Mass Effect Q&A and Trailer

[GameBanshee News]

GameSpot has scored a four-page Mass Effect Q&A with BioWare's Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Casey Hudson, as well as an exclusive trailer to go along with it.

Q: Moving on to gameplay topics, we're seeing a lot of combat scenes in the trailer. Could you walk us through a typical combat experience in Mass Effect? Is it straight run-and-gun action, or is there any RPG stuff going on under the hood like in your past games?

CH: It's actually extremely adaptive to the way that you want to play, and that's certainly one of the things we're most happy with. If you're a shooter-style player, it actually plays out very much like a third-person shooter. You take cover, you crouch behind things, you can fire around objects, you have a squad that will back you up with AI, and you don't have to actually direct them if you don't want to. They'll fire off their powers, and the really cool thing is that it's basically a one-button click to send them up ahead to a location or bring them back. So, even though you don't have to really tell them what to do in order for them to support you well, it's really easy to give them commands to help you out.

So, that's if you want to play it like a shooter, but the more that you want to play it like a role-playing game, the more the game can adapt to doing that. So, you've got all of your special abilities and powers. You create your own character, so you can be male or female, you choose what classes you want to be and what abilities you're going to have. But then, throughout the game, you're picking up new abilities and things that you can do in combat. So, you're going to be throwing people around with dark energy, and using tech abilities that destroy enemy shields, and doing all kinds of really cool stuff.