Ian “Tibby” Frazier Was Featured on BioWare’s Mass Effect Team Reveal
Today was “N7 Day” — November 7th, yes, but also BioWare’s celebration of the anniversary of the release of the first Mass Effect game. As part of the festivities, as it were, the BioWare blog featured a lengthy article which introduced some of the development team leads overseeing the creation of the next Mass Effect game.
Ultima V: Lazarus project director Ian Frazier — Tiberius, Tiberius Moongazer, or simply Tibby, as we in the Ultima fandom also know him — was, of course, featured therein. He is the lead designer, after all:
Think it, build it, play it – that’s lead designer Ian Frazier’s approach for the next Mass Effect. With so many creative teams on a project, he says it’s easy to lose focus and sit around bouncing big ideas off one another. That’s why when Frazier feels the team has a good idea, rather than getting it perfect on paper, he focuses on having them build it in game so they can get their hands on it and see how it handles.
“My philosophy is: build a basic prototype now, play it, and iterate on it, rather than building a giant paper cathedral of design and then trying to implement it into the game,” he says.
According to Frazier, his chief responsibility is ensuring the game is fun. What this means is hours of communication, breakdowns, playtests, and meetings with writers, artists, and designers to make sure that the levels they’re building in game make sense, and that the story is represented across all aspects of gameplay.
“We have a lot of tribal knowledge of what makes Mass Effect work,” he says. “But we also do a lot of experimentation. We try stuff, and then we do internal focus tests with fans. We’ll see their reactions, and when we see things that across the board people are getting excited about, then we know we have something good.”
Frazier’s introduction to design was in grade 6 when his father introduced him to Game-Maker. His modding experience led him to university, where he created and ran project Lazarus, which aimed to remake Ultima 5 in the Dungeon Siege engine. He has since worked as lead designer for a number of studios, overseeing titles such as Dawn of War: Soulstorm and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
When the chance arose to come work on Mass Effect at BioWare, he says he jumped at the opportunity.
“I’m a huge fan of all things BioWare, and have been since Baldur’s Gate,” Frazier says. “Mass Effect is my favorite series, so I was extremely excited about it. They could have offered me janitor on this project and I would have taken that.”
Fortunately, they had a rather more important role in mind for him.
BioWare also released some concept art created for the upcoming Mass Effect game, and NeoGAF has some additional artwork evidently captured from a livestream given earlier today. Both sets of images are well worth a look.
And darn it all…Tibby still looks like a young Richard Garriott, doesn’t he?
The Mass Effect trilogy was really amazing up until the end of 3. But I find it hard to get excited for any new Mass Effect because of how much the ending bothered me, which is why I didn’t pick up the Leviathan or Citadel DLC for ME3.
I wish Ian Frazier the best but they’ll need one hell of a pitch to draw me back in.
The last time we spoke, Ian did allude to some ideas he had about adding depth to the moral decision-making…how about that?
Mass Effect was really good at that up until the end. I loved the Geth/Quarian dilemma and the ethical debate over the Genophage.
I just don’t know how or where you set a new game where I’m interested again. The ending wasn’t just a let down (because of how amazing everything before it was) but it killed a lot of potential for the series.
I hear The Citadel had a lot of great moments with companions, but if the DLC is set at a time where billions are dying left and right to Reapers, it seems a little odd to take a break for comedy and fan service in the middle of the dark/tense narrative.
Not only is it pretty much impossible to scale stakes upward in any way, I just feel like most stories you could have told in the ME universe before 3 have now been made impossible or very difficult to tell.
Well, ending the conflict with the Reapers was…kind of a given, I suppose. No real way to get around that, and it certainly does lend a finality to that trilogy.
But, the nice thing about Mass Effect is that BioWare fleshed out its universe incredibly well, and left themselves lots of room to add new stories into the lore. Equally, for just about any ending of ME3, there’s lots of potential for new stories…the reconstruction of the galaxy and suchlike.
Of course, yes, nothing will have quite the same universe-saving stakes as the original trilogy…although there is still that whole dark energy thread that was teased in ME2 and then never really explored thereafter…
I wish him the best. But like T.J., I’m basically done with Mass Effect unless there is something HUGE to draw me back in. Also, like T.J., I did not even bother with the DLCs for ME 3 (aside from the revised ending), for much the same reasons.
@TJ, word is on the street the DLC explains a lot of the ending. Not that it makes the endings any better.
I finally got this trilogy on an Origin sale a number of weeks ago. I felt the gameplay and pacing of the 1st and 3rd was pretty good. Along with character development being pretty good throughout. But that transition from ME1 to ME2 was super offensive. It was really jarring and simply too unbelievable to accept. Going into ME2 with all the hype; I was expecting a Human Revolution or ME3 pacing. What I got was completely different. IMO, it was the weakest part of the series. Although I can see how the episodic nature of the character development would be appealing to gamers with limited time. In that way it was pretty genius.
The overall ending was rather lazy and rushed. Perhaps I was prepared for it to be disappointing, so I didn’t have much of a problem with the abrupt ending. Throughout the game I’d been exposed to so much illusion of choice that the ending wasn’t a shocking surprise.
I’m sure Tibby will do a great job as he’s done in the past. Most importantly they have a new lead writer!