“I’m a person who is always dreaming up new worlds.”
Perhaps it was so hard to do, BioWare never wanted to do it again.
And the trilogy idea was already there then, he says.
Hudson was apparently greatly inspired by Star Wars.
Two: BioWare needed an exciting innovation to sell the series with.
And a trilogy was exactly the kind of idea that would make people take notice of it.
On the very first design document, then, were sections for Mass Effect 2 and 3.
Small sections, mind you.
And it would be very aspirational, like, ‘Let’s wrap this whole thing up!'"
And, of course, that idea made it into the final game.
The original lead writer,Drew Karpyshyn, had this whole Dark Energy ideathat wasn’t used.
Plus, “you don’t know how the fans are going to respond”.
What if fans hate an idea you’ve really gone in on, or what if their tastes change?
It had to try and remain flexible.
The other benefit of putting off the worrying was it freed the team up creatively.
While Mass Effect 1 was in development, the team was preoccupied solely with getting Mass Effect 1 done.
He saw this again recently while making the Legendary Edition of the game.
BioWare could handle it because of the groundwork it laid making ME1 and ME2.
But no, apparently it never came up.
“I don’t think we’ve ever talked about that again,” Walters says.
And the ‘Why?’
That doesn’t mean all of the trilogy-linked ideas were dropped, though.
(I’ll come back to that last point.)
But sadly it was one of the ideas the team could never quite make work.
It’s hard to translate into a procedural world.
Andromeda, remember, was primarily a BioWare Montreal game, not an Edmonton one.
The project needed some core leadership and Walters was it.
So when Walters eventually took over the reins, there was a lot of work still to do.
To some degree, Walters can accept that.
And we hit a point where people were like, ‘No, that isn’t okay.’
Or, at least, ‘It isn’t okay for your franchise’.
And that’s fine, that’s a lesson learned.
Andromeda was a low-point for BioWare at the time and a perceived step down in terms of quality.
“Oh no we definitely felt it,” he says of the negative feedback the studio received.
“When I joined BioWare, we were innovative,” he says.
“We were always trying to push.
Walters was involved in the vision for the Mass Effect, too.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Again, it was more of a consulting thing.
I’m here if you need me but I’m going to focus on this.'”
But BioWare today is different to the BioWare that originated Mass Effect - even the BioWare that made Andromeda.
I had done a lot of Mass Effect.
And I love the series but I also wanted to do something new.”
Launching new IPs, or new worlds, is something that’s in his blood, he says.
“And then I was just starting to feel that itch that you feel,” he says.
“It’s nineteen years - nineteen-plus years at BioWare.
But ultimately the decision was I just needed to make a clean break.”
