Update:
Original Post:
I felt there were probably enough new details here to justify a new thread.
Unfortunately I can't link the site since it has scans.
Wiggum2007 said:Someone on the Bioware forums summarized some info from the new Xbox World magazine:
SQUADMATES:
"Twelve was a big number in Mass Effect 2 - almost too big", Hudson concedes. "We're focused on a smaller squad with deeper relationships and more interesting interplay in Mass Effect 3' he explains. "We're not going to have twelve again but we are going to do more with the characters on your squad including Liara, and Kaidan or Ashley. And we're bringing everyone back - every main character is in Mass Effect 3 somewhere"
ON CHARACTER RE-DESIGN:
"We have to update the look," Watts continues, referring to Jack, Ashley and Kaidan's refesigns "And the people who redesign the characters are the same people who did the original characters; and they know best how these things are supposed to mature. Stuff changes. Garrus' armour is going to change. Even Shepard has changed quite a bit. His armour has changed a lot since the first Mass Effect"
CERBERUS
"Regardless of how you finished ME2, Cerberus are now your enemy and are throwing their black and yellow-clad commandos at Shepard for reasons he'll discover later in the game when, as Bioware confirm then Illusive Man returns"
"You were begrudgingly working for Cerberus in ME2" Explains Casey Hudson, "but they've gone a bit further and Shepard has returned to the Alliance so Cerberus troops are a major threat"
"Cerberus heavy troopers wear enormous armour, Assassins use the same Biotics as Shepard and Phantoms use blades."
COMBAT
"Cerberus Troopers can do everything that Shepard can do now" says Designer Corey Gaspur. "So your fighting a force that's a lot more punishing"
"We wanted to make it so that when the player's fighting in the moment they feel like they have more options than aiming shooting and using powers says Lead Gameplay Designer Christina Norman. "We really want to make
mobility a factor that plays into combat. You'll always ask yourself, 'am I in the right position on the battlefield? Where are my enemies? How am I going to get from point A to point B?' Players should never be walking tino these safe places with great cover and stay there for the whole fight. It's about how you're going to move through the
battlefield as the enemies through the battefield move through the battlefield and how they're reacting to one another and to you"
LOCATIONS (we obviously know more than article mentions)
-"Turian homeworld Palaven and theQuarian homeworld Rannoch are early new destinations."
-Returning to Tuchanka
-Mining base on the edge of a Martian crater
-BUT "it's Earth cities which form the game's showpiece locations"
"The Seatle/Vancouver megacity on the west coast of North America is a truly gigantic space which Shepard will visit before and after the Reapers take it apart."
"If you Google Map Vancouver the layout is pretty much the exact same as our map" says Level Artist Don Arceta. "Geographically it's very true to the real world"
"You play a game like Gears or War and they just have sandbags everywhere, and we really don't want to do that. We really want to get away from arbitrary things placed just for the people working there, and we're just trying to really make sense of these spaces"
"We try to design the arhitecture first before we blow it up" says Arceta. "Like, really thinking about how did they actually design this building, and does it function well?"
BIG LEVELS:
"These spaces large enough toaccommodate a six hundred foot Reaper bossfight, and a fifty foot Cerberus Atlas mech Shepard himself pilots later in the game."
"Over and over Bioware's team mention the scale of ME3 - every fight every enemy and every space is bigger than anything you've ever seen rendered in Mass Effect - or by the Unreal Engine - before"
LEVEL VARIETY
"I think Lair of the Shadow Broker is a good look at how we design levels now" says Hudson [...] "It's all about sudden shifts in the action. There's a section on Earth whereand all that happens in a moment of gameplay. You have control thoughout and that's when you'll realise annything could happen at any time"you're running a narrow walkway and there's a war going on all around you and a ship is in the distance. Suddenly its nuclear core blows up and its suchs a shockwave that it knocks you off the walkway and you end up sliding down the glass face of a knocked over high-rise and then you kind of roll and catch yourself
FOR NEW PLAYERS
Similar to what PS3 owners got for ME2...BUT:
"It might not be comic style, but we'll do something in the same style to recap the story", says Hudson. "It's essentially a really fancy save game generator
REWARD FOR LOYAL FANS?
"Absolutely," he says. "Definitely. The challenge is to make the game better than ever before, to make it a great entry point for new players, and to make it the ending fans deserve. It's about making sure it starts the way a
great story should start versus just being a continuation. And thats tough becaus there is no canon except for what the player has chosen. In the end, its their game".
END.
I tried to cut out some of the stuff we've heard about already, full post is here: http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mass-Effect/Mass-Effect-General-Discussion-NO-SPOILERS-ALLOWED/Xbox-World-Magazine-ME3-info-ULTRA-Spoilerific-7352856-1.html
Original Post:
I felt there were probably enough new details here to justify a new thread.
