Mass Effect 3: perfecting videogame cinema

Parish Ley is lead cinematic animator on Mass Effect 3, which means he's seen more aliens close up than the entire Star Wars cast. The bombardment of queasily skinned mugshots would ruin a lesser man, but Ley's made of stern stuff. Just as well. With the third chapter in BioWare's blistering trilogy making its final approach, we shoved a press badge in Ley's face and screamed naked admiration at him till he agreed to answer some questions.

What were your personal aims for Mass Effect 3?

What I wanted to do with this game is to develop the galactic war, make it as big as we had promised all the way back on Mass Effect 1. When we were on ME1 and planning for the trilogy, we always planned for the third one to be a big war. All the races of the galaxy are there and the hero has to gather them up and lead them against this timeless enemy.

At the time we were like "no problem" - but when it came to Mass Effect 3, we made this big promise and we really needed to deliver. So we wanted to make sure the scale was right, to make it as big as our imaginations thought it could be. It was always going to be a lot of work but we really dug in and I think we've done some really exciting stuff.

The second thing we wanted to do was make it so you really have a stake in that giant battle or war - the player has to have the relationships, the personal relationships with the characters, the ones that feel right. That's when the giant battle really feels correct, as big as it should. Otherwise you're just watching a load of explosions and it doesn't really mean anything.

Cinematically, we were playing with the language of classic war movies and battle scenes, because what we wanted was for the battle to feel timeless but also very personal, like it's your personal war you're fighting. You're the face that launched a thousand ships, they're all waiting for your command.

A lot of the shots and experiences will toggle in or out depending on your story or what you've been doing in Galaxy at War. As you go through the game you make decisions that will make races rally to you or fall away, and it's those races which will gather together at the end.

It's amazing that it hangs together so well, given the range of choices you allow for.

To the player it feels like a natural gaming experience, it feels like a proper edit. One of the other things we were dealing with was moving in and out of cut-scenes and the branching story experience, and we've developed a lot of tools with the camera. One of the fun things about the whole galaxy being at war is that where you jump in really doesn't matter. They're all fighting each other, or the Reapers, and playing with the IP in that way was quite fun.

In Mass Effect 1 or 2 you could jump into a system and then you'd fly over a city, whereas now cities are falling, planets are falling, these things are really exciting to do, and it adds a bit of a different artistic flavour to Mass Effect 3, and it's fun to see the arc.

How about the quieter moments, like when you're talking to a squadmate?

One of the things that we wanted to do was we spent a lot more time on the performances and developing a lot of the characters. We built a lot of our sets on the motion capture stage - things like the med bay, Shepard's bedroom and Joker's cockpit. We took some days with the actors and rehearsed it and acted it out and gave the actors time to develop the nuances we were going for.

Although we write a lot of stuff, what can also help in these is not saying anything and letting it happen. That was really successful, the animators were able to take those experiences and do amazing things with them. So once we had those performances we wanted to make sure the player is engaged with them, that the performances feel like natural reactions to what players have done.