Mass Effect 3 Interview

The deepening of the RPG elements is once again mentioned in this new interview with Mass Effect 3 associate producer Michael Gamble that Ten Ton Hammer presumably conducted during last weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo. Here’s to hoping they’re actually expanding character development and not just trying to reconvince fans that were disappointed by the lack of any real RPG depth in ME2:

TTH: When I was watching the demo yesterday I liked the fact that it looks familiar. There’s nothing that’s so new there that it would be like learning a whole new game for people who’ve played it before. Some things have changed though. Can we talk a little bit about what’s changed for the new game?

Michael Gamble: On the system level, Mass Effect 3 is all about quick iteration and polished pass to the combat maneuverability. In combat now, you can go back and forth, do cover switches, and that kind of stuff. It’s a lot more fluid. In Mass Effect 2, you could take cover, and the way you took cover was an evolution itself from Mass Effect 1. Now we want to make it so that you can move around the battlefield a lot more smoothly. I believe that the demo also showed ladders and things like that. It just changes the layer of the battlefield, and that’s kind of the combat stuff.

RPG systems and progressions, we’ve deepened that. Every power has a lot more customizability. You have multiple evolution options; six instead of two. And the weapons mods stuff obviously. Now all classes can use all weaponry, which is great. We’re expecting to see a lot more even usage of classes rather than everybody using Soldier because he has the coolest weapons. What you can do is customize your weapon based upon the mods that you pick up throughout the galaxy.

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TTH: Can we talk a bit about the new abilities? You mentioned that you’ve split them off to six instead of two choices. Are they similar to what we saw in the previous two games?

Michael Gamble: You have three choices that you take at the beginning that you level up to make better. Once you hit a certain point, you basically run through a half-tree and you have six possible choices, and you choose three of those. That basically gives you six evolution choices for each power. Now, across all powers, you can do that, so what happens is: I have an engineer Shepard, and engineer Shepard gets access to this subset of skills. First of all, you have to make a choice. I can customize only six of these ten because I only have enough points over the entire game to focus on these six instead of ten. Within each of these six, how am I going to customize it? Am I going to do heavy damage? Am I going to do damage over time? Am I going to do a slower recharge rate? Things like that. You can make them all completely yours. At the end of the game, you have a very different Shepard than your buddy, who also played a soldier, but he decided to play a little more defensive or that kind of stuff. It takes time and it takes a lot of progression, but it’s worth it.