Mass Effect 3 Previews

We still have five months to go until BioWare brings the original Mass Effect trilogy to a close, so in the meantime you might want to check out these new hands-on previews.

MSXbox-World starts us off:

All in an effort to try and make Mass Effect as hassle free as possible you may now access certain terminals on a mission which allows you to change garnered weaponry and upgrade them with different scopes and modifications. How to earn these weapon upgrades is unknown but there definitely seems to be a higher dosage of customisation, and before you could only use the Normandy to make any of these changes.

The biggest change though had to be levelling your character. Each unique upgrade slot available to your character can be upgraded a point at a time like before, but now as you dropped a point into ‘grenade damage’ for example it would open up another menu where you could choose what types of improvements to that ability you wanted. This sub-menu of explicit upgrade improvements showed a linear line which after three upgrades branched off into opposing choices, for instance, picking between improving a grenade radius increase or a grenade damage increase. These variables not only make upgrading your character explicit, they allow for a more differing character than someone who may have picked the same class as you.

And then Mediakick covers similar territory:

Along with the exclusion of weapon enhancements, BioWare also decided to lower the amount of skills Sheppard could progress in and, personally, it left me wishing they hadn’t. Fortunately, after having initially gone from twelve skills to six skills, BioWare has now upped the skill count to eight and has added further enhancements to it. In previous titles, upgrading a skill will only have one route to go down before a choice of specialisation at the end but this has changed in Mass Effect 3. BioWare has decided that after three upgrades to the skills, it splits into two streams and both will offer different advancements. It may be small, but it requires the player to think more about their choices.

Once I had decided on what paths to take in my skills, I came to one the new mini-boss battles against a manned mech with powerful homing rockets and machine gun alike The Atlus. Tactics and brute force were best applied to this battle with squad placements and powers taking precedence over any weapons. The new mini-boss also introduces another new addition to the franchise, dynamic damage. In order to deal optimum damage, I was required to shoot at the glass cockpit which ultimately led to the pilot’s death. However, this doesn’t mean you won’t be able to deal any damage if you don’t hit the cockpit, it just means you run the risk of dying due to a longer battle.