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After the reboot that caused the old News thread to lose most of its content, I fell behind in keeping up with ME2 updates. Though this has been circulating for a few days, I thought it would be a good idea to bring out [url="http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/mass_effect_2/preview-2130.html"]this eight page interview with Casey Hudson, the project director.[/url] I don't often bring these up because BioWare tends to parrot the same info over and over in response to the same old questions, but I think fans will really want to see this one.

It covers in detail things Hudson has been shifty about before, including the squad loyalty system, just what has been happening with the Normandy, the new dialog/interrupt system (and the interesting places they can occur), and the "numerous" romance options Shepard can choose from.

Depending on how much you've been reading about the sequel, this interview may or may not contain spoilers.

Of interest are some certain parts:

First of all, each of the enemies has received custom scripting. They have different behaviour. Some enemies are defensive, they take cover, it's hard to dig them out from behind cover. If you advance they'll retreat, so they're always heavily defended, very tactical. Other enemies will stand and move towards you relentlessly, but they'll flank you as well. So when you fight several of them you very quickly find yourself surrounded by them.

On the NPCs:

Here, the reason you end up talking to your characters, outside of the fact that it's interesting and there's a relationship there, is that you can figure out what it is that's going to make them loyal to you. And then you go and do a mission where you learn a lot about their back story. It unfolds in a way you can learn about and appreciate that character. So you're developing their loyalty, you're developing their relationship, and then we also have a number of romance options in this game where if you develop a relationship over the course of the game, some of them will become love interests.

And, thank heavens, the work done to improving the exploration of uncharted worlds:

But now, also when you are doing this mini-game you can find locations. We call them N7 missions. You find things that only Commander Shepard can investigate. When you find one of those, that's an N7 mission. Our approach with N7 missions is that really every N7 mission has to provide you something amazing and different in terms of the gameplay or what you get to do, than you would be able to do anywhere else in the game. Now when you find missions out there in the uncharted worlds, there are always missions where something special happens, and you get really good handcrafted gameplay and art that you can't see elsewhere in the game.

Given that Dragon Age is generally considered to be a "step back in the right direction" in terms of the games BioWare should be making, I think it's safe to be looking forward to ME2 now more than ever.

I finally got around to finishing the interview, and yup, I'm quite excited for the game now. I'm not holding my breath the loyalty mechanic for the NPCs. Coupled with the voice acting trailer, I'm quite excited for ME2, enough so that I'm considering a pre-order.

I'm not holding my breath writing-wise, as some characters and situations (and its accompanying dialogue) from ME1 was unintentionally hilarious. But, if the NPCs from DA:O are any indication, maybe Bioware is bringing their A-game back for this game too.