Hands On: Mass Effect 3
By Tom Yeates | August 20, 2011 | Previews | 2 comments | Share
It’s a fact – I love Mass Effect. I do! I admit it openly. I was a late adopter of the first game, picking it up for a ridiculously low price in a clearout sale and was quickly left wondering what I’d been doing with my life before playing it. Sure the vehicle segments were terrible and the dice-roll shooting less than compelling and yeah, the inventory system was poorly designed…but it had one of the best stories and some of the most well crafted characters I’d ever encountered in a video game. I fell in love with the universe, the lore, the politics and Shepard became my hero. No, better than a hero because it was me who was controlling his actions. Roll onto Mass Effect 2 and the situation compounded. I’ve completed the game eight times now, six on the PC version and twice on the PS3 (yes, I bought it twice…) It breached my all time top five list and I expect it to remain rooted there for time immemorial. Now we’re building up towards Mass Effect 3. It’s an exciting time, a time of leg tingling anticipation. A time of questions and the building, teeth gritting yearning for the answers. Oh Mass Effect, what have you done to me?
However, I did get to play it…so it’s not all that bad and guess what? It’s looking good!
Possibilities…
The playthrough is nothing new, it’s the section seen at E3 with Shepard, Liara and Garrus on the Salarian homeworld after meeting up with Mordin who has discovered new information about the Genophage, which could lead to the development of a cure. He is in the company of a Krogan female and is seeking Shepard’s help to extract her safely off world. Cerberus have other ideas, and attack the facility, Shepard and his crew.
Cerberus' motives are currently unknown...
This in itself poses some interesting questions, most notably, just how much will your decisions in Mass Effect 2 affect the overall scenario in third installment? For example, if you soothed Mordin’s conscience in Mass Effect 2 and kept telling him that the genophage was the right call, will he still be pursuing a cure in Mass Effect 3? If you were pro-Cerberus in your Mass Effect 2 playthrough, will Cerberus not be a threat to you? It’s certainly intruiging, with many players coming into Mass Effect 3 with saves brought over from both the previous two games (myself included) or if they purchased the digital comic DLC that came with the PS3 version, they will also have made important choices from Mass Effect 1. For example, I’m quaking in my boots on one save where I romanced Liara in Mass Effect 1, only to fall for Tali in the second game. What will her reaction be? I admit that I am frightened to find out…
It's still fundamentally a third person shooter with RPG trappings, but now they have improved the RPG elements of the game.
Effective Changes
Mass Effect 2 was a major overhaul in terms of gameplay from the first game, but this time around Bioware is content with the core mechanics they introduced in Mass Effect 2 and has iterated on them, rather than reinvent them. It’s still fundamentally a third person shooter with RPG trappings, but now they have improved the RPG elements of the game. Character skill progression has been expanded, and there is a lot more choice within the skills themselves. I played through the demo as the Soldier class, and I had around 36 points to spend on skills. I unlocked Concussive Shot – a knockdown ability and there was further progression within the skill itself. Spending more points allowed me to reduce the cooldown of the ability, increase the damage and knockback effect and then the tree branched out, with each level having two possible options, I could choose to widen the knockback radius or increase the force further and so on and so on. It’s a welcome change as Mass Effect 2′s progression system was a little bare bones in places.
The combat feels much the same, though it has been augmented by further improvements to the cover system – you can now roll from one cover to the next, for example, to avoid those stretches of open ground a little easier. You can also perform these rolls outside of cover, giving Shepard another means to avoid damage aside from constantly being glued to a wall. The melee system has been improved, with multiple strikes causing a combo. You now have several skills that augment your melee damage and execution moves will be possible by using the omni-tool as a blade, though I was unable to do this in the demo itself.
Another new feature is the ability to customise your weapons. I was kitted out with an assault rifle, an SMG and a heavy pistol. I upgraded the barrel and magazine size on my rifle, to increase the damage and ammo capacity and attached a grip and magazine extension to the SMG as well to lower recoil.The pistol recieved the same mods as the rifle, to give it that extra punch. We only had access to a limited amount of weapon mods, so I presume there are more and this is a feature I can see myself putting to good use, switching weapons up to cope with different enemy types and scenarios.
Mordin was one of Mass Effect 2's stand-out characters,
The Board Is Set…The Pieces Are Moving…
I played through a combat section, trying to protect Mordin and the Krogan female from Cerberus assault and as a result I didn’t run into any dialog segments other than the initial exchange with Mordin and the Krogan. Mordin’s voice actor has changed, and whilst I think the new actor is doing a great job, I can’t help but feel a little disappointment at the loss of such a great voice from Mass Effect 2. Mordin was one of my favourite characters, and I am hoping that the new voice actor can do the role justice in the third installment.
It’s easy to forget that there’s still a long time to go before Mass Effect 3 will be in our greedy little hands, lighting our faces up with an expression that’s half manic glee and half psychotic agony as we wait for the installation to complete, furious that we aren’t immediately absorbing ourselves in a universe of Shepard magic. The game hits shelves and digital services on March 6th, 2012. From what I played, it looks like Bioware is making excellent progress, retaining everything that made the previous games great, iterating where iteration was needed and bringing the trilogy to a suitably emphatic conclusion.
In the words of Grunt: “Shepard is my battlemaster, he has no match.” I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment.
Mordins voice actor is returning. It was just a replacement for that time.
I think if you were pro-cerberus and left the base for cerberus at the end, the Illusive Man gets indoctrinated to some degree by the reaper tech. Just my hypothesis.
And it'll be pretty easy to dictate how/who dies in missions. After all, you just have to play through the game on the easy setting, mess around with taking random squadmates on the missions, and then running through the mission the way you want to. Also, I'm sure there will be people who finish the game within the first 24 hours of receiving it, so just keep an eye on online forums.