Mass Effect 3 has been widely praised by critics upon its release, but there have still been vocal fans that have voiced their concerns about various aspects. One of the first things that some fans criticized was the DLC available on day-one, though Casey Hudson, the Executive Producer and Director Mass Effect, diffused the issue.
“I think a lot of the common sense is prevailing,” said Hudson. “Initially, it was spun in a direction that suggested that we had taken the lore out of Mass Effect 3 and were holding it inside the DLC only, which now the people who actually have played Mass Effect 3 and the DLC they know that that’s not true. So that fear was set aside and, ultimately, I think people get it now. They get the fact that sometimes the way that things work in game development isn’t known very well by a lot of people, so there’s an opportunity for misunderstanding, including the fact that as a multi-studio team and company, we have many projects that are ongoing. When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves and that team goes on to work on something else that in those intervening months represent millions of dollars of development time, which either goes towards the next game that you might not see for several years, or a different game that they might go to work on like Dragon Age or the Old Republic. We work on all these different things.”
“So in this case, we chose to work on a DLC which people really enjoyed for Mass Effect 2 and we also wanted to make sure that people had it as an opportunity to build it into their first play-through if they wanted that as an optional thing,” he added. “That’s what they did and now that people have played it they can see that, yes, it was optional versus the way it was initially spun by some people on the Internet.”
One of the most controversial aspects post-launch is the ending, and Hudson said of the game’s ending, “I didn’t want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the endings have had with people–debating what the endings mean and what’s going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in,” he said. “That to me is part of what’s exciting about this story. There has always been a little bit of mystery there and a little bit of interpretation, and it’s a story that people can talk about after the fact.”
When asked if BioWare pays attention to fan feedback, Hudson says, “Oh, we pay very close attention to it. It’s very important to us and we will always listen to feedback, interpret it and try and do the right thing by our fans. That’s why if you look at Mass Effect 2 we knew that people wanted to spend more time with a character like Liara, and so we created an ongoing storyline with her as part of the comics and then built it into the DLC stuff, and we’re always listening to fans. We have some really great multiplayer content and some really great single-player content coming over the air, and their feedback will become part of how we design that.”
“It’s very important to us because as a game designer, you and a small group of other people design a game–and everything that you have and everything that you know–to make it as good as possible. But that opinion really pales in comparison to the opinions of millions of people that actually play it under the intended conditions, buying the game, wanting to enjoy it as a piece of entertainment, and then providing their honest feedback,” he continued. “That’s where we learn a lot as game designers and artists and developers–really listening and really trying to analyze what’s behind a lot of the feedback that we get and convert that into a new set of principles that we carry forward into each game. So it has everything to do with finding a really good balance between action and role-playing systems that we did for Mass Effect 3, or even deciding which characters we really want to feature strongly, or what we want to do with those characters.”
When asked for an example of fan feedback informing the game design, he said, “Some of the characters in the Mass Effect series were never intended originally to be potential love interests — characters like Garrus or Tali who are quite alien. From the outset, we didn’t envision them as characters that people would want to have a romance with. And yet they were successful as characters, and so popular amongst a lot of people that people really wanted to develop a relationship with them, so we integrated that from Mass Effect 2 and it’s become a big part of the series.”
Source: Digital Trends
