Mass Effect 3 Interview, Part Three

For the third and final installment of their in-depth Mass Effect 3 interview (you can find part one here and part two here), CVG has quizzed (now former) lead gameplay designer Christina Norman and gameplay designer Corey Gaspur on combat and AI. Here’s an excerpt:

How has enemy design changed over the years?

CN: With Mass Effect 2 we had this ‘let’s come up with cool enemies’ approach, and we made each enemy as an individual. Now we look at enemies as a force, with units within the force, and each of them has a role. You end up with this really cool chessboard thing, where you have a knight and a bishop, they’ll work together in one way but if you have a knight and a rook, they’ll work together in a different way. It’s giving our level designers and combat designers a lot more opportunities, not with heavy scripting, but just by combining these pieces that work together in new and interesting ways.

And the system in the new game will make them harder to fight, even on Normal?

CN: Yeah. And in Mass Effect 3 it’s not just that the game is harder on Insanity, it’s that this creature actually behaves differently on higher difficulty levels. On those harder difficulty levels we can make the enemies exhibit specific behaviours more often, or even give them new behaviours that we think will work for a harder difficulty level, but which won’t work for an easier one.