Rock, Paper, Shotgun

BioWare may have mentioned once or twice that Mass Effect 3 is the closing of the trilogy. Now, obviously you’d have to be more naive than a tiny puppy to believe they’d not make any more games in the enormously popular universe, but it did feel reasonably safe to say this would be the last outing for Shepard. But perhaps not, after BioWare’s Mike Gamble told GamerZine that we should hang onto our save games. What does it meeeeeeeeaaaaaaan? We’ve speculated, and have some insights you will not read anywhere else.

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I think I’ve just won the most literal title of the day award, and it’s my first post of the morning. Hear that, rest of RPS? You might try to defeat me, but I will bland you out the park. I hope I don’t get stuck in a rut. Can someone out there recommend a newly written guide to some sort of writing? What? Bioware‘s Senior Writer David Gaider has just written a blogpost on how to write fanfiction? What I do is essentially fanfiction to the whole of PC gaming. That’ll do!
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Words. Words need voices, or they’re just stupid, noiseless blobs. For example: what if I were to tell you that you’re now reading these words in the voice of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth? Oh my, yes indeed. Bioware have just released a small teaser trailer showing you who is making their blobs into voices for Mass Effect 3. Now I know it’s the third game in a trilogy, so you’ll probably know who is making word things less blobby, but when I get the chance to link to President Bartlet Sheen, I take it. Join me below in a frankly embarrassing amount of hero worship.
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Bioware’s white-hot marketing plasma has congealed into a glistening multiplayer combat trailer for Mass Effect 3, which you can see below. In the excitable two-minute sequence, Super-Shep and his surprisingly humanoid alien friends get stuck into a good old clobberin’ session. There are quite a few explosions, and the footage is basically designed to show how while one player is shooting the enemy, another can be stabbing it, or blasting it with a grenade, or using their mutant brain energies to turn it into a far less lively version of itself. That’ll learn ‘em, eh space fans?

Mass Effect 3 will be teleporting star-credits directly out of your wallet on the 6th, 8th, 9th, or 15th of March, depending on which part of the lumpen crust of the planet Earth you are tethered.
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Not the best quality video, for some reason, but the chaps at Evil Avatar spotted a Bioware trailer showing off Mass Effect 3 single player and talking to developer Mac Walters. I’m not sure if this was the video Bioware intended to release as it seems to cut out at the end there. I’ll have a look around and see if there’s a fuller version. Oh: there’s a full version on GTTV.
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Next week’s update for Star Wars: The Old Republic is to be called Rise Of The Rakghouls, and plans to add some major new content to the game, focusing on story-heavy features. Senior Creative Director James Ohlen explained to us in an interview we’re posting very soon that along with “a lot of bug fixes and modifications”, there would be the titular new story-focused flashpoint, as well as expanding Karagga’s Palace to have five times as many bosses (five). And this is just the first of many updates they’re already working on. March promises a new planet, warzone, operation, guild banks… And then there’s the updates they’re already working on for next year. You can see the accompanying trailer below.

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For all the grumbles you may have read, Star Wars: The Old Republic is undoubtedly one of the most remarkably complete and solid MMO releases we’ve seen so far. It’s where most MMOs get in about six months. And this patch adds more content. But there are still things to fix, and the first major patch (ie. one that doesn’t just remove an exploit) is due very soon. In fact, as Eurogamer point out it’s been released on the test servers, which means we know what’s in it.

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Anyone who’s not looking forward to the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy is an idiot. That’s the official word given via the parliamentary press secretary for David Cameron, speaking to a field of bees this morning. And if you needed any more proof, there are five new screenshots of the game out today, each emblazoned by BioWare’s ludicrously pointless logos, and one of them showing a big fat alien monster. Like you can resist clicking onward.

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Taptaptap. Is this thing on? One, two, one two. Hello mum. One two. Two. Two. Two. And she’s buyyyyyyyying a stairway to heavennnnnnnnnn. One two, one two. Okay, 2012 is go!

I’ve occasionally wondered what it would have been like had RPS been around back when World of Warcraft first launched. The excitement, the moaning about queues and bugs and griefers and customer support, the mad little adventures in a new world. SWTOR offers a taste of what might have been, though the deep familiarity of EA’s MMO means RPS as a whole hasn’t been able to conjure the drooling desperation to play that we had for WoW back in the day. I am quite sure, however, that we would have found all sorts of things like this to post about – an exploit that keeps your character safe from harm if you can activate a safety dance in time.
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Well this is all jolly interesting. Remember the story about Star Wars: The Old Republic banning a player because he’d been to Ilum at too low a level, and been looting the containers? And remember how it looked pretty dodgy, and was probably a fake? Well here’s the thing: it wasn’t. It was real. But, as you might imagine, there were a few details missed out.

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