We were able to catch Christina while she was waiting in line for one of the (many) talks going on during GDC 2011 and interviewed her regarding designing Mass Effect 2 and its influence on Mass Effect 3.

The interview might give a bit of insight into the kinds of things to expect in the last game of the Mass Effect trilogy.

Game Rant: When you addressed design concerns going from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2, how did you start? What influenced the changes?

GR: Will players who opted to stay romantically involved with Liara or Ashley Williams from ME1 be rewarded for staying loyal?

There were a lot of themes that emerged that seemed really consistent and resulted in kind of like a critical, hardcore gamer feedback and there were also people who would just say things like, “I find this game confusing,” “I try to play it and my gun isn’t hitting anybody and I don’t know what’s going on,” and other sort of things. So there were certain aspects of the gameplay that were making the game inaccessable to players.

The way I like to put that is, Mass Effect has always looked like a shooter, but Mass Effect 1 didn’t really play like one. It could play like a shooter, if you were a smart gamer and you understood what we were doing and you did all the RPG stuff in just the right way, you could have a pretty good shooter experience.

We wanted to make sure every gamer who have already played a shooter could have a good experience in Mass Effect 2 and look at the RPG stuff as not being the barrier to entry, like you don’t get to play a shooter if you don’t do this RPG stuff and make it more like “You can play it like a shooter, but if you want to be really awesome, if you want to just destroy everything, you really have to engage that RPG stuff.” And that becomes sort of a competitive edge to a gamer when you engage those RPG mechanics.

GR: Since the design differences between 1 and 2 were so prevalent, are you taking an approach to the third game of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?”

GR: Like planet scanning?

There really is infinite possibilities now that we have that really, really solid Mass Effect 2 core. What you’ll probably not see in Mass Effect 3 is a lot of major, complete reinventions, because we don’t have those things where we’ll shift it and all that. That is not actually what we wanted to do. There will still be things that are in ME2 that won’t be in ME3 and that’s just because we’re looking at the overall play experience of “does this make sense to have in both games?” Sometimes there’s something and we’ll say “this is great for one game, but we don’t want to do it again in another game, because once was enough.” And instead we want to put in something new to replace it.

Players of Mass Effect 1 may have noticed that very important decisions had a direct impact on the experience of Mass Effect 2, like choosing to save the Council or kill the Rachni queen. They were part of 700 different plot points that also carried over, not every single one was immediately noticeable during the play experience, but as Norman points out, those decisions may be seen in Mass Effect 3. She and her team are hard at work creating a ME game that will not simply be an upgraded version of the second title.

Gameplay changes aren’t going to be the only thing that make the third game a high-profile title. Fans are eagerly anticipating the story completion and continued journey of Commander Shepard (that is, if he/she made it during the suicide mission). Mass Effect 2 did win the GDC “Best Writing” award this year and while some have their objections to the plot of the game, the mythology and characters did a wonderful job of bringing the story to life.

Here’s hoping that ME3, and the Mass Effect games after Shepard will deliver an experience that will blow ME2 out of the water.

Mass Effect 3 releases Q4 2011 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.