Mass Effect 2 Previews and Screenshots

The Mass Effect 2 conference call BioWare hosted last week continues to be the source of some new previews, with ActionTrip and WorthPlaying joining the fray this morning. An excerpt from the former preview:

“In Mass Effect 1 part of the problem was that, because the weapon was a skill, your character might have a low skill in a given weapon and that means that you as a player might be able to put the reticule on an enemy, but your character would be unable to hit them because the character has a low skill or the weapon is a poor weapon. We’ve moved those things onto different kinds of powers, so now the character is able to fire as well as you and that just really adds to the precision of the combat. But at the same time all the depth is there in terms of your character progression,” says Casey Hudson. Related to that, “each class feels a lot deeper and a lot more varied,” he added. “As a Vanguard you are good at shotguns and you have some Biotic powers. One of them is ‘Charge’ – it’s a new power where you can launch yourself across the level using Biotic powers at tremendous speed so you can physically hit another enemy. When you do that, the higher-end version of the power actually slows down time when you hit them so they get launched into the air and in slow motion you’re right there with your shotgun. It creates this really high-risk, high-reward type of combat. That’s a very unique kind of play style.”

“Then you have other classes like the Adept. The Adept can essentially remotely command the battlefield. You’re looking around and all the different enemies and you’re able to do ‘Pull’ and all these amazing abilities. But beyond that, we’ve advanced those powers, so when you do a power like, say, ‘Pull’ it’s not just something that pulls enemies towards you; it’s an actual projectile that you throw out into the world and it guides towards the enemy and then at which angle you throw it, it’ll yank that enemy in that direction. If you’re on a bridge, you don’t just pull the enemy towards you that land close to you on the bridge, you can yank them left or right on either side of the bridge. You really control what you’re doing and where people are going,” offers Casey.

Additionally, WorthPlaying has cranked out two new screenshots of the engineer class.