The Mass Effect series has been credited with one of the better narratives in gaming. While the story seemed meticulously crafted, many parts of it were composed piecemeal.
“With ME1 and 2 we kind of cast some lines out into the next game that we knew we would have to think of something with. We didn’t know what exactly, how it would happen, but we knew what we had to do,” said executive producer Casey Hudson. “We would start a plot point, you know on a character level or on a macro level, knowing that, ‘okay in the second one it’ll change this way and in the third one it’ll change this way and it’ll be resolved’ but we didn’t know exactly how. Some things we had pretty specific ideas for how it would work but as we moved forwards we add more detail and start condensing things down into specifics.”
Hudson responded to a question asking if Mass Effect 3 ended up where they thought it would be by saying, “I think it’s a similar thing where we know we’re going to have to resolve certain things and we have ideas about how we’re going to do that, so we know from 1 we might say. ‘yeah this particular large storyline We’re gonna do this particular thing with it and now we’re gonna resolve it’. But the people and the back-story might not exist for it until we make ME2 and we go ah! These are the people who need to be in that position at that time, to do these things.”
