I was at an event tonight where Autodesk was demo-ing new features in Maya and 3DSMax. Adrien Cho, lead technical artist for Bioware, gave a presentation. I' m not sure if this is already common knowledge, but he mentioned that the large worlds in Mass Effect will be 16 square kilometers. That' s quite a lot of explorable terrain for multiple worlds!

16 sqm? Wasn' t Oblivion 16 sqm, too? Anyway that seems tto be a lot bigger than KotOR and Jade Empire and that' s obviously positive. Just one more month...

I' m starting to feel that Mass Effect should be the GOTY. I' ll probably play UT 3 more in the end, but the market is so saturated with FPS games that a none FPS deserves the honors.

Remeber Evil, the large worlds are 16Km, that means there are several of them to explore!

Right, plus many smaller ones!

Oh thanks, I misread your text. I read " the large world will be 16qkm" and not " large worlds will be 16qkm" . So it means even more f' n space to explore. Though I am just hoping there' ll be enough diversity and not 16qkm of boring brown landmass.

How are they going to fit all of this on one disc? Will they?

I think the landmasses will be some form of random generated patches of land. I dont think itll all be brown, but some of the worlds will probably be barren and hostile to visit.

Thanks Zoy. It wasn' t common knowledge as far as i know. I had been getting the impression that the game world wasn' t as large as i' d originally hoped but obviously it is.

I wonder whether we' re talking multiple discs...

Every new world a different disc ;)

But seriously, if they manage to fit this game on DVD it would be really astonishing.

It' s a one disc game, they stated that some time ago.

the game is 18-30 hours long, depending how you go about it, and more you start exploring, if the game sells well, they add content to ease the player into the story of ME2. If that sells well they will produce more of it.

I hope these plans havent changed with EA taking over the reins. Im hopeful EA will leave Bioware alone, im guessing they didnt pay a billion to destory the company.

Im trying to forget what happened to:

Westwood
Bullfrog
Origin

It should be quite easy to get landscapes that big onto a dvd, as long as the landscapes are part-prcedurally generated I cant see them taking up all that much space in the same way that the graphically lavish independant maps such as gears use. Particularly as in such a large environment you will be able to use instancing to a whole new level without it being noticable.

I reallyy need this game to be as good as I hope it is!!

The impression that I got is that the charted worlds are fully designed, with large areas of the landmasses formed through displacement maps which are then populated by static meshes that are handmade by environment artists. Smaller, uncharted moon and asteroids might be more randomly generated.

He also showed a number of screenshots that I hadn' t seen before, but I' m sure they' ll be released sometime soon. One was of a lava/mining planet, which I think was one of the larger worlds. He said that because the draw distance has to be so great for the surface of the planet, the interior mining section is handled as a separate level. (Not sure if this means a loading wait as you enter the mine, or if it' s able to stream them together somehow.)

Another world shown was a jungle planet. He showed some gorgeous shots of a beach with rocky, forested outcroppings in the water in the moonlight.

An interesting location shown was a circular, wheel-like space station with a river running along the " floor" of the wheel, traversed by multiple bridges to all the buildings on either side. There was some sort of holographic strip of clouded, blue sky on the ceiling. Due to the curvature of the wheel, you could see for a great distance of this gradually upward-curving city. He mentioned that they came up with this idea as an homage to old-fashioned visions of the future, as in old issues of National Geographic that had speculations of " what life will be like in the year 2000." But when they implemented it they found that they hadn' t anticipated certain problems caused by the curvature of the floor, such as characters appearing to stand at weird angles and unusual camera angles.

This game looks sweet but I want to know more about it(like I saw a little about combat, but it wasn' t great). I will definately watch this one(when is it set to release).

Yes I can look this all up, but I am sure one of you knows them off the top of your head.

Lazy bastard!

November 20th in the US

November 23rd in Europe

It' s just 4 weeks away!

It' ll go quickly too because CoD4 is out 2 weeks before that...

November 5th in the US

November 9th in Europe

And my PC will be built around mid-November and Crysis is out mid-November and Assassins Creed is out mid-November and some other games are out both before and after mid-November including but not limited to; Unreal Tournament 3, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, Ratchet & Clank Future, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja, Need For Speed: ProStreet, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, Ace Combat 6: Fires Of Liberation, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, Bully: Scholarship Edition, Haze, Time Crisis 4, Gears of War and My Horse & Me.

My Horse & Me

I didnt realise November was going to be so crowded. Although I' m really only interested in 6 of those....7 if you include My Horse & Me. The dx10.1 in that game, seriously.

This game looks sweet but I want to know more about it(like I saw a little about combat, but it wasn' t great). I will definately watch this one(when is it set to release).

Your not going to want Mass Effect for the combat. Its a story driven game roleplaying game, the combat in game like that cant be compared to Gears of War or something like that, and it shouldnt. It does seem like they' ve made it more intresting than former RPG' s.

Its impressive that there are so many titles in November, reviewers will be on overtime.

I was not trying to imply that I would be buying this game for the combat, but I remember seeing something about it being party based and still a shooter, but i am looking to this for something different because that is mostly what I will have then.

Thanks for the info Nitro I can' t wait until COD4 comes out and then this right after it i am going to be so broke by the end of this year. i am so getting My horse & Me!

On a side not I now have a working 360 and will be getting Live as soon as I can, so for any of you who have forgotten my GT is Torr44, I will also be getting Halo3 when I get Live, so I' ll see you all online.