Holy shit just realized that next year is packed with high production AAA titles. Best year in gaming history confirmed?

Next year is ALWAYS the best year in gaming history. lol! ;)

BioWare and Dark Horse Comics are very pleased to announce a Mass Effect comic series published by Dark Horse, Mass Effect Redemption. Mass Effect: Redemption is scheduled to launch in January 6, 2010.

BioWare and Dark Horse Comics today announced a.In Mass Effect: Redemption, the story takes readers through the treacherous events leading up to Mass Effect 2 which opens with galactic hero Commander Shepard having mysteriously gone missing and left to fight for survival. What unfolds next will expose readers to new locations, aliens and extended storyline in the Mass Effect universe.

The Mass Effect: Redemption story is written by Lead Writer Mac Walters at BioWare. Walters is the script writer behind Mass Effect 2. He brings unique insight to the Mass Effect comic and nuance of the world within. The comic is scripted by John Jackson Miller (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, The Invincible Iron Man) and drawn by Omar Francia (Star Wars Legacy). This first four-part series explores the exotic and dangerous future Milky Way of Mass Effect, revealing previously unseen locations, aliens, and enemies of this rich science fiction landscape.

I am definitely picking this up for PC.

So many games are getting comic treatment these days, not that I complain though.

I hope ME2 has much better character face customization, first one was decent but could had much more options.

The models should be more accurate in game play, they look better when you create them. And they need more/better hair.

Hmmm sounds like they are setting up the comics to tie into the ME2 DLC?

GO: Did things ramp up faster as you turned to Mass Effect 2 given what you've been able to carry over in lessons learned and shared technology?

CH: Yeah, it did, though I think one thing people are going to be surprised about is that we didn't take the easy way out. We didn't just make a sequel where the same features and the same characters and environments move around differently to tell a different story. Mass Effect 2 is a game that's absolutely packed with new ideas and places. In fact I actually can't think of an aspect of the game that we haven't overhauled and made 100% better. I think it's going to surprise people how much we've improved things. In fact I think it'll be a game that gets talked about simply on the basis of how much we've gone in and touched, including things that already worked well in the first one.

GO: How significant are the variables being indexed in the save games, and how threaded throughout the Mass Effect 2 experience are they?

CH: It's completely different from anything you've played before, because it's literally, potentially threaded into everything that happens. When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things. Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information.

When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information. And it's not just what your ending was, or a couple of the big choices, you know, where we could have stuck a conversation at the beginning and asked you what you did and moved on. This is literally hundreds of things.

Anytime we have a plot or a character or situation in Mass Effect 2, we think about what you did, potentially, in the first game that might affect said plot or character or situation in the second. We can look at each variable and dynamically change what happens in the moment. It ranges from small things like, by way of example, Conrad Verner was a fan of Commander Shepard's that you met in the first game, and it's like you meet this guy in an alley and you can be nice to him or you can be a jerk to him, and at the time you might have been thinking of it as just a trite role-playing convention, good-guy bad-guy, and that's that.

Jump forward two years. Now you're playing Mass Effect 2, and oh my god, who's this, it's Conrad Verner! And based on what you've done, you realize that while the moment in the first game maybe seemed throwaway, now Conrad's back and involved in another plot in a game you're playing two years later...and what you did two years ago is meaningfully affecting what's happening. That's a small example.

[SPOILER WARNING]

The larger examples are things like...take the way you navigate through the ending of Mass Effect, how you left the galaxy in a certain state with humans, whether they were in control of the Galactic Council or not, things like that. In Mass Effect 2, when you walk around, you'll see all the areas affected by your decisions, including large scale stuff like the Citadel. You'll see signs all over the place that either humans are in control or that they're working more with the aliens and the Citadel is more like it was in the first game.

[END SPOILER]

It's also part of dialogues, part of signs that you see, even reflected in PA announcements that you'll hear. So it's woven through the entire experience, from beginning to end.

GO: You've had that level of continuous granularity planned from the beginning then?

CH: Yeah, it was always the plan to be able to import your character, therefore we included all those variables in the save game. We try and work the trilogy story from both the high level and the detail level. We've always known where the trilogy was going on the highest level, thematically speaking, through all three stories. But then as we get into developing each game, that's when we get down to the mid-level, like what are the actual workings of the plot and major characters and such.

The save game has every variable that you've set as a player, and as we delve into the detail levels of things like actual words that are spoken, art that appears in levels, sounds and music and subtle things as such...those can all be looked at, and how they comprise the world of each sequel can be affected by your choices in the prior ones.

