Pteraclaww ★★
Posts : 234 Join date : 2010-09-21 Age : 30
| Subject: Mass Effect 3 [Update: 08/06/2011] Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:03 pm | |
| - Spoiler:
- X360A, on February 10th, wrote:
Mass Effect 3 is going to sound a bit different to Mass Effect 1&2 it seems, as BioWare has chosen to employ a new composer for the game's soundtrack, which presumably means that Jack Wall - the man behind the music in the previous two games - is out and renowned movie composer Clint Mansell is in.
Best known for his work on soundtracks for Darren Aronofsky films like Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler and The Black Swan (actually, that's almost every Aronofsky film), Mansell is also no stranger to scoring great sci-fi, as his work composing the excellent soundtrack for Moon amply demonstrated.
This will be Mansell's first gig scoring a videogame though, which makes us wonder why BioWare chose to go with a new composer given the incredible job Wall did on the music for the first two Mass Effect games. And where this actually leaves Wall in relation to Mass Effect 3 is unknown.
"I'm doing a videogame this year actually: Mass Effect 3," said Mansell in an interview with The Quietus. "I'm definitely interested in different outlets – that's one of the reasons I get involved in short films."
Mansell added: "It's not so much that I can experiment as it is to be in a situation where nobody's looking over your shoulder. Short films are usually made by young people and they've got ideas I can bounce off. They can take me in a different direction. So in a game, the character might arrive at a big boss and you have to have a piece that can quickly become dramatic.
"You've got all these different elements that change depending on what the player does. You have to figure out an overall symphony, but be able to break it down into component parts. You can bring the pain when required"
Here's hoping that Mansell really does bring the pain (assuming that's a good thing) when Mass Effect 3 releases later this year.[/align] - X360A, on March 22nd, wrote:
- [justify]Dark Horse may be prepping another entry in the Mass Effect comic book series for launch later this year, if a report by Newsarama from the 2011 Chicago Comics & Entertainment Expo proves to be true.
"We are going to publish another Mass Effect series later this year," said Dark Horse representative Jeremy Atkins. There's no misconstruing that quote, although nothing has been officially confirmed yet.
EA and BioWare have yet to offer any information on another Mass Effect comic book series at present, but given that Mass Effect 3 is heading towards release at the end of the years, another comic book tie-in would make perfect sense. [Via GameSpot]
In other Mass Effect 3 news meanwhile, Tricia Helfer - aka Number Six in Battlestar Galactica - will be reprising her role as the Normandy's helpful AI, EDI. [Via Daily Joypad]
Helfer posted this tweet on her Twitter page yesterday: “Just finished my first voice session for EDI in #MassEffect3. Fun!”
More Mass Effect 2 will be coming on March 29th with the Arrival add-on for 560 Microsoft Points, while Mass Effect 3 is slated for a holiday 2011 release. - X360A, on April 8th, wrote:
If you've been living in a cave on Pluto, you might not know that Shepard is making his return in trilogy finale Mass Effect 3 this winter, as the Reapers invade Earth and all hell breaks loose. Game Informer has the first proper details on the game in its latest issue complete with ME3 cover, so strap yourself in and beware... Here be spoilers. Stop reading now if you haven't finished Mass Effect 2 and/or the Arrival DLC, and if you don't want the prologue for ME3 spoilerified for you.
- Spoiler:
Mass Effect 3 will apparently begin with Shepard on trial following the events in Mass Effect 2: Arrival and the Reapers will invade right in the middle of the court proceedings. In the prologue, Shepard escapes to the Normandy and sets to work gathering a party of allies once again, tackling Reaper units - ie. different species of Husk - along the way.
If you haven't played Mass Effect 1&2, Mass Effect 3 will come with an interactive comic that will enable you to make your game-shaping decisions that will affect the plot as usual. Naturally, your ME 1&2 saves will decide who you encounter, so Shepard's party will end up consisting of Garrus, Liara, Ashley/Kaiden and a new guy called Sanders, among others.
Wrex, Mordin, Legion and Anderson are also confirmed to appear in Mass Effect 3 - based on the outcome of Mass Effect 2 during your playthrough - but they may not be squad members. Cerberus is also out to kill Shepard this time around and as such, the gravel-voiced Illusive Man will play a pivotal role in the game. Why Cerberus is after Shepard is currently unknown, however. With regard to Mass Effect 3's gameplay, apparently BioWare is beefing up the game's RPG aspects, striking a happy medium somewhere between Mass Effect 1 and 2's RPG elements. There will be more freedom with character skills and skill trees will be bigger. Powers will also evolve several times instead of just once, so your characters will have plenty of room for growth.
