The Level Designer
The act of environment and encounter creation in any level-based action game is an organic, almost mystical process that brings all the disciplines together—artists, programmers, and perhaps most importantly, the level designer.
The level designer is where the “rubber hits the road.”
Equal parts architect, combat tactician, builder, and artist, the level designer is responsible for bringing together content, systems, and aesthetics, and then translating these things into an experience that will be fun, challenging, and pleasurable for the player.
More than that, it has to be memorable.
As with many outcomes of high craft, good level design is often invisible; it becomes such an organic outcome of the player’s experience of the game that it is indistinguishable from all the other game elements.
There is a cohesion that makes the experience shine, and the player is left with an indescribable sense of everything just feeling “right.” In other words, when it works, it just works.
Creating Levels in Mass Effect 1
Mass Effect 1’s level design process was largely an outcome of its origins as a spiritual follow-up to Knights of the Old Republic.
In KotOR, the combat systems were still largely based on “die-rolling,” meaning, as with the tabletop pen-and-paper RPGs that inspired it, the computer is rolling a die (in this case, triggering a number generator) to determine a relatively random outcome to each combat event.
This all happens outside the player’s knowledge. When the player initiates an attack, the game logic calculates the attack’s likelihood of being successful based on various parameters and then assigns an outcome—for example, damage to the target.
Mass Effect 1’s combat system determined outcomes using a similar system of “rolling the dice,” the effect being a combat experience that did not always feel intuitive, satisfying, or responsive to the player.
In fact, under this system, it was entirely possible for players to miss, even though all the visceral feedback provided by the game suggested strongly that there should have been a hit.
Level creation in Mass Effect 1 was also a fairly rudimentary process by the standards of the sequels. Levels were created by artists, with aesthetics considered before the playability of combat.
Level designers provided guidance on where cover objects should be placed, but the placement of those cover objects was still being done by the level artists.
As a result, the levels and layouts looked beautiful and were a pleasure to navigate through but were not always set up ideally for cover placement that would support an optimal combat experience.
Creating Levels in Mass Effect 2
For Mass Effect 2, the gameplay design team wanted to bring the combat gameplay closer to what player’s would expect of a shooter.
This would make ranged weapon combat feel more satisfying to the player, which would in turn make the entire gameplay experience more cohesive.
In a pure shooter, the outcome of combat is not based on “die rolls” but rather on real-world notions of line of sight, bullet accuracy, and penetration of armor.
Ray-tracing techniques are used to determine whether an individual projectile hits its target or not: the game calculates the path of the projectile, what lies between it and its target, what the target is doing, and how it is equipped defensively.
The resulting outcome is much more logical, intuitive, and in many ways, and satisfying. Without necessarily being able to articulate exactly why, the combat just feels better to the player.
This approach also made the placement of cover objects much more critical to the end result.
In reviews, Mass Effect 2 was lauded for providing a highly improved combat experience that brought the game in line with players’ expectations of a sci-fi-based action RPG.
Level creation in Mass Effect 2 also changed accordingly.
Rather than having artists create the level spaces as in Mass Effect 1, level designers created and iterated on “gray boxes”—level environments with untextured geometry and basic lighting intended to provide a low-cost environment to facilitate iteration on cover placement, line of sight, blockers, portals, access points, and so on.
Only when the levels were deemed ideal spaces for gameplay did the artists begin to beautify. This process tweak resulted in gameplay spaces that were as playable as they were pleasing to look at.
Taking Things to the Next Level in Mass Effect 3
Despite making massive improvements to the combat spaces in Mass Effect 2, the team still felt they could do better.
Using Mass Effect 2 downloadable content modules as test-beds, the team was able to experiment with new ideas and iterate on existing systems to create a combat experience in Mass Effect 3 that eclipsed what had been done in the previous two games.
One way in which combat spaces were improved in the DLC (downloadable content) was by experimenting with line of sight—what the player is able to see from any given position.
In Mass Effect 2, players could enter a combat area, choose a cover point, and fight the majority of the battle from that location.
This put them in a fixed position where mobility was not a factor and meant the combat space was not as dynamic as it could be.
The team addressed this in Mass Effect 3 by creating combat areas that would encourage players to move from location to location.
By placing objects that would block the player’s line of sight from a specific location, they would still be able to sense that the combat area extended beyond their current visible range. In effect, they would have a blind spot.
This would encourage them to move from point to point, advancing through the combat space and engaging in a much more dynamic combat experience.
With combat areas being more open, players would have more space to move around utilizing flanking maneuvers, forcing themselves and their enemies to travel around the environment.
By moving around, players would not only expose themselves to enemy fire—raising the threat to them and, correspondingly, the tension and their stress level—but they would engage in a more active navigation of the area, employing skill and tactics in how they use their weaponry and how they exploit the environment to their maximum benefit.
As a result, the combat spaces in Mass Effect 3, and the encounters themselves, offer more choices to the player and more interesting challenges, and it feels much more satisfying to win.
Building Encounters Around Themes
In order to evolve the encounters in Mass Effect 3, the team needed to take a different approach.
Rather than creating spaces like dungeons and simply populating them with enemies and asking players to fight these enemies as they passed through the area, encounters would be imbued with stronger contextualization through regular objective updates for the player.
The player would always be given a clear goal to accomplish, and the enemies would stand between them and that goal.
This simple but fundamental shift in the encounter-design philosophy for Mass Effect 3 led the team to another realization: that their strongest levels and encounters were unified through common themes.
Building experiences around themes provided cohesion to the player experience and was a process that ranged from macro to micro in scale.
Everything from the overall context wrapper, to subplots and character arcs, all the way down to individual moments and mission objectives played a roll in this.
Exploration Movement
In Mass Effect 3, the team introduced a new paradigm to their development of game levels: exploration movement.
Ladders, jumps, and drop-downs provide variety for the player and would allow the game environments to unfold along both vertical and horizontal axes.
This was in contrast to levels in Mass Effect 1 and 2, which were unable to provide major height variations without including long ramps, something few level environments could support.
The inclusion of ladders alone had a huge impact on the team’s ability to create interesting, multilevel layouts, as ladders could easily be accommodated in almost any type of space and provided a great deal of flexibility.
This also meant that encounters could exploit multiple tiers—enemies could approach and fire upon the player from varying heights, creating more dynamic and engaging combat spaces that push players to deal with threats on both the vertical and horizontal planes.
“Level design is about providing the player with interesting choices, but not too many at the same time. These choices must have interesting consequences for the player.”
Bastiaan Frank, Lead Level Designer, Mass Effect 3
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