BioWare Using Mass Effect Data to Tweak the Series

 

Oftentimes, when companies start mining consumer data they do it for nefarious marketing purposes; when BioWare does it however, it’s to improve on an already amazing franchise. The company has shared some info it’s gathered on Mass Effect 2 and opted to talk a little bit about how they plan to use the data in the upcoming Mass Effect 3.

First up, some fun facts that you likely didn’t know:

• The most utilized character class is the soldier, while engineer is least-loved.
• 80 percent of gamers chose to play the game as a male version of Commander Shepard
• Two PC gamers have each finished Mass Effect 2 28 times, while four Xbox 360 gamers have beaten the title 23 times.

The statistics alone are pretty interesting, but more importantly BioWare is utilizing the info gathered to improve the franchise on the fly, making sure they’re putting together a series gamers will continue to enjoy.

“The only data that we get are in terms of events — little things that happen in the game,” said project director Casey Hudson. “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. Then we can start getting ratios and comparing proportions and things like that. It becomes this mass of numbers, and then we have to try to figure out how we would interpret that.”

“Sometimes you’ll design something and think that it’s going to be used in a certain way and people will use it in a completely different way,” he added. “And if you didn’t know that, then you would just keep making that system the same as you did before. But once you know what players like and what they don’t like, based on the way that they’re playing it, then you can make more of the good stuff and less of the stuff they weren’t interested in.”

 

One other fun little tidbit, it seems that PC players were more likely than Xbox 360 players to tackle Miranda’s loyalty mission (where she tries to reconnect with her sister), while 360 owners were more likely than their PC brethren to take on Grunt’s loyalty mission on the Krogan homeworld. We’re sure there’s some deep psychiatric meaning behind that but we’ll let that debate rage in the comment section.

So now BioWare can use this info to fine-tune the experience for Mass Effect 3 and really cap off the series in style as they get a good feel for what players do and do not want from the franchise. Even though the game’s a long way out we’re already tremendously excited, so much so that we’ve begun speaking as quickly as Mordin.