Gameworld: "Mass Effect" space epic aims to evoke emotion

By Wojtek Dabrowski

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Saving the galaxy from annihilation has to be emotional, according to a Canadian video game developer who wants players of action role playing title "Mass Effect" to weigh their choices carefully as they fight for the future.

BioWare Corp, the Canadian game house being bought by Electronic Arts Inc, is giving players a big swath of outer space to explore and defend with its upcoming Xbox 360 title "Mass Effect."

But with some of the most realistic and best looking digital actors available in any video game to date, BioWare is also out to prove it can make players feel passionately about the characters in the story.

"These characters are living people, I mean they have personalities and you literally interact with them in the way that you'd have real-life conversations," Casey Hudson, the Mass Effect project director at BioWare, said in an interview.

"You get to know them, you start to care about them."

Players are cast as Commander Shepard, an elite agent of the human military, and tasked with saving the galaxy from an ancient race of machines which wipe out all advanced organic life every 50,000 years.

To accomplish the mission, players are handed their own spaceship, a map of the galaxy and a mandate to -- in BioWare's words -- "act without remorse, without hesitation, and outside the limits of the law."

Players also have the say over everything from Shepard's appearance and gender to his or her background story and abilities, as well as which non-player characters emerge.