When you start Mass Effect 3, you have to choose between three new game modes – action, roleplaying, and story. How early into development did you come up with the idea of splitting it up into the different types of players who are likely to be checking this game out?
CASEY HUDSON: That’s actually another thing that we wanted to do in previous games. It’s simpler than it seems. It looks like we’ve done something really crazy, but all it’s doing is – first of all, we realized that it’s not ideal that when someone starts the game, they don’t know that much about it and we dump a huge options screen on them. Automatic squad powers and this and that – you’re asking them to make too many decisions about stuff they haven’t even played yet. That wasn’t ideal. We also have a lot of feedback from people who say, "Your games look really cool, and I love the idea of the story and the characters. It looks awesome when I watch it on YouTube, but I’m just not that coordinated with a shooter. I would play it if I could figure out how to do combat."
So we always thought we should have a mode where combat isn’t going to kill you. You still go around and fight, but you’re playing it for the story experience. We thought we should be able to do that relatively easy, but there’s still work involved in that.
You have to make a game with a certain design before you realize that there are different player types. One of the surprising pieces of feedback was for some players, it’s not that they don’t like the story. They love story. In fact, the story is so important to them that they feel the story choices are intimidating. They’re worried that they’re going to make a wrong decision. We never build our games that way, but they find it stressful that they have to make all these decisions. They want to see what happens, but they want to see what they would perceive as the best outcome.
So all these settings do is that they set some of the options on the option screen before you’ve played it and know what those options mean. Once you get in and start playing, you can change things. The story mode is actually just a difficulty setting. The action mode is actually just about choosing "automatic dialogue."