BioWare’s Mass Effect series has become one of the most influential games of its generation. Its dialogue wheel, relationship system, and cinematic presentation are still used in modern games.
Mass Effect cinematography designer and Mass Effect 2 lead cutscene designer Armando Troisi told in the FRVR podcast that Casey Hudson was behind the desire to make the game as “cinematic” as possible.
He set impossible tasks for us. Just saying, okay, here’s what we need to do.
The team worked directly in the game engine, experimenting with long lenses and cinematography techniques from cinema. At the same time, the production was built according to clear rules.
If the characters were friendly to each other, they were placed in the same frame. If there was a conflict between them, they were separated by personnel. Even shooting over the shoulder could indicate the proximity of the characters. This allowed the camera to convey the relationships between the characters even before the player knew their true intentions.
We literally wrote down: here is a hostile camera, here is a friendly one, here is a camera for disagreement, and here is for intimacy. The level of ambition was simply unthinkable for that time.
BioWare won’t show Mass Effect 5 because the studio doesn’t have time for teasers
All this had to be done on an extremely unstable new engine. According to the designer, Mass Effect began to work normally on the Xbox 360 only at the very end of development, and the team worked in the “21 days of work, one day of rest” mode.
