Mass Effect 3 Developer Interview: Shepard, Co-op & Story Details

After playing 90-minutes of Mass Effect 3, we catch up with BioWare producer Mike Gamble and ask him a few questions about the Mass Effect series, the future of the franchise, multiplayer and the RPG elements.

With Mass Effect 2 it’s defining moment was its suicide mission, and everything built up until that point. Now with Mass Effect 3 you’ve got this large-scale galactic war, will you be looking to include a similar final mission and – if so – how do you top the suicide mission?

Well, we’ve kind of set ourselves up in such a way where the theme of the game in Mass Effect 3 is obviously the Reaper attack. We open at the beginning of the game with it, it’s the common thread throughout the game and so all the things you do in Mass Effect 3 tie back to that theme. So the various missions that you do in whatever order you choose to do them they still all tie back to that theme. 

The suicide mission was one thing but even in Mass Effect 2 we were always building towards ‘the Reapers are coming, the Reapers are coming, okay, really the Reapers are coming’ and finally they’re here. So I think that theme itself carries the entire game and we just tie into it for each individual area and storyline.

We’ve heard that in Mass Effect 3 you’ll be visiting the alien homeworlds and even answering the questions of the Keepers – will Mass Effect 3 be about answering more of these questions of the universe? 

The whole point of Mass Effect 3 is to tie-off all the story threads and conclude the things that we’ve brought. Of course, as a new player if you wanted to jump into Mass Effect now is probably the best time.

We’ve building towards it, the Reapers are here now, so it’s kind of a self-contained story were you start off and see that these evil, alien, sentient beings are here and they’re attacking and I – as Commander Shepard – know what I have to do. 

So as a new player, it totally makes sense but if you had that previous game experience you’ll realise ‘oh hey I’m at the Asari homeworld’ or the homeworlds that you’re able to visit, they do tie into the story and we do explain a lot of interesting details around that.

It’s interesting that you mention the new players since – with a focus on combat and additions like Kinect – Mass Effect 3 is perhaps the most accessible one yet. How do you look to bring new players up to speed?

Well, a number of ways. I think the improvements made to the combat aren’t necessarily just targeted towards new players, existing players will be able to see the progression of how we’ve been able to move the combat system through.

In terms of making it accessible, I think it’s just a matter of making sure nobody is left behind in terms of the requirement is to play Mass Effect 3 or the knowledgebase you have to have. Going into the game designing it we assumed none.

We want to make a rich and detailed experience for the people who did play the previous game and provide those fulfilling conclusions, but we couldn’t assume that people coming into it knew all the specifics in the past otherwise they would get lost.

So we wanted to make a really important decision to have different experiences for those people who maybe didn’t import a save or maybe they just want to try it as a new player. The conversations work differently in terms of what’s exposed and what isn’t exposed, what’s described and what isn’t described. 

Even in the first two missions on Earth and Mars, you’ll see that some of the conversations you’ll have with squad members like Ashley or Kaiden will go slightly differently if you’re a new player and if you’re not a new player. So we kind of build it towards that and carry it throughout the game.

So how will importing your save impact the different ways Mass Effect 3 will play out?

There’s specific dialogue areas where different lines of dialogue will be said, or not said. Obviously the characters which live or die, and the relationships you’ve had with them. You can also form new relationships in Mass Effect 3 if you haven’t played the previous ones and you can go through the entire relationship system. But if you have played the previous ones it will know what you did and what you didn’t do.

Mass Effect has always had a different set of mini-games – though many didn’t enjoy the planet-scanning in Mass Effect 2 – what will you be looking to implement in Mass Effect 3?

You know, in general, I think one of the themes we’ve always tried to hit home with Mass Effect, and the planet-scanning was an extension of this, is the theme of exploration.

So we’ve put in a lot of things that will encourage the player to explore, basically planet by planet, area by area, sector by sector – the details of which I’m not going to get into – but it’s the key fundamental thing which we want to have persistent throughout all the Mass Effect: exploration, open-endedness, open galaxy aspect of it, and there are things to encourage players to do that.

So in Mass Effect 2 exploration involved scouring the galaxy in your ship, will you have a similar size universe to explore or will it be more limited now you’ve got an impending doom to deal with?

I wouldn’t say it’s more limited, it’s just more… under attack. You’re still absolutely able to explore.

Of the gameplay we’ve seen so far there seems to be a larger focus on combat, with many people comparing Mass Effect 3 to Gears Of War. What would you say to these sceptics?

