Mass Effect 3 Interview

Mass Effect 3 executive producer Casey Hudson was willing to tackle a handful of questions about the sequel’s romances and Reaper encounters in a new two-part Q&A over at PC Gamer. An interesting snip from part one:

PC Gamer: How are the romance options compared to previous games? In Mass Effect 1 you only had a few, and then Mass Effect 2 had loads.

Casey Hudson: It had a few more. In this one, we don’t really have new characters that are part of the romance stuff in the way that we did in Mass Effect 2, where we introduced a lot of characters. So this is more about how you, if you’re a new player, how you start these romances with the existing characters. If you’ve had relationships with previous characters, then it’s your opportunity to resolve those. And again, it’s in the context of a ‘˜World War II’-type setting, so you don’t really know if you’re going to survive, or what kind of a world is going to live beyond the story. So it’s kind of that situation.

But we also have some interesting things happening, where you’ve got Ashley and Kaiden from the first game, you’ve got Liara, and there’s sort of a love triangle there. And then we gave people a bunch of new characters. People said (Well, I just want my Mass Effect 1 characters, and I’m not interested in any of these characters.) But then a lot of people had romances with those characters, and now the fun is bringing back some of those characters from Mass Effect 1 and putting them back in the mix, and looking at what you did in Mass Effect 2 and bringing some. interesting scenarios around those things.

And a sampling from part two:

PC Gamer: You guys were talking about a Reaper creature with a sac that bursts if you shoot it, and smaller creatures come out do you have any other favourite examples of location specific damage stuff like that?

Casey Hudson: Yeah, I think two of them. One of them is the Atlas that you saw, so it’s the big kind of mech thing. The cool thing about that is obviously once you see it moving, you get more of an idea of what it’s about it’s a massive, heavy thing that’s got a huge cannon on it. But it’s piloted by a Cerberus trooper that’s on the inside you can actually see him in there, and if you concentrate on the little glass shield that he’s behind, if you can take that shield out. Then you can damage the guy that’s in there, and then you kill the guy and the machine’s dead. Or likewise if you kill the machine, then the guy can hop out and you fight him. So there’s some fun stuff in there in terms of fighting a machine that’s actually piloted by a guy.

And then the sac thing, that’s where the Reaper-ised Rachni has a few of these sacs on him, so as you’re fighting him in terms of location based damage you really don’t want to hit one of those things, because then it unleashes the little creatures that are inside that scuttle along and try and climb up you. Those are a couple of the more fun ones.