And 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. When you import it into Mass Effect 2, now we can continue mining all that information. Your Mass Effect save game contains all of that information. 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. In a chat with PC World, lead producer Casey Hudson spoke at length about the hundreds of ways that actions from the first game, not just 'big choices,' can change things in the action-RPG sequel due on PC and Xbox 360 early next year: BioWare has repeatedly cautioned players of the first Mass Effect to hold on to their save games for use in the upcoming sequel, and now we have a better idea as to why.