Mass Effect 2 is going to be noticeably more grim than its predecessor, said producer Casey Hudson – drawing comparisons to the darker middle act in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Sure, both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi had their downer moments, but as a general rule of thumb they were pretty positive movies – they had happy endings, for one. Not so with The Empire Strikes Back: By the end of Empire, Han is frozen in carbonite, the Rebel Alliance is scattered, Luke has had his hand chopped off – and has learned some distressing information about his long-lost family dynamics.
(By the way, if you’re one of the 10 people on the planet who hasn’t seen the original Star Wars movies, I just spoiled you. Sorry.)
The upcoming sequel to Bioware’s space opera Mass Effect will be the Empire of the series, says producer Casey Hudson. Hudson confirms what many suspected after the first trailer revealed that Commander Shepard had supposedly been KIA (not that we believe such things, of course) – ME2 is going to be darker than the first game.
Of course, that’s simply just good narrative convention – not everything can go well for the heroes all the time, can it? As Hudson puts it: “They say in the first act you put a guy in the tree, in the second act you throw rocks at him, and in the third act you get him down.”
Nor is Hudson saying that the first Mass Effect was all hugs and sunshine, either. The game “introduced a lot of really dark ideas,” explained Hudson. “But you just get a peek into it in Mass Effect 1. In Mass Effect 2, it’s about really exposing that and letting you see it and letting you see how scary that would be when it’s on the scale we’re talking about.”
“The fun of the second story is that now we know who these characters are, we know what the situation is and we can really beat up the hero of this story and take you to the most brutal parts of the Mass Effect universe.”
One can’t help but wonder if Commander Shepard will have some surprising revelations of his/her very own about his/her paternity. Admittedly, it’s one of the oldest tropes in the book, so I wouldn’t be too surprised here.
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