...last week, at an IGDA meeting up in Montreal.

First things first, I just want to explain something: I'm a student of game design, a few months off from graduation, and on the verge of entering the game industry. I'm in a situation where I meet and am exposed to industry figures all the time, but I'm also still new enough to be very excited about meeting these people. So when I come onto this forum and talk about the latest person I met, I'm not, as some people have suggested, bragging or dropping names: I am sharing my genuine excitement with you guys.

Me and some of my friends talked to him for quite a while. At one point I asked him why they decided to move away from the infinite ammo/overheating limitations from the first game. I enjoyed the freedom that the unlimited ammo gave me, and was a bit wary of the change. I was only a couple hours into ME2 at this point. His answer was that limiting ammo accomplished two things: it pressured the player to change weapons more frequently, and it pressured the player to move around in battle to pick up ammo. And on reflection I realized that I had used a greater variety of guns in the first 2 hours of Mass Effect 2 than I had in the entirety o the first game. Pretty much sold me on the change. And apparently if you ever run out of all of your ammo, your party members act as infinite ammo spawns, to prevent the layer from ever getting completely stuck.

I also got a chance to talk to one of the animators from the game. At one point, he started waxing nostalgic about the old Wing Commander games, and complaining about how the space fighter genre seems to have disappeared... and said that he'd like to see that in Mass Effect 3.


I also need to finish this game faster so that I can actually read these topics, hah.