8 Sep, 2010
If you ever felt like someone was watching you game, it may not have been your underlining schizophrenia at work. Turns out that Big Brother… I mean BioWare has been watching you.
If you are one of the many who enjoyed (or at least played) Mass Effect 2, it’s been recently shown that you were sort of an anonymous guinea pig for the gaming company. While your male or female Shepard went traveling around space, making friends (and enemies), shooting some while saving others, BioWare was quietly gathering data to see how exactly you play.
Executive Producer, Casey Hudson, spoke to IGN about this, explaining, “The only data that we get are in terms of events — little things that happen in the game. Let’s say if we want to know whether players skip lines of dialogue, we can have that become a little event that gets sent up. It’s all completely anonymous, so all we get is raw numbers for how many times these kinds of events occur.”
The main goal behind this data is for the company to gauge what exactly you like in the game and what you don’t like, so that in future games they can make adjustments towards the way the game plays. An example of some of the date included the fact that 80% of the Shepards played were all male; meaning either a lot of females prefer to step into the shoes of a guy, or not a lot of girls play Mass Effect. For shame, girls!
source-ign
If you’re also in the habit of skipping dialogue, that too has been taken into consideration. It seems most players skipped 15% of conversations in Mass Effect 2. If that had been any higher, there may have been a trip back to the drawing board. Hudson explained this by saying, “If we found that 80% or 90% of the lines were being skipped, we would have to reevaluate the work that we were putting into the digital acting.”
The statistics also showed that the game was often played more than once. Some PC players hold a record of playing the game a total of 28 times, while some 360 players did it a total of 23 times. I can’t even fathom how those players had the time to do so, but it’s certainly impressive. However, the stats also showed that only 50% of players finished the game.
So, what does this mean for the future of Mass Effect? Well, it certainly seems to be a good thing. BioWare will be able to take these stats and with them, be able to figure out a way to make Mass Effect 3 perfect for all of us who already love the series.
Source: IGN
I was surprised that quite so many people played as Male Sheppard, as I’m always hearing about people’s Female Sheppard’s antics! It also surprised me only 50% finished the game, I found it got better as it got on!
I want to see some stats for the amount of time spent mining planets!
Yeah, I can’t understand those who never finished the game. I couldn’t get enough of it. In fact, writing this just reminded me I want to do another playthrough!