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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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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Somewhere in a meeting room in EA, a place where heartbeats have been replaced with the papery flap of money being riffled, a meeting took place.

“February 12th?”
“Dear God, no. That’s the day the creator of Peanuts died!”
“Okay, how about the 13th, then?”
“Excuse me, but did you really just suggest we launch the demo on first day of the The Festival of Parentalia? There’ll be outrage! I won’t sit here and allow you to disgrace EA by -”
“Alright! Enough! February 14th? Does anything significant happen on that day? Anything at all?”
“Well, it’s the anniversary of Australian currency being decimalised, but other than that…”
“Fine. Right. Gentlemen: from this day forth, February the 14th shall forever be known as ‘The Day EA released the Mass Effect 3 demo’. Call Clintons: I have an idea for a commemorative card”
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You know, I didn’t bat an eyelid at the Mass Effect/Dragon Age pre-order crossover stuff, because it seemed like a random lark within Bioware games. Not so! And not limited to the preemptory pounds, either. EA look like they’re going to try the cross-pollinatory approach across a bunch of their other games, too, starting with Mass Effect and Kingdoms Of Amalur demos. We mentioned this briefly yesterday, but there’s now a video (below) detailing precisely what you’d be getting for playing either game’s demo in the other game. This could be some clever meta-commentary on how trad sci-fi and fantasy settings are basically two sides of the same coin, of it could be a mad marketing ploy dreamt up to shift more units: YOU DECIDE!
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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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It’s going to be Mass Effect trailers from here until March I reckon, at which point we can finally play the game and enjoy the conversation as well as the guns. This new’un resolutely focuses on the latter, or more specifically giant space beasts at war as tiny ManShep legs it around a collapsing cityscape in their wake. Spectacular stuff, but scripted from here to eternity and all a bit Gears of Warsy.
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Bioware have put out a video focusing on Shepard’s improved animations in Mass Effect 3, which you can see below. The clip shows off how his reactions when taking cover are more nuanced, and also shows how melee is made a little smoother and more believable with improved animation syncing. It’s quite an interesting insight into the little tweaks that the devs are able to make for the third game, and it shows the designers demonstrating their combat in a test scenario, which makes the improvements on the original character animation really stand out. Skip to 1:20 to get past the “community” blatherings and get to the meat.
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Here are some details about Mass Effect 3 combat abilities. They’ve been encapsulated in video form so you don’t even have to read anything to find out about the new class-specific powers. However, if you don’t want to watch a man enthuse over the contents of the game’s special edition you should skip forward to around 1 minute 50 seconds. There’s nothing too surprising, with such things as floating turrets for engineers, improved melee combat across the board and shockwave-inducing ground-punches for vanguards. I suppose the most surprising reveal is that the collector’s edition contains a working model of the Normandy but I just made that up.

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Two female aliens and a human man probably. Whatever the logistics, it’s sick. Either that or I’m not referring to Kirkesque feats at all but rather to the fact that according to leaked beta assets, Mass Effect 3 will allow players to choose from three different playstyles: Action, RPG or Story. The full text from the menus is below but the names are fairly self-explanatory. I certainly wouldn’t want to play a Mass Effect game in ‘Action’ mode, although Mass Effect 2, eh? Improved combat did lead me to believe all traces of RPG had been completely erased and that only guns remained were once there was dialogue. Or not.

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