Mass Effect 3 Interviews

It looks like I missed a couple of pre-release Mass Effect 3 interviews from earlier in the week, but since a lot of people have yet to play or finish the game, I figured they were still quite relevant. First up is an eleven-minute video interview with Casey Hudson about the game’s Kinect support, the From Ashes DLC controversy, and where the franchise will go in the future, and then we head over to iTWire for a three-page interview with associate project manager Robyn Théberge about the game’s three different gameplay modes, the challenging AI, the iOS spinoffs, and more. An excerpt from the latter:

Mass Effect 3 can be played in three distinct ways; Action mode puts more emphasis on the combat and automatically answers dialogue options, whilst Story mode lessens the difficulty of combat and provides extended dialogue trees. RPG mode is more along the lines of how experienced Mass Effect fans would be used to playing the game. Was this idea aimed at expanding the experience for fans, or paving the way for new players to choose their play experience?

(It’s a bit of both,) explains Théberge (in Mass Effect 3 it’s the break-out of the war, as you depart the Reapers have just arrived, the Council has finally lined-up on with you on what’s going on. So it is a good point for new players, and the story essentially rewrites itself to add context for the new players to the series. But it is also about branching out for our fans and allowing to tailor the experience further and customise it for the kind of role playing game they want it to be.)

Were these modes relatively easy to implement? Was it just a matter of adjusting the conversation trees more than anything else?

(Yeah, and the AI, the artificial intelligence and combat itself, it is more difficult in the Action experience than it is in the Story experience and so it was just testing of different variations of the game. It does get kind of complicated in making sure that all the right decisions are being made and the right options are being presented to the player at the right time, and there are some nooks and crannies in there that do pose some hiccups, but it definitely adds a lot of value to the experience.) Says Théberge.