BioWare: Aliens are easy

Friday 1 June 2007
Mass Effect, developer BioWare's epic space opera action-RPG (try saying that with a mouthful of tribbles), has a cast packed with weird and wonderful alien races. But, reckons BioWare, it's the human beings who cause the real design headaches.

"If you get humans right, you've got the aliens in the bag," Casey Hudson, project director on Mass Effect, tells Wired magazine in this month's issue. BioWare had apparently run into problems with human characters like leading man, Shepard (below), looking too much like sinister mannequins.

"We spent a lot of time on the reflection of light on the eyes and suble eye movements," Hudson continues. There's a team of 130 people designing the Geth, Turian and Asari characters, plus all the other inter-galatic worlds and creatures. In our eyes they've done a fantastic job.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.