Mass Effect Preview, Interview, and Media
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We played our Cmdr. Shepard as an Infiltrator, a class that mixes some aspects of the Soldier class with the tech powers of an Engineer. At one point during our Eden Prime shootout, a berserk Geth goon lumbered toward us suddenly at breakneck speed, leveling his weapon and threatening to run us down. Shepard was toting a pistol at the time, so we quickly hit the left bumper to bring up her weapon wheel, pulled out our shotgun and buried a round in his chest at the last minute. We also could have used our overload tech power to quickly shock him into submission, but hey, we panicked.
Although its combat is technically real-time, Mass Effect's hybrid fighting system brings some of the best elements of turn-based, tactical combat to bear on what is essentially a third-person shooter. From what we've seen so far, the system is fairly simple in theory but takes time to fully master (which we didn't in the two short combat segments we were allowed to play). In the build we played, we didn't have the option to use in-game tutorials, but you will, which should make the combat system significantly easier to wrap your brain around.
And a snip from the interview:
Q: Did the multiple planets mean that a lot of the development team could introduce their own ideas about side quests or missions?
A: Some of the guys did come up with the side quests we have got and there are lots of cool ideas. We needed a lot of these smaller ideas of the uncharted worlds, so we were able to let people come up with their own ideas and we put them in a bigger pot of side quests or challenges. This enabled us to paint a much bigger canvas, rather than just restricting it to a few people who had to come up with all the ideas.
We can do dream up anything really. Even fetch quests - or what I like to call Fed Ex quests - in Mass Effect are more interesting than your standard game. It's a challenge to make fetch quests exciting but I reckon we've done it.
