Mass Effect 2 importing 'hundreds' of Mass Effect decisions

In a recent interview with PC World, BioWare lead producer Casey Hudson confirmed what many assumed this advice implied: Decisions made in the original Mass Effect will impact how Mass Effect 2's storyline unfolds.

"When you're playing the first game, everything that you do is setting a variable so that as the story progresses we know that you did a certain thing on a certain planet, and then internal to the game, we can reference those things," Hudson said. "Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information. When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information."

Hudson went on to note that even minor decisions made in Mass Effect will impact events in Mass Effect 2. "It's not just what your ending was, or a couple of the big choices, you know, where we could have stuck a conversation at the beginning and asked you what you did and moved on," he continued. "This is literally hundreds of things."

"The save game has every variable that you've set as a player, and as we delve into the detail levels of things like actual words that are spoken, art that appears in levels, sounds and music and subtle things as such...those can all be looked at, and how they comprise the world of each sequel can be affected by your choices in the prior ones," he went on to say.

Mass Effect 2 is expected to arrive for the Xbox 360 and PC before the end of EA's current fiscal year, which runs through March 31, 2010. Check out GameSpot's previous coverage for more information on Mass Effect 2.