Fabulous Massles: ME3 Will Have Man Love

Mass Effect 3 executive producer Casey Hudson has revealed in a tweet that ME3 will feature same-sex romances for both female and male Commander Shepards. Previous games in the series only offered girl-on-girl sex scenes for the stated reason that "if you’re picturing a PG-13 action movie, that’s how we’re trying to design it." Which, if it's true, is a comparatively innocent reason for the noninclusion of male homosexuality. Less innocent reasons might include the fear of tarnishing the game's macho figurehead, but ANYWAY! Let's all assume Shepherd was neck-deep in the closet for those first two games and move on. Thanks to Gay Gamer for the news.

So long as we're talking ME3, PC Gamer have spent the last few days leaking a variety of details from a long interview of their own with Casey Hudson. I've assembled a bullet point list of the important info after the jump.

• Every party member from Mass Effect 1 and 2 will be appearing as a character in ME3, just not necessarily one who can join your crew.
• Tali, Garrus, Liara, either Ashley or Kaiden and a new character called James Vega are confirmed as potential party members. Garrus in my Mass Effect 2 game got carried off by bees during the suicide mission, so I'm not sure how that works.
• All the love interests in Mass Effect 3 will be party members from the first two games. No new squeezes. There will be at least some new squeezes!
• Characters from ME1 will, apparently, know if you cheated on them in ME2. Casey also says "f you had a Mass Effect 1 romance and you didn’t have a Mass Effect 2 romance, so you stay true to the character from the first game, there’s a scene where you look at the picture of that character, and that’s essentially the romance scene in Mass Effect 2."
• On the subject of Mass Effect being a trilogy, Casey says "I would argue that this is the only trilogy in games. There have been games where there were three, but in terms of planning it out from the beginning, with a story that was meant to span three games, and actually finishing all three games – I don’t know if that’s ever been done before." Which- well, I don't think I can prove him wrong.
• Combat will be "quite different", with an emphasis on special abilities such as melee-focused characters.
• There will be big robots piloted by small men. You can shoot the glass window out of the back of the big robot to kill the small man, thereby deactivating the big robot. Or, if you kill the big robot by itself, the small man will climb out to continue the fight.

So there you go. The third and final instalment of Mass Effect will be landing in early 2012, but my word, I'm skeptical about it being the last ME game we get. A big reason that there have been no isolated trilogies in gaming is that so long as there's money to be made and a universe to be exploited, these licenses resurface. But I guess we'll see.