Mass Effect Interview

The folks over at Guardian Unlimited had the opportunity to sit down with BioWare president Greg Zeschuk for a quick interview about Mass Effect.
Q: Are the achievements any impact on the game? For example if you give an achievement for doing one thing in the game are you expecting everyone to do it to get the achievement and so miss out on other things in the story?

A: We've designed it so that you can get all the achievements unless you replay the game. One really interesting thing is the way the achievements come back into gameplay. So if you've used a power a certain number of times on a previous run through and got the achievement a future character may have it as one of their starting powers when you begin again. Achievements allow us to add some quite cool things. Also there is ton of equipment you can get by exploring in the game, like high level armour, which really adds to it. It's not Diablo but equipment is really important to the game.