Weapons will be like Mass Effect 2's, but you'll be able to swap out parts like scopes, barrels, clips and so forth, improving the weapon's performance while changing its aesthetics. Every class will be able to use weapons without limitations, but will have a predetermined number of slots to carry them in. Only the Soldier class can carry unlimited weapons, whereas the Adept, Engineer, Sentinel, Infiltrator and Vanguard will be limited to carrying two or three.
Mass Effect 3 will also have multiple endings - both bad and good - based upon who you have in your squad and the course you take through the game. And finally, Mass Effect 3 will not feature multiplayer, although BioWare is reportedly considering it for possible future spin-offs or separate games.
So, there you have it. That's pretty much all of the details worth knowing from the May issue of Game Informer. Check out the cover below and grab it from newsstands now-ish. Mass Effect 3 is scheduled for release this holiday 2011. - X360A, on April 20th, wrote:
Fresh details for Mass Effect 3 have emerged on the BioWare forums, courtesy of a Spanish games magazine. One forum member has taken the salient information from the feature in the publication and condensed them into a list of handy bullet points.
There's aspects like new acrobatic action moves for Shepard, such as rolling and jumping, as well as SWAT-style manoeuvres. There will be new enemies with specific weak points to aim for, customisable weapons and more. Some new locations and environments have also been revealed.
This is all according to a translation from the unnamed Spanish magazine of course and we've tweaked the language in the bullet points to make for easier reading, but all the same, perhaps a small pinch of salt might be in order for some of this, just to be on the safe side.
Have a gander at what has been gleaned from the forum post:
* New Cerberus' troops include mechas, assault units and ninja-style shock troops. * Reapers come in different sizes, ranging from the smaller 500-600 metre ships to the 2km long Herald. That's big. * New skills for Shepard: apparently he or she will be able to roll, jump and find cover a bit like Max Payne. * There will be SWAT moves enabling Shepard to turn and strike the enemy with a greater variety of melee attacks. It specifically mentions "a new class: Heavy Melee" who will take advantage of these capabilities of combat. * More new skills: The Engineer class can build turrets. * Customisable Weapons, guns, sights and so on. Each category will have five variants. * There will be more items to "loot." * Space Battles are a possibility, but they're unconfirmed. * Environments will be larger in scale with people going about their business, ships fighting in the distance and architecture rendered in greater detail. New lighting techniques have been implemented improving the atmosphere and the number of dynamic elements. * New locations to visit will include New York, London, a moon of either a Quarian or Krogan world, a Salarian world and Mars, among others. Each environment took about 6 months to create, apparently. * You can inflict dynamic damage upon enemies. The Cerberus mechas, for example, will require hitting a weak point on their glass cockpit to disable them. You'll also be able to cut off the arms, break the head or break various pieces of armour on other enemies. * Combat is supposedly more dynamic, forcing more frequent movement. The game speed is apparently up by 10-15%. * Exploration won't include driving vehicles like the Mako or Hammerhead. This doesn't necessarily rule out vehicles completely, but there's no plans or details on vehicles at the moment. There is also a new scanning system, which presumably means that mineral mining could be back again. Yipee! - X360A, on May 11th[, wrote:
Even more Mass Effect 3 details have dropped from the pages of Xbox World via VG247, following hot on the heels of previous details taken from the pages of Game Informer and OXM, meaning that soon, you'll have every single detail from the game and you'll no longer need to play it. Not really, of course. More Mass Effect 3 details are always welcome round here.
According to a feature in the magazine, you'll now command a smaller squad than before as BioWare felt that twelve was simply too many. “Twelve was a big number in Mass Effect 2 – almost too big,” said Director Casey Hudson. “We’re focused on a smaller squad with deeper relationships and more interesting interplay in Mass Effect 3. We’re not going to have twelve again but we are going to do more with the characters in your squad including Liara and Kaidan or Ashley. And we’re bringing everyone back – every main character is in Mass Effect 3 somewhere.”
