1000xRESIST creator wanted to make “a Mass Effect without any shooting”

“We knew very early on that this game would be super narrative-focused. And so we began to do some thinking about themes. Actually, that’s not 100 per cent true. If I go back and I look at the prototype when I began working on the prototype — and before there was any story, I was just referencing my desire to have a Mass Effect experience where I didn’t have to go around shooting anybody.” Whether it’s a game, a film, an amusement park ride, a pizza topping or even a brand of toothpaste, the words ‘Mass Effect experience’ are a surefire way to grab my attention.

“That was the original place where I was starting the prototype, but we acknowledged then that if we’re going to have a Mass Effect without any shooting, much of it has to be narrative-focused. And so then that’s when we kind of peeled away. And then myself and the writers, as they joined, started off with the thematics, and then brainstorming kind of what could happen: Who are the characters? What are they like?”

“This is something we know from the arts: If you keep adding stuff on top of stuff, you’ll you’ll never be able to make space for something new. So the idea was to ask very simple questions like, ‘If we’re going to make a very pure narrative game, what would that feel like? And what can we reference?’ And in games, we have so many assumptions about what something should be or what it is. If you even remove just this one thing from it, all of a sudden there’s so much space for a new type of discovery or a new type of way of doing something.”