Unfortunately I can't link the site since it has scans.
Mystery Site said:-Tali is a confirmed squadmate
"Garrus, Liara, Kaidan, Ashley and (newly confirmed) Tali are all full
time members of your team if they survived the previous games."
-Wrex?
"I asked point blank about Wrex and got as close to a 'no' as I think Bioware will come at this early stage: exceutive producer Casey Hudson simply re-emphasised that such characters canplay a role and fight alongside you without necessarily being permanent squad members."
-No new Romance in ME3
-Biotics are more potent in combat
"Biotics can use their Pull ability to rip a shield out of someone's hands"
-Multi Layered combat areas
"The games combat spaces have graduated from the often-familiar open areas dotted with low walls. They're now multi layed encouraging you to seek high ground for a better vantage point...[the rest is about Cerberus rocket boot dudes using this to their advantage]
-class Specific Melee attacks
Engineer: Omni-tool fire lash attack
Adept: Melee (biotic) attack that knocks everyone near them away and stuns
-Powers Evolve more than once
"In ME3 this is just the start. A Vanguard player can customise their devastating Charge move first to slam people harder, then do more damage, then to reduce the cooldown.
-Powers combine
Example given with Soldier: "Soldier still has an arcing attack called Concussive Shot, but it now behaves differently depending on the ammo ugrade he/she is using. Cryo ammo lets you use that same trajectory to deliver a blast of ice that canfreeze every enemy in the area."
-Story is more like ME1 than ME2
-Places being visited (at least what the Magazine reports):
[...]mission takes you to the Salarian homeworld, the Quarian homeworld, the Asari homeworld, and the human homeworld - Earth. You'll even go to Mars [...]
-Every major character you have met will play a role in the last game
-Why is Cerberus after Shepard? They are working with the Reapers
"If your wondering why we were fighting Cerberus, having worked closely with this shadowy organisation in Mass Effect 2, the answer just raises further questions. They are wokring with the Reapers"
-Reaperized enemies include Asari, Krogan, Rachni
"In Mass Effect 3 we'll fight the Reapers other experiments, with other species.
One is a hideously bloated pregnant Asari, her gums stripped away and a robot skeleton showing through her rotting flesh"
"The Reapers take on the Rachni, who were already viscious insect monsters,are covered with bulging savs of lesser creatures. Rather than hitting their weak spot for massive damage, you want to avoid it like the plague: bursting any of these sacs before the creature is dead wit will unleash a swarm of horrible mini-rachni that crawl all over your body"
"The Reaperised Krogan wears heavy armor plates that can shear off with enough focused fire. Once you do the creature changes its behaviour to be more defensive clutching its lurid blue intestines to its stomach as its lumbers towards you"
"One Reaper creature draws life force from anything that dies near it.
The time-honoured strategy of taking out the easy enemies first ends up
being counter-productive: you make the creature stronger than it would
have been with its allies alive."
Casey Hudson summarizing ME3 (This is an article quote):
"Casey sums up Mass Effect 3 as being about victory through sacrifice, the scale of that sacrifice has been increasing with each new chapter" [Rest is authors speculation about saving(or not saving) Wrex and Rachni consequences]
Nirolak said:Here are a few more quotes from the article about combat.
"To deal with the last few elites, Shepard [using the freezing concussion shot] freezes them solid to hold them still, then lines up sniper shots exactly through the eye-slits in their shields."
"Put a shield in front of an enemy, and suddenly the ability of the engineer class to place a combat drone behind someone and blow it up gains a new significance. Namely, knocking a guy on his face and shooting him in the head."
"Shepard commando-rolls out of the elite's way - a new move, by the way - and sneaks behind a partition running alongside the main corridor. Liara springs out of cover and pins the elite with a biotic singularity, while Garrus snipes him from cover. Neither kills the elite, but now Shepard is behind him. Rather than fire, he lashes out with his omni-tool, which emits a blade of flame that cuts through the elite's exposed back. He drops."
Notes On Decisions:Nirolak said:This preview mentions that 70% of people weren't faithful to their ME1 romance, and that this will come back to bite them.
PC Gamer said:"Mass Effect 3 will have an equivalent of loyalty missions - the personal quests you could take on for your crew in Mass Effect 2, in order to gain their trust. But their significance won't be quite the same: you're not determining whether a crew member is loyal enough to you to do their job when the time comes. Instead, these quests and your decisions within them count towards the war effort.
The 'war effort' is a key term BioWare uses to characterize the impact in Mass Effect 3 of your various decisions throughout the series. There are hundreds of these to track, and this is the game where they all pay off - or otherwise. But they don't want a bad call in Mass Effect 1 to render the third game uncompletable. So the wisdom or foolishness of the choices you've made determine not the difficulty of the game, but the range of endings available to you for the finale of the series. In other words, how winnable the war is."