Well we were listening to those people going into Mass Effect 3, we brought back a lot of the customisation systems – for those who aren’t interested in going down that route they don’t have to – but the people who are interested, you can customise your armour, customise your weapons, there’s a lot more power evolution options in Mass Effect 3, that kind of thing just to make the experience a lot more custom and deep. We did that to balance out any concerns that were had about the RPG systems.

But I think that the combat improvements, they play better and overall that benefits everyone. The more visceral and the more engaging that your combat can be made, the better the experience overall – regardless of whether or not you’re an RPG focused gamer or you’re more of a shooter focused gamer. So going into Mass Effect 3 we wanted to polish everything and make everything a little bit better and brought back some of those systems people asked for.

So there was that Mass Effect 3 story leak a while back, did it affect the final story of Mass Effect 3? Did it force any changes?

The story leak that happened was early, in terms of where our writing was and in terms of what the plots were. We polish everything until they tear it out of our hands, I mean that’s just how we do it.

It was really unfortunate, we were obviously upset because no one ever likes things that’s not final to be circulated with the wider audience because we haven’t locked down things completely and that’s much the case with what happened.

So have the main set pieces been affected? We’ve seen a lot of footage highlighting many of these sections, where did you get inspiration for these huge moments?

Well we actually do draw a lot of inspirations from Earth. The Earth in Shepard’s timeframes is much different from the Earth of today, but there’s still a lot of similarities. Obviously the alien races are inspired, in general, from where they were from in the original Mass Effect. 

We always had ideas in their architecture and how their each race would look in an art perspective. We grabbed it from basically everywhere, throughout the modern world – it was important that each race has its individual styling and individual presentation so they would be uniquely identifiable.

You’ve previously mentioned that the possible squad options will be smaller than previous Mass Effect games to create closer relationships. How will Mass Effect 3 help create these bonds?

We want relationships to feel more organic and natural rather than having certain points in which certain things happen all the time. So part of this was to just make more options and more different outcomes depending on current game states and what have you. So that takes a lot more effort and a lot more time so we were able to do it because we were able to focus in on a few tighter squad members and just develop them a lot more.

Personally for me, both in Mass Effect 1 and 2, I would pick my favourite squad members and tend to stick only to those. Do you think these closer relationships will encourage that or are you looking at ways of getting people to mix up their squads?

Mass Effect 3 is all about player choice, so if that was the way you want to play your game we shouldn’t punish you for that, and we won’t. Much like the people who want to switch out a new squad member every mission, they’re going to get an entirely different experience.

I would say from a content perspective you’re going to see just as much stuff, you’ll obviously see more variety in terms of if you bring Ashley and if you bring James as opposed to bringing someone else and James. You’ll see a different dynamic, you’ll see them go back and forth and you’ll be able to glean an insight in how their relationship develops a bit more, but it’s completely up to you.

So, co-op. We haven’t really seen all that much about it, about some of the things you might be taking on. Will it be more similar to missions you might take on in a single-player?

When we designed the co-op system, we wanted to seamlessly integrate it into the single-player experience. But we also thought it would be really cool – alongside playing with your friends, probably the coolest part of co-op – to be able to play as those races you were never able to play as before because we wanted to keep Shepard’s story Shepard’s story. But to show the war of the galaxy through another soldier’s eyes – you know, more on the ground, the day-to-day fight rather than the overarching fight – we thought it was really interesting. 

So when you play multiplayer you can jump in with your friends, you guys can choose whichever races that you want and you can fight the Reapers for control of these conflict zones. The more you fight, the more control you have and all that kind of weaves its way into the single-player narrative. 

Of course you don’t have to play multiplayer, you can choose to play all the side-quests in single-player and do all that stuff you’ll still get all the same endings and same information, it’s just a totally different way of playing.

Will it be drop-in, drop-out or lobby based?

You’ll set up in a lobby and go forwards afterwards. 

Will there be a focus on persistent unlocks and experience points, in a similar fashion to Call Of Duty? So you constantly earn new unlocks?

Yep. You build your character up over time and you unlock different classes and weapons as you go through, as well as the ability to play as different new races. So for example there are a set number of races that are unlocked as the game starts, say you want to play as a Drell Infiltrator and you play enough then you can get that race and that class.

So obviously this is the end of Shepard’s trilogy, have you been looking at different ways – within Mass Effect 3 – that you might be able to continue the series?

Definitely. It’s the end of Shepard’s trilogy, for sure, but we’ve developed this world that there’s so many races and so many back stories that we can tell that the possibilities are nearly endless for what we might do next. This is not the end of Mass Effect, just the end of Shepard’s story.