Mass Effect 3 Info Emerges From BioWare TV Live Stream

BioWare TV's live stream has been running all day, showing footage of Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2: Legacy, and Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes. Throughout the day, various BioWare developers have jumped onto the live stream to answer questions from fans. Casey Hudson, Mass Effect 3's director, was one of them. He was fairly guarded when fielding questions about specific characters and the game's story, but did shed a few tidbits about the game.

When asked about resource gathering, Casey had this to say: "Mass Effect 2 really was a story about accumulating things, gearing up, getting a squad, training them up, and just kind of accumulating a force that you could take towards a suicide mission. It's kind of a Dirty Dozen type of story. Mass Effect 3 is very different. It's a war story. The planet scanning we did in Mass Effect 2 doesn't really make sense in the story of an all out galactic war. We still want to give you reason to take your ship out to the edges of the galaxy to find planets and go down and walk around on their surfaces. So we are integrating a reason as to why you would want to go out and explore, but it ties in more to the overall galactic war effort and the things you are trying to do there."

Another viewer asked if players would learn of the Reaper origins. Casey sat back, contemplated his answer, and then said "since Mass Effect 3 is really about your final fight with the Reapers and getting closer than ever to understanding them, I think it's safe to say that we'll develop it, but I don't want to be more specific than that."

Casey says that the team is working hard to make sure the renegade and paragon interrupts are equally as bad ass this time around. He says it's really easy to create fun situations for renegade, as they usually involve roughing someone up. Paragon is not as easy to implement into this system. "We intend to do [paragon interrupts] a little bit better than we did in Mass Effect 2," he said. "Having written it for the first time, these different opportunities for interrupts, I think we learned a little bit about how we can do them better."

Casey also pointed out that party members will have casual outfits in addition to their armor, but it sounds like these costume changes are tied to specific moments in the game and story. The last question he fielded was about the sniper from the trailer. He jokingly answered, "Who is that guy? I don't know. We'll have to find out. As we develop a story, it starts out fairly skeletal. We then have to start finding characters for different things, and we'll come across different stories that happen inside the larger arc. Sometimes we come across a character like that that we can use for something. It's quite possible that this fellow is someone that you'll see inside the actual game." That's not exactly the definitive "he's a party member" response people have been expecting to hear, but it does sound like we'll at least find out who this guy is.

UPDATE: A twitter user asked Casey if the Citadel will be explorable like it was in Mass Effect 1. "Yes, we had a two hour meeting today exploring it," he said.

Thanks go out to GI reader Sarah for the twitter tip!