make sure that, you want every writer to feel like they are putting their influence into it, but at the same time it also has to fit the same tone.

Right.

Same themes.

Well, Mass Effect kind of made a name for itself with the dialogue system and then the way that the story branches.

Right.

What, what are some examples in the industry that you've seen that you think are just really good examples of writing in a video game?

You know, I actually, I actually really enjoyed, I'll say BioShock, you know, was one that, that I enjoyed. But you asked me specifically about writing. I guess I always look for something that's engaging in the story, and one of the things I actually try to press home is that we are writers, but sometimes we can tell a story in ways that don't necessarily involve writing. So that's actually something I'm more interested in. It's like, "How do we tell a story?"

Right.

And there's been some great games out there that have.

So would you say that's an example of something that the industry could be doing a little bit better than they're doing right now?

Yeah, yeah and I think we're trying to do better, you know. Obviously, if you harken back, way back, story was, or dialogue was the way to tell a story because it was easy. It was words. It was cheap. There wasn't any sort of attachment to it. You could write a character in a day and, if you had to rewrite him, whatever. It's just another day from the writer's time. But now, you know, I have cinematic designers. I've got VO people. I've got actors coming in to do all the work. Even changing one line is a significant change.
Right.

So, it's easier if we can find other ways to carry the story, and so one of the things we did on Mass Effect 2, which was a big change for us, was we said writers work specifically into teams with level designers and also the cinematic team. And we always worked closely but we actually had small groups of teams work together so they would say, "Okay, in this level this is the story we want to tell. How can all of you [do that], not just the writer?"

Right. This is probably my last question, but if Mass Effect is the Empire Strikes Back, how pissed off are we going to be at the cliffhanger? That's what I want to know.

I don't know about pissed off, but people are going to be blown away -- and they are going to be blown away -- and it's going to leave you wanting more for sure.

[ahleung]

第3個新角色: Subject Zero
(片中有一幕, 應該係可攻略角色吧? )

[saberlam]

賽車先要60....其他遊戲又要靚, 光影又要好, 物理又要好, 30已經是極限了....

要靚又要30以上, 本代家用機根本沒有這個機能應付....

[亞利古]

作者: ahleung

第3個新角色: Subject Zero
(片中有一幕, 應該係可攻略角色吧? )

呢件野性得濟
唔該出番個正常人類

[david]

上集有得玩男女任選兩件，我估今集可能有得玩多人？a

最好有限定版送設定集，今集人設真係好得！b

[Gashapon™]

作者: 亞利古

呢件野性得濟
唔該出番個正常人類

其實上集d重口味有無人岩架

[ahleung]

http://www.xboxinsider.net/new-mass-...2-screenshots/

[ahleung]

作者: Gashapon™

其實上集d重口味有無人岩架

你指百合外星人? 我o岩o架

[Sar8]

其實上集咪有條女帶面具既
我好想睇下除左面具係點樣

[ahleung]

作者: Sar8

其實上集咪有條女帶面具既
我好想睇下除左面具係點樣

可能好似predator咁....

[Sar8]

作者: ahleung

可能好似predator咁....

咁都係帶返好d

[ahleung]

Mass Effect 2 stardated January 26, 2010

by Alexander Sliwinski { Oct 16th 2009 at 1:03PM }

Captain's Log: Stardate: October 16, 2009. Electronic Arts has announced that Mass Effect 2, the next installment in BioWare's epic space opera, will jump to North American and European retail on January 26 and 29, 2010, respectively. The North American GameStop pre-order bonus will include:

• Terminus Armor -- "Increasing run speed and personal shields, and augmenting weapons with an additional magazine of reserve ammo."
• The M-90 Blackstorm Heavy Weapon -- "Generates a high-powered localized gravity well, accelerating particles to near-infinite mass."

Those who preorder from other retailers will receive the Inferno Armor, which gives Shephard "an increase in run speed and augmented damage from combat powers." And thus begins the Q1 2010 release bonanza ...

Update:
Yes, we realize the gun says "M88" even though it's supposed to be the "M-90 Blackstorm." Confusing things even more, one of EA's asset sites notes it as the "M-490," so let's just say it's "a gun" for now.

[失業中年漢]

Thanks for info!
希望呢次香港出果陣會多d 人留意到(唔好好似上集咁出完無聲無氣)

[saberlam]

有無PC版???? 同步???

[romrom2004]

BioWare：《質量效應2》只會登陸PC和Xbox 360平臺
http://www.vg247.com/2009/10/16/biow...xbox-360-only/

BioWare社區經理Jay Watamaniuk在官方論壇中闡明有關於《質量效應2》PS3版的傳聞。「嗨，夥計們。昨日我在
波蘭的露面造成了今日有一些傳言肆虐。看起來大家對於《質量效應2》登陸PS3誤解了。」他說。「讓我今天闡明一
下：《質量效應2》只會登陸360和PC，抱歉造成了混淆。北美與歐洲分別在1月26日及1月29日發售。」

[david]

嘻，咁烤肉機主有空想無問題喎，諗o下o者，但實情空想係唔會實現咁解之嘛，又或者等得三五七年咁。\/

[ahleung]

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/30/sh...eplay-footage/
戰鬥 gameplay 片段

打擊感好左, 敵人中槍時個感覺實在好多.
同埋可以睇到自己個shield既破損程度.

[Sar8]

這根本是射擊game
d鎗聲都好聽左

呢個係pc版定360版
睇落真係好似全程30fps咁