Mass Effect 3 Interview, Continued

PC Gamer has apparently subscribed to the growing trend of releasing a single interview as several bite-sized parts spread across a several-day period, as demonstrated by the two additional installments they’ve brought us from their Mass Effect 3 Q&A with creative director Casey Hudson. A snip on how “BioWare used DLC to experiment with Mass Effect 3 ideas”:

PC Gamer: What was the biggest area of improvement that you wanted to focus on in Mass Effect 3?

Casey Hudson: One thing that we’re doing is just making the entire experience feel a lot more. it’s the moment to moment unpredictability, the variability. Anything can happen. We’ve got these action moments, little micro-cutscenes and stuff that lead in and out of actual gameplay. We’ve got lots and lots of epic situations that you’re in for gameplay and combat stuff that we’ve never done before.

Some of the stuff we did in our DLC was very successful, and were in a way prototypes for what we’re doing here. So when you fought the Shadow Broker, there’s a different scenario for how you’re fighting this huge guy who’s smashing parts of the environment, and charging you, and you’re working together. Or you’re on the back of that big ship, and there’s wind. And we had the whole car chase thing in the Shadow Broker. So with some of these things we’re just kind of experimenting with stuff to broaden that envelope of gameplay that we’re doing in Mass Effect 3.

And a bit on “how your choices determine Mass Effect 3’s ending”:

PC Gamer: So it’s not like, if I let the Rachni live, now I can’t complete the game because they’ve killed everyone. But maybe I can’t get the ultra-nice ending where everything works out perfectly?

Casey Hudson: I think a way to think about it is if you made decisions early on, you’ll see them affecting this. And the decisions you might want to make that go against those prior things are gonna be harder. Killing the Rachni might present opportunities in Mass Effect 3 that you wouldn’t otherwise have, but if you don’t take those opportunities and you try and do something in opposition to that, then it would be harder for you than if you work with it. Similarly with the decisions at the end of Mass Effect 2, for whether you saved the base or destroyed it.

And so all the different things that you do, if you do a little side quest, or you go off and do a major plot, these things contribute to the war effort. If you just rip straight down the critical path and try and finish the game as soon as you can, and do very little optional or side stuff, then you can finish the game. You can have some kind of ending and victory, but it’ll be a lot more brutal and minimal relative to if you do a lot of stuff. If you really build a lot of stuff and bring people to your side and rally the entire galaxy around you, and you come into the end game with that, then you’ll get an amazing, very definitive ending.