more details
Fresh details for Mass Effect 3 have emerged on the BioWare forums, courtesy of a Spanish games magazine. One forum member has taken the salient information from the feature in the publication and condensed them into a list of handy bullet points.
There's aspects like new acrobatic action moves for Shepard, such as rolling and jumping, as well as SWAT-style manoeuvres. There will be new enemies with specific weak points to aim for, customisable weapons and more. Some new locations and environments have also been revealed.
This is all according to a translation from the unnamed Spanish magazine of course and we've tweaked the language in the bullet points to make for easier reading, but all the same, perhaps a small pinch of salt might be in order for some of this, just to be on the safe side.
Have a gander at what has been gleaned from the forum post:
* New Cerberus' troops include mechas, assault units and ninja-style shock troops.
* Reapers come in different sizes, ranging from the smaller 500-600 metre ships to the 2km long Herald. That's big.
* New skills for Shepard: apparently he or she will be able to roll, jump and find cover a bit like Max Payne.
* There will be SWAT moves enabling Shepard to turn and strike the enemy with a greater variety of melee attacks. It specifically mentions "a new class: Heavy Melee" who will take advantage of these capabilities of combat.
* More new skills: The Engineer class can build turrets.
* Customisable Weapons, guns, sights and so on. Each category will have five variants.
* There will be more items to "loot."
* Space Battles are a possibility, but they're unconfirmed.
* Environments will be larger in scale with people going about their business, ships fighting in the distance and architecture rendered in greater detail. New lighting techniques have been implemented improving the atmosphere and the number of dynamic elements.
* New locations to visit will include New York, London, a moon of either a Quarian or Krogan world, a Salarian world and Mars, among others. Each environment took about 6 months to create, apparently.
* You can inflict dynamic damage upon enemies. The Cerberus mechas, for example, will require hitting a weak point on their glass cockpit to disable them. You'll also be able to cut off the arms, break the head or break various pieces of armour on other enemies.
* Combat is supposedly more dynamic, forcing more frequent movement. The game speed is apparently up by 10-15%.
* Exploration won't include driving vehicles like the Mako or Hammerhead. This doesn't necessarily rule out vehicles completely, but there's no plans or details on vehicles at the moment. There is also a new scanning system, which presumably means that mineral mining could be back again. Yipee!
Mass Effect 3 is scheduled for a holiday 2011 launch.