What's more, each character has been updated in appearance by the original game's character design team. Characters' armour will also evolve as the game progresses and enemies you'll be facing include Cerberus heavy troopers in bulky armour and lithe Assassins that wield the same Biotic abilities as Shepard. Cerberus will also return as the game's enemy, regardless of how you left things at the end of Mass Effect 2. “You were begrudgingly working for Cerberus in ME2, but they’ve gone a bit further and Shepard has returned to the Alliance so Cerberus troops are a major threat,” Hudson explained. “Cerberus Troopers can do everything that Shepard can do now,” Designer Corey Gaspur added. “So you're fighting a force that’s a lot more punishing.”
Locations have been covered before, but BioWare has revealed further destinations, including the Turian homeworld of Palaven and the Quarian homeworld of Rannoch. You'll also be going back to to Tuchanka, as well as embarking on mining missions on a Martian crater. However, BioWare says that Earth's cities will be Mass Effect 3's big standout locations. "The Seattle/Vancouver megacity on the west coast of North America is a truly gigantic space which Shepard will visit before and after the Reapers take it apart," declared Level Artist Don Arceta. "If you Google Map Vancouver, the layout is pretty much the exact same as our map. Geographically, it’s very true to the real world."
Mass Effect 3's environments will be massive apparently, especially for the instances where you'll reportedly be fighting a six-hundred foot Reaper and piloting a fifty foot Cerberus Atlas mech later in the game. They're allegedly bigger than anything the Unreal Engine has rendered before. “I think Lair of the Shadow Broker is a good look at how we design levels now,” said Hudson. “It’s all about sudden shifts in the action. There’s a section on Earth where you’re running a narrow walkway and there’s a war going on all around you and a ship is in the distance. Suddenly its nuclear core blows up and it's such a shockwave that it knocks you off the walkway and you end up sliding down the glass face of a knocked over high-rise and then you kind of roll and catch yourself, and all that happens in a moment of gameplay.”
And finally, newcomers hoping to pick up the story with Mass Effect 3 will be catered for with something similar to the interactive comic book that PS3 players were given for catching up with the narrative for Mass Effect 2, although it might not be in the same comic book style. Say what?
“We’ll do something in the same style to recap the story”, said Hudson. “It’s essentially a really fancy save game generator. The challenge is to make the game better than ever before, to make it a great entry point for new players, and to make it the ending fans deserve. It’s about making sure it starts the way a great story should start versus just being a continuation. And that's tough because there is no canon except for what the player has chosen. In the end, it's their game.” - X360A, on May 16th, wrote:
... Apparently, it'll know that you've been cheating and will make romance situations rather awkward, according to Producer, Casey Hudson.
"If you’ve had relationships with previous characters, then it’s your opportunity to resolve those," Hudson told PC Gamer. "But we also have some interesting things happening, where you’ve got Ashley and Kaiden from the first game, you’ve got Liara, and there’s sort of a love triangle there."
And then we gave people a bunch of new characters. People said “Well, I just want my Mass Effect 1 characters, and I’m not interested in any of these characters.” But then a lot of people had romances with those characters, and now the fun is bringing back some of those characters from Mass Effect 1 and putting them back in the mix, and looking at what you did in Mass Effect 2 and bringing some… interesting scenarios around those things."
Uh oh... Does that mean that Ashley is going to get mad when she realises that we've been putting it about with Miranda? It certainly sounds like it, unless you remained faithful to your Mass Effect 1 love interest. "I think when people realised that we were thinking about that kind of thing, and that we were going to reflect those kinds of decisions, then it’s like “Wow, the game actually knows that I didn’t cheat on my Mass Effect 1 love interest," Hudson continued. "So if it knows that, then it probably knows other stuff that it will reflect. Then that means I need to think about that stuff [when] talking to characters and making decisions and the like."
Hudson added that there will be no new love interests in Mass Effect 3 to further complicate things, meaning you can concentrate on the love triangle that you've probably managed to create for yourself. "...we’re not introducing any new characters that are going to be love interests," explained Hudson. "There’s some new characters, but generally it’s going to be the interplay between the characters from 2 and the returning ones from 1, and then Liara as the one that’s… either asexual or omnisexual, depends on how you look at it."
So, there you have it. If you have a complicated love life in the real world, perhaps you'll know exactly how to diffuse this messy romantic situation when Mass Effect 3 releases in Q1 2012. Hudson also implied that Tali will be returning as a full squad member, while Wrex probably won't. You can have that as a bonus piece of news. E3 2011 videos here: - Spoiler:
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Last edited by Sagittarius on Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:09 am; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Updating with E3 videos) | |
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