Mass Effect 3's Level Design Detailed

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Written by BuckGB on February 3rd, 2012

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Beyond the Citadel, things get rough and ready fast. Mass Effect 2's Krogan homeworld - a ball of smoking missile craters populated (at the time of visiting, anyway) by warring tribes - has provided useful pointers. "Environments, we got a lot of reference from Tuchanka. It's rough. They don't like cushions. Their world we decided to go with brutal architecture - very harsh shapes, nothing glamorous, bleak."

At times, BioWare has reached out to real-life ruined nations for inspiration. "There's one building which we modelled a bit too closely, which is actually a building in North Korea. They don't play Mass Effect so they probably don't care, but it's a 100 storey building in North Korea and it's completely abandoned."

He comments later: "the reason we reference a lot of actual buildings is because we get a better idea of what the materials are. It's a huge team that figures out all these questions - it's too much to expect one level artist to work all of that out. With Mass Effect 3 we went with more angled beams and bringing some vegetation in on planets, trying to get a heavier atmosphere."

Watts breezes us through the process of turning those inspirations into working levels. "We go in and do detail drawings - for levels we'll do it quickly. There's a lot of things to think about - where's the combat, would it be better if they were further down, does it make sense, what do you need to do here, where does the narrative flow.

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