Mass Effect 3 Preview
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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. 'God rays' cut shafts of light through gently quivering trees and the new water effects are good enough to make even bitter old games journos' eyes widen.
These are spaces large enough to accommodate a six hundred foot Reaper bossfight, and a fifty foot Cerberus Atlas mech Shepard himself pilots later in the game. Over and over Bioware's team mention the scale of Mass Effect 3 - every fight, every enemy, and every space is bigger than anything you've ever seen rendered in Mass Effect - or by the Unreal Engine - before.
More importantly, they're better spaces, designed to be varied and unpredictable. "You could always tell when a fight was coming," says Hudson about Mass Effect 2
"You would walk into a room filled with low cover and before we could get dramatic about it you already knew a fight was coming. So now we're building environments that don't have crates and sandbags and that kind of cover; we have environments that have natural opportunities to take cover. And it helps that Shepard can climb and fall and SWAT turn and leap across gaps and stuff like that. It allows you to look around your environment and solve problems in that space and makes combat less predictable."
