Mass Effect 3 Previews

We have a couple of new previews for BioWare’s end to Commander Shepard’s sci-fi trilogy, Mass Effect 3, starting with a hands-on preview courtesy of IGN:

Remember the upgrade system for powers in Mass Effect 2? You’d pump stat points into each power, upgrading them along a fixed path until the final upgrade would give you a choice of two variations on the power. It was cool, but for Mass Effect 3, BioWare is giving players more this or that choices. Take Liara’s singularity power. You spend a point to purchase it, and each subsequent upgrade costs more points much like the old system. The second upgrade increases its duration, the third its radius, then for the fourth, players have a choice between extra duration or wider radius, for the fifth it’s a choice between increased damage and faster recharge speed and for the final upgrade it’s another choice, between having a 50% larger size for the first ten seconds or having the ball of gravity collapse in on itself and explode when the power ends.

It means players will be able to customise every power they have in pretty cool ways sometimes literally. In our hands-on we bumped our cryo ability way up, meaning that cryo ammo would often either cool and slow enemies or outright freeze them, opening them up to be shattered into a million pieces with any further damage. Weapons can also be modified, letting players upgrade different stats, like fire rate and clip size.

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Mass Effect players have always had a fair amount of control over the members of their squad. After all, at any time you can bring up the radial menu and tell your squad mates which enemies you’d like in the air/in giblets/frozen/concussed/etc, and they’ll give it their full attention. That level of control has only increased for Mass Effect 3. We weren’t able to test out the Kinect voice commands, which enable you to simply state what you want each squad member to do, but it is clear that the game is going to be pushing players to use their squad controls in particular the waypoint system more during battles. One moment in the hands-on has a couple of enemies holding up shields coming towards the player, and it’s a simple matter to position one of your squad to draw their fire while you or the other squad member flanks around them. Mind you, it’s even easier to command Liara to use her singularity power to suck them into a swirling ball of gravity. Gravity is there anything it can’t do?

Sarcastic Gamer also offers a preview, although unfortunately it’s not based on any hands-on time with the game:

David Silverman of developer BioWare made it very clear that Mass Effect 3 is about the choices you make, and that no single playthrough is the same. Approaches to combat, words you choose in conversations, and upgrades you choose for your character make differences in how your game may open out and with a huge universe to explore there’s much to see and do.

The first demo shown to us showed Shepard and his squad in this case, series stalwarts Garrus and Liara attempting to rescue a rare female alien, an operation soon interrupted by pro-human terrorist organisation, Cerberus. Cerberus troops storm the multi-storey centre on jetpacks, and Bioware showed us multiple ways to tackle each combat encounter. Verticality, Silverman stressed, was a new design aesthetic for Mass Effect 3 to bring a greater sense of scale to the levels.

Using cover and the new combat roll move, Shepard and his team combine abilities and specialist incendiary rounds to tackle each floor of Cerberus soldiers, escorting the female alien to a point of escape. Storming in with guns blazing ((like a real American cowboy,) Silverman quipped) and quickening your reactions artificially was a viable option, as was marking the area with waypoints to send your two squadmates to, providing the combat with a layer of tactics and strategy. The enemies are smarter, coordinating their attacks to effectively surround you, but even a tactical arrangement doesn’t stand a chance against Shepard’s new holographic Omniblade, a surprisingly lethal (and fetchingly orange) melee attack.