Mass Effect 2 – BioWare Collecting Stats Data for Understanding Player’s Interests

BioWare is collecting player comments from Mass Effect 2 in order to make Mass Effect 3 better. You don’t need to do anything to contribute though, apart from play the game while connected to the internet.

The series’ executive producer Casey Hudson told consumer site IGN that BioWare had examined Achievement stats from 2007′s Mass Effect, but wanted to expand the amount of stats available for the sequel.

According to the information collected, the least played class was the Engineer, with the Soldier proving to be the most popular. The average completion time was 33 hours with around 50 per cent of players actually completing the game. Worryingly, there are players that played the game to completion in a single 66 hour session and four of you completed Mass Effect 2 23 times.

“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. 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.” said Hudson.

BioWare seeded Mass Effect 2 with dozens of tiny events that would let it collect information on things like the classes that people picked or how many of the game’s conversations they skipped. Casey Hudson, the series’ Executive Producer, said that the information gave BioWare a window into how people were playing the game and how the company might tweak things for the sequel. For example, the soldier is by far the most popular class, and Hudson said that knowing that allowed it to start asking the right questions about the design process for ME3.

The “anonymous player data” collected by BioWare is obviously meant to inform the studio in designing future titles. For example, only 15 percent of people skipped conversations in the game, most of the time in “non-critical moments like in the hub worlds.” Hudson says that if the company found people skipping 80-90 percent of the lines that they’d have to “reevaluate the work” the team put into digital acting — and we’d have to reevaluate why people are playing Mass Effect in the first place. Check out IGN’s piece for more on how the stats support current decisions and influence future projects.