A former BioWare lead says Mass Effect’s development was built on a ton of impossible goals and massive ambition.
Speaking to FRVR, Mass Effect cinematic designer Armando Troisi spoke about game director Casey Hudson, recounting, “He would put these impossible goals in front of us,” adding, “He was just like, ‘okay, this is what we need to do, right?'” He adds that around the studio, Hudson was known as the “troublemaker in chief,” an approach that clearly worked, as the game was ultimately lauded for its cinematic presentation.
Troisi says the cinematic team at BioWare was “hacking the engine to try to make things work.” He adds, “We would throw on things like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and it would be playing in the background. And we would look at the cinematography, and we would look at it like, how is this working, and how could we emulate that?”
“It was weird because it’s a game I feel should have never been made,” Troisi explains. “It was a new engine, a new IP, a new console. It was a triple threat trying to get that to all [work]. Trying to get the streaming to work and getting it all to go.” And despite being a console exclusive for the Xbox 360 for around half a year, Troisi adds, “the story behind that is we didn’t have it working on console until the very end of development,” which resulted in the game releasing in the glitchy state it was.
Mass Effect “really pushed the limits of what is possible in real-time rendering,” Troisi explains, but there was a significant trade-off to get there, as he recalls the developers going through “21 days on, one day off kind of crunch to get this thing out the door.”
However, despite all of that, it was worth it in Troisi’s eyes, with the developer saying, “It’s a level of ambition that I think was just unheard of at the time,” he said. “It’s not just an interactive narrative; it’s an interactive film. And delivering that to our audience in such a profound way, I guess, and wrapping it in such a great story and a great fantasy was just something that we were just so proud of, and I’m still proud of. It’s one of the things I look back on in my life and go: ‘wow, that was really really hard, but really worth it.'”