The larger examples are things like...take the way you navigate through the ending of Mass Effect, how you left the galaxy in a certain state with humans, whether they were in control of the Galactic Council or not, things like that. In Mass Effect 2, when you walk around, you'll see all the areas affected by your decisions, including large scale stuff like the Citadel. You'll see signs all over the place that either humans are in control or that they're working more with the aliens and the Citadel is more like it was in the first game.

The Citadel has been rebuilt if i remember rightly from the new Mass Effect book Accession, and that picture is of the Cerberus floating space station Headquarters.

GO: Besides its trunk story, Mass Effect had a galaxy of optional planets you could explore. Of those, about 90% were represented with superficial text descriptions, while the remaining 10% you could actually land on tended to be mechanically and visually generic. How distinctive are the planets and optional locations this time? What can we expect from planetary exploration?

CH: It's completely different. It's based on an approach that's 180-degrees different. Much of what we were trying to do with the first game was to accomplish this experience of enormous scope, and that involved creating a new IP and all of that stuff. Now we're able to look at the feedback, what people wanted, what we want to do differently, and yeah, dealing with planetary uniqueness was one of the big points of feedback.

With Mass Effect 2, we actually looked at whether we should simply abandon additional worlds outside of the core ones. We seriously evaluated that, because with the first game, we had all these rich core-story-based worlds, and then we added to that a large number of other worlds you could explore and conduct missions on. But in general, there was a lot of feedback, as you say, from people wanting the optional planets to be more distinctive or unique. So we thought, should we even have this extra expanded universe portion of the game?

What we found in evaluating what people were saying, was that they loved the idea that you could look at a galaxy map and find a planet, go out there and find something amazing and explore it. They just wanted more substance and for the whole enterprise to be more interesting.

So we've kept all those additional worlds in Mass Effect 2, but we took a completely different tack, which is that every area has to be…every planet that you find out in the uncharted worlds has to be based on its own unique hook. There has to be something different there, an opportunity for you to play with something in terms of gameplay or the story content or whatever's going on at a given location that's different from what you're able to do in the core story.

With the first one, we built lighter content but were able to deliver a large number of worlds. In Mass Effect 2's case, by contrast, it's about every area being something amazing and special, so that you see one and you go wow, that was a really cool and different experience. But then the next one is completely different from that, and changes your expectations again about what you'll find. The more you do it, the more you realize that anything can happen in the outer parts of the exploration experience.

Mass Effect fans, what are your thoughts on Bioware flirting with permadeath in Mass Effect 2?

GO: Turning to first game quirks, I know everyone cranks about Mass Effect's slow elevators, but what bugged me was exploring with the Mako. It didn't seem to scale well with the rest of the game. At one point I recall hopping over projectiles spit by an alien sandworm and feeling this Super Mario vibe that clashed with the seriousness of everything else.

CH: We have a completely new vehicle in Mass Effect 2, and it's a similar idea, but the way it works and the controls are fundamentally different. We're not talking too much about it yet, in part because it's one of the things that's just gone in and we want to make sure that it's going to stay the way it is in the final game before we talk too much about it. But it's definitely a different design.

It's a similar idea, in that it's a vehicle about the size of the Mako that you can use to explore these really rough alien worlds. The difference is, it moves fundamentally differently from the first Mako, where now...it basically moves similar to the way your character moves. You can strafe from left to right, you can shoot wherever you want, it's easier to target enemies that are standing right in front of you or directly overhead, and it just navigates the terrain a lot better.

Part of the issue with the first Mako was that it literally, in a way that I don't think anyone knows or will ever fully appreciate, it was probably I'll bet the first and only physics-simulated skid-steer vehicle in games. Not that that's a... [laughs] ...not that that's a bullet point we'd put on the box, but the amazing thing about it is that it was actually physically simulated. In doing that, it incurred a lot of control difficulties. You couldn't just strafe to the side and hide behind a rock and then pop out.

The new vehicle fundamentally addresses all the stuff we wanted to improve with the Mako, and that's part of the value of really just...instead of moving ahead and just continuing into the sequel, the fact that we stopped, we looked at everything about the way people were experiencing the first game, and then designed things that were fundamental solutions. We could've made incremental improvements to certain things like the Mako, but by going back to first principles and thinking about the way the worlds actually ended up, how rough the terrain was, the kind of fighting that you'd want to do there, the kind of exploring, then designing a vehicle that captured exactly those things...knowing all that we know from the first game, we now have a vehicle that's right out of the box so much easier and intuitive to play with.