You rely heavily on the lighting and the materials and can you get those reflective surfaces? Can you do it real time or is it all faked? Do you have to flip the level upside down and make part of it transparent? You have to end up faking it and making it as good as you can.' It's hard to do with clean, plastic, white hallways with the reflective floors you see in some of the movies,' the artist said. 'Videogames look a lot better if you clutter up hallways.

Some aspects of Mass Effect's design have proved difficult, too, especially the clean, slick look of the space age. 'We wanted those wide open areas, those swooping curves, the grand vistas and stuff, but it was hard to do with that engine.' 'Getting used to the technology made it difficult for us, he said. Watts said BioWare felt at the time it had done a good job, because it was the studio's first game of the current hardware generation. 'We had a lot of raised platforms and areas you could get caught up in - stuff we should have fixed right from the beginning.' 'Art-wise the original Mass Effect's levels worked really well but for gameplay they weren't so good,' art director Derek Watts told CVG. Mass Effect 3's art director has a lot of problems on his plate, from the game's sleek and shiny environments to the issue of what's behind Tali's mask.

What does tali look like under the mask