Mass Effect 2 Preview
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Mass Effect's finale broke down into eight separate conclusions depending on your renegade or paragon actions throughout and the final choices you make. Those of you who have completed Mass Effect can appreciate how this will change the ongoing story. But in developing Mass Effect 2, BioWare has had to consider every divergent plot choice you made in your saved game experience and account for every possible permutation. What's more, the team's going to have to do the same thing for both Mass Effect and the second episode when creating the third game. So if you had trouble getting your head around Dr. Emmett Brown's timeline sketching in Back To The Future II, try not to think about how BioWare's doing this too much it might give you an aneurism. (It is an incredible logic nightmare,) Casey puts it mildly. (Replayability, characters dying, the consequences of your actions coming to fruition and, as part of driving home the importance of the consequence of how you play the game, Shepard can die.)
Hold it right there... so now Shepard can die after all? Let's backtrack a few months to the time when BioWare released the Mass Effect 2 teaser trailer: for most of the minute of trailer footage the camera pans around what appears to be a battered suit of N7 Alliance armour, while pop-up text reels off Shepard's stats and accomplishments, before declaring that Shepard is '˜killed in action'. That set the community ablaze with speculation, naturally, but we can reveal that he isn't dead. After all, BioWare has repeated on numerous occasions that Shepard isn't just part of the Mass Effect trilogy story, he IS the story. (First of all, all the stuff in the teaser is a part of the story in Mass Effect 2, so it's not '˜hey wouldn't it be fun if we tricked people into thinking he's dead!' or something like that. We thought that teasing that out would be a fun way of bringing people into what Mass Effect 2 is all about. You do play as Commander Shepard, and Commander Shepard's death is a part of the story. Mass Effect 2 is really all about a suicide mission that you know you have to do and in order to make it successful you're going to have to build the best crew from around the galaxy, go get them onto your team, make them loyal, well equipped, build up your ship and then, when you think you're ready, you go into this end mission that you are told is a suicide mission. In fact, it is a suicide mission unless you play the game well, make good choices, understand the people you're bringing with you and set up this end mission, because one of the endings involves Shepard not making it out.)
