One of the factors that will not affect the “Galactic Readiness” are the choices the players made in the first two Mass Effect games. Rather, they will affect the Galaxy at War in terms of how the story is told, rather than whether you get an optimal ending.
One way to raise the “Galactic Readiness” is through the co-op multiplayer. The more successful at the missions, the more “Galactic Readiness” you earn. One of the nicest features is that the co-op won’t somehow make the increased “Readiness” seem disjointed and out of the story progression. According to Houston, ”The SP elements will dovetail really nicely into those and both those actions will allow your Shepard to have a different ending depending on those actions.”
The co-op missions are meant to be side-stories to the main campaign, and the characters in the co-op will never be in any of the main campaign missions. ”We don’t want to create situations where MP players have something that SP players couldn’t otherwise see.” As for dialog, Houston added, ”All dialogue is done ambiantly, for instance the commander will be giving you orders through your headsets.” He did affirm there would be party chatter in the same way that party members banter in Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
Players who don’t want to or can’t engage in co-op multiplayer won’t be cheated either. ”(Single player) can still be played all by itself without any kind of multiplayer or third party and you can still get the absolute best ending. This just gives you new options to be able to get that ending,” promised Houston.
He went on to reveal three races that could be played as in the co-op: Krogran, Drell and Asari. He was cagey as to whether players could be Geth, and added, ”I can say there will be a lot of interesting races that you may not expect to be able to play as because they wouldn’t normally be looked upon as characters who are for the fight normally. That said we’ll be releasing more and more characters through DLC later.”
The multiplayer characters can be leveled up, just like single player characters, each leveling up independently of each other. Houston stated, ”Experience is gained through objective gathering not necessarily class choices. Each class earns achievements at the same pace, but separately. So if I play a soldier, the soldier earns the experience and my vanguard won’t until I play that vanguard. If I got to level 10 as a soldier, my vanguard would still be at level 1.”
Houston did make one disappointing note that PC LAN play would not be implemented, nor would private servers be supported. In addition, the game would require a one-time internet activation, after which it could be played offline. However, when asked “Is there a sunset plan after you decide to take the servers down in a couple of years?”, Houston replied, ”Yes, absolutely. We won’t be taking the servers down until we realize that there aren’t enough players playing to warrant keeping them up and when we do take them down, we will make sure there are options so the players who are playing don’t feel abandoned. If anything is a good example, you can see today that Never Winter Nights is still supported and we’ve kept a lot of our servers live on it. So I wouldn’t be too worried about us taking down the servers anytime soon.”
Finally, Houston made a few minor notes. For example, friendly fire was toyed with, but discarded because it simply didn’t work in the context of the game. As for griefers, Houston didn’t get into specifics, but assured that ”we are putting systems in place that will let you deal with people that you don’t want to be playing with.”
Mass Effect 3 will be released on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in March 2012.
