Piping hot Mass Effect 3 details emerge

My favorite things about Game Informer exclusives is that they try so hard to keep things secret, and then everything is blown open and their well thought out feature (as well thought out as Game Informer gets) is reduced to small bullet points in a forum post that makes reading their article pretty meaningless. It’s pretty much my favorite thing.

Anyway, following this cut be Mass Effect 3 details, and WHAT THEY MEAN.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way, first. Confirmed squad members include everyone you didn’t like from Mass Effect 1 and Garrus. Seriously, guys, no one would have faulted you for getting rid of Kaidan/Ashley, Liara, and hell, I’d have sacrificed Garrus to do away with them. No problem. You also get a guy named James Saunders, aka Wee Jim. He’s not Jason Statham from the trailer, which is kind of…well, it’s awkard.

Some of your old friends are confirmed, but not as squad members. Basically, everyone’s coming back who can, but maybe not as squad mates. Frankly, I wish they’d replace the cast of Mass Effect with the cast of Mass Effect 2, who were vastly superior, but…shrug.

The big plot point is that Cerberus wants to kill you. What a surprise, Bioware doing away with a complicated choice in favor of making one game instead of five or six. For a studio who just released a pretty half assed game in Dragon Age 2, this does not inspire confidence. In any case, I don’t feel the Illusive Man as a villain. He never felt villainous. He was a guy who’d use any means necessary to save his people. That’s fine. That’s not a villain, though I’m sure they’ll get Martin Sheen to whip up an evil laugh and be angry about shit.

Bad news over! Good newses incoming: the RPG is back. Or, the RPG is more back than it was in shoot and speak Mass Effect 2. Apparently skills will have multiple branching paths in skill trees, and this means we might not all have the same parties of weirdos. Further, everyone can use every weapon, but the less weapon classes can hold fewer weapons. Frankly, this is a fantastic change: my least favorite aspect of Mass Effect 2 was being unable to use anything but a submachine gun the whole game as an adept. Weapon mods will return, as well, which will add some more RPG flavor. No one is complaining about this: I’m glad Bioware are trying to make something of an RPG, instead of a super action shooter.

Everything else is pretty obvious. Multiple branching endings? Yeah. Sure. No multiplayer? Really. I’m so shocked. Everything looks pretty decent, basically. I’m no more sold than I was, but really, if you’ve played the first two, you’re deluding yourself if you think you’re not buying Mass Effect 3. Sorry, but you are.

More as it happens, of course.