Mass Effect 3 Interview

BioWare’s official blog is hosting the results of a lengthy interview that their social media coordinator conducted with Mass Effect 3 producer Jesse Houston. Topics include the effects of our decisions in ME1 and ME2, the classes we can play in multiplayer, why Kinect won’t be compatible with multiplayer, the possibility of split-screen or LAN co-op on PC, and much more:

Which classes/races can you play as? Can you be a geth?

We haven’t given the full list yet. But as an example, you can totally play as a Krogan, as a Drell, as an Asari. Beyond those, I can’t give away all of the details, but 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.

How does leveling up work in MP?

As you complete objectives inside of the co-op experience you are going to be leveling up similar to how you would in an RPG. You gain experience points and those experience points go toward your level and you spend points exactly how you would as a SP and each character is its own so you could theoretically have 10 or 20 characters going, each leveling up independently.

…

Will local co-op be supported? (ie local split screen, PC-LAN)

At the time of release, no. However it is definitely on the table as something we might add.

Is there a sunset plan after you decide to take the servers down in a couple of years.

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 Neverwinter 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.