New Mass Effect interview
A few days ago, we were able to get hold of Mass Effect Project Director, Casey Hudson, to find out how the game is coming along. In the process, we were able to get additional information on characters, races and other cool details related to the gameplay. Enjoy!
Casey Hudson: There are literally hundreds of locations you can travel to in your ship, and what you'll find there can be anything from a barren asteroid to a large explorable location involving its own subplots, new characters, and extremely valuable rewards.
Casey Hudson: The character customization in Mass Effect allows you to really decide who you want to be, what you want to look like, and how you want to fight through this tremendous story experience. For those who want to jump straight into the action, you'll be able to choose our pre-made Commander Shepard character. And even if you choose this pre-made character, you'll still have countless opportunities to customize and develop this character over the course of the game. And for those who really want to specify every detail of their character, you'll be able to do so through a very deep character creation system. Starting with an interface where you create your own appearance, you'll be able to create your own male or female Commander Shepard to look however you want. You can then decide what kind of gameplay experience you want by choosing the class of your character's expertise, such as combat, tech abilities, or superhuman abilities that use dark energy. And by spending your available experience points, you can develop specific skills throughout the game - even leading to completely new abilities that open up as you become an expert in certain areas.
Casey Hudson: As you complete portions of the story or survive new combat engagements, you'll gain experience that can be put towards developing your character. Improving your character's ability in a certain area is as easy as spending some points on it. When you reach a maximum in certain abilities, that may unlock new areas of expertise that you can start developing. In demos we've shown how you can use these things in combination during combat to pull off some amazing combinations. For example, at X06 we showed how one character in your squad can use an electromagnetic pulse attack to destroy an enemy's shields. Then we ran up and fired a "carnage" shotgun attack which involves overloading your shotgun for an extremely powerful close-range attack. The result of that combination tore a huge mechanical enemy to shreds! You'll also be able to develop abilities such as creating temporary dark energy force fields to take cover behind, attacks that use gravity-like effects to squeeze enemies to death, and tons of other combat, technical, and dark energy abilities.
Casey Hudson: The great thing about combat in Mass Effect is that it gives you the same kind of amazing combat experiences as in KOTOR but in a 3rd-person shooter interface that's so much easier and more fun to control. So while anyone can pick up the game and start having fun in combat because of the point-and-shoot controls, you end up having the same kind of fun that KOTOR had - such as strategically placing squad members, directing them to focus on certain enemies, cooperating with you on combinations of attacks. Having 3 squad members also means one or two of them can go down in battle without you being "killed", so sometimes in really tough battles you'll be the last standing member of your squad, fighting it out against a really tough enemy.
Your squad is actually really smart and tough during combat, so you don't need to give them specific orders to survive combat. But if you want to, you can tell them to run to a location or attack a specific target with a single press of the D-Pad. You can also issue exact paths to run and specific attacks to make, through an interface called Squad Command.
Casey Hudson: We're still locking down details of our launch date, but you can expect it sometime in early 2007. Mass Effect is an Xbox 360 exclusive, and we can't wait for you to play it! (Way to dodge that question, Casey! - Ed)

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