Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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Bioware are releasing a whole new game after Mass Effect 3 is sent out into the big wide world. All we know, though, is that it’s a new franchise, and this is the first screenshot of it, as bestowed upon the industry’s number one chum GameInformer. We don’t know a name, we don’t know if the inclusion of buggies and deserts is a red herring (as was the Mass Effect 3 image they released for last year’s VGAs), and we don’t even know if it’s an RPG, guns & conversation, shooter, or what. We’ll find out just what it is at the VGA awards on Saturday.

ACTIVATE SPECULATOTRON.

Mako Races! Krogan mud wrestling! Co-op mining! Garrus threesome co-op! None of which is going to be in Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer. Give it up BioWare, Shepard on Shepard action is what we want to see, none of this “Success in multi-player will have a direct impact on the outcome of the single player campaign” tomfoolery. But yes, that’s the headline. I’ve just got DeviantArt open in another window.

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Oh dear, there appears to have been some kind of mistake here. Bioware, as part of their long-awaited marketing acknowledgement of the female version of Mass Effect hero Shepard, have offered fans the option to vote for which of six new versions of FemShep (I really dislike that portmanteau for reasons I can’t entirely pinpoint, but it seems rather too late to resist it now) will be added to the character creator options in Mass Effect 3. However, none of them look like the FemShep I know, and thus presumably you know. Mysterious! Someone must have uploaded some fan-art by mistake, right?
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As if I needed any further proof that other people are wrong, BioWare have revealed to VG247 that only 18% of Mass Effect players pick the lady Shepard. With the obviously better choice finally getting recognised by the game’s marketing, that less than a fifth of gamers pick the Jennifer Hale-voiced heroine genuinely surprises me. Because, well, girls are best.

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We don’t tend to do too much in the way of ‘person x changes job’ stories here, which is primarily because the knowledge that disgusting organic creatures are responsible for our beautiful, clean, matter-free digital worlds is a horrifying truth we can’t accept, but also because… well, people do change jobs. This one stood out to me, however, due to both source and destination. The lead gameplay designer on Mass Effect 2 and 3, Christina Norman, has left Bioware – but to go where? Oh, that’s right, it says it in the headline. Yeah, League of Legends dev Riot Games.

So, from a console-straddling mainstream RPG/action developer that’s bigger than it’s ever been to the young home of devoutly hardcore multiplayer PC games.
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Despite admitting that they’ve yet to figure out any kind of useful multiplayer for Mass Effect, Bioware’s Casey Hudson has said that the idea of an MMO in the universe “makes sense”. Speaking to world-bestriding super-magazine Game Informer, he said: “Part of what you’re trying to do is save the universe so you can live in it. That’s part of the promise, I think, for any great IP. It has to be a world worth saving… I think Mass Effect has that quality to it. If you get rid of the Reapers and win that, wouldn’t it be amazing to just live on the Citadel or just take a ship to Omega? That makes sense.”

I feel like any genuine space-life MMO would be pretty amazing, and perhaps Eve Online will manage that in the coming years. Or maybe Bioware will make a space MMO of some kind. Hmm. Thanks, VG247.

Spoilers! Get yer spoilers ‘ere! Only three quid a dozen! Howzabout that then ma’am, a punnet full of Mass Effect 3 details, yours for just a paaaaarnd.

Actually, I’m guessing these are not especially meaty ME3 spoilers, as rather than spoiling late-game plot stuff they document the status quo for Shepard and chums at the start of Bioware’s next galactic opus – but if you really do want to go in totally blind you should look away now.
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I’m regularly taken aback by how quietly enormous Mass Effect is. While common conception is that EA’s getting its mega-corp bottom kicked by Activision, it’s got a breadth of franchises that it’s CoD’n'WoW-dependent rival does not – and Bioware’s sweeping space opera universe is one of the foremost of those. It’s really doing the Star Wars thing, I guess, as there was perhaps a vast sci-fi fandom void waiting to be filled in the wake of Lucas’ long-running exploitation/ruination of its galaxy far, far away.

So it makes perfect sense that Mass Effect would turn to other mediums – specifically, movies. Well, anime movies.
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Why change a winning formula? That’s what I was left wondering after discovering that, on the one hand, Dragon Age sold better than any Bioware game ever as of November, and on the other, that the formula is changing dramatically for Dragon Age 2. It’s worth noting that the PC version isn’t changing as much as the console versions of the game. We will apparently retain “strategic combat”, which is a good news, while console chums will be “playing to their strengths” with more actiony combat mechanics. Conversation will also now be handled via Mass Effect’s wheel system. The biggest change, however, is that Dragon Age 2 will be getting its own equivalent of Shepard, with player character options reduced to the male of female versions of “Hawke” (pictured? I think). Bioware confirmed on their forums that you will have to play a human.

Hell, I enjoyed Mass Effect 2, but you have to wonder why Dragon Age was so successful in the first place. Not because it was copying its less successful sibling, that’s for sure. I enjoy almost all of Bioware’s work, but I think boiling one game down to another just makes gaming a less interesting place. Diversity is important.