Ready for the big leagues?

Mass Effect 3 is going to be big, says executive producer Casey Hudson.  Heir to the Mass Effect dynasty, the game has been making a lot of promises lately.  The shift from the action lite Mass Effect to the run and gun upgrades of ME2 took a game that got by on story alone and actually made it fun to play by stripping out all of the RPG elements.  I mean all of them.  This left the game feeling slightly hollow, far removed from its customizing and augmenting roots and thrust into the world of samey shooters we are all so familiar with.  It was still awesome, just missing something.

ME3 promises to give fans what they were looking for in ME2 with heightened RPG elements.  The buying and selling of Mass Effect will return in a less arbitrary fashion, weapons will now be upgraded on a bench (Dead Space style) and armor customization will offer more than a handful of choices with some color options.  But fear not action fans, the game also promises to “evolve the moment to moment gameplay and make it more and more intense” giving Shepard new mobility options like the genre famous dive and roll and the melee focused Omni Blade.  Weapons will now feel more hard hitting and unique then the last game’s and it also promises several rail shooter sections pitting Shepard again the Reapers themselves, the massive walking star ships of the previous edition.

As great as all this sounds, Hudson seems most excited for the hugely increased scope of story from the last, describing Mass Effect 3 as “like World War” with complex political relationships remaining even as the entire universe fights for its existence.  He describes the process of Shepard recruiting entire races to his resistance and that the level of completion the player accomplishes with these recruitment will directly influence the game’s ending.  This will probably work similarly to ME2’s multi-ending with relationships between the player and each individual crew member reflecting who lives and dies (including Shepard).  If you fail to recruit enough allies, the universe could very well be completely destroyed at game’s end, depending on how far they are willing to go with this theme.  It might be nice to see a game punish a poor play-through with the end of all existence.  Nice, right?