Mass Effect 3’s Enemies and Races Detailed

OXM continues their week of Mass Effect 3 coverage by publishing two more articles devoted to the game’s new enemies and the various races we’ll be saving from the Reaper invasion. Art director Derek Watts contributes commentary for the former:

“One of the things we wanted to branch away from is the skin-tight outfits, we wanted the enemies to be bulkier,” art director Derek Watts tells OXM. “They’re harder to shoot, they’re bigger, they’re more beat up, they’re more armour-covered.

“It’s going to take a lot of bullets to defeat these guys. These guys have seen a lot of combat all over the galaxy, they are fighting you, they are fighting everyone else. ”

Passing around concept artworks we’re regrettably unable to publish here, Watts shows how the original Mass Effect’s clean, figure-hugging elegance has evolved into bristling, war-torn pragmatism. Art design doesn’t happen in isolation to the rest of the development process, of course; Watts and his team have thrown concepts back and forth between level and combat designers, working out how best (for instance) to hint at an enemy’s behaviour via his appearance, and adapt his silhouette to fit against cover.

Having established key design principles with Mass Effect 1, BioWare was able to work in bulk on Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 benefits from this “block feature” approach. “If you’ve decided the trooper is going to be one of your main enemies, let’s get a block version of him and get animation involved, get combat involved and figure out what’s going to make this guy shoot. Are we going to fix his AI, how are the designers going to know how to put him down and build the levels.

While the latter covers everything from the Rachni to the Volus:

Hanar/Drell

Keen as we are to get our hands on a copy of Blasto, we’d hate to fight alongside the Hanar. They’re jellyfish, remember – graceful in the water, balloon-like and unwieldy on land, and Mass Effect isn’t exactly celebrated for its swimming levels. We are, however, keen to engage with them on the subject of the Enkindlers, aka the Protheans, aka a fallen race that’s been enslaved by genocidal living spaceships. The Hanar are unlikely to take well to news that their deities now work for the Borg.

Smoothing their ruffled religious feathers will be important, as winning over the Hannar is key to winning over the froglike Drell. And you really, really want the Drell in your corner. They’re perfect assassins, partly because of their much-touted “wiry strength” and photographic memories, and partly because they conceive of their souls as wholly disunited from their bodies, which means they’re not that bothered about what their bodies get up to. If you want proof of their staying power, consider that they’re happy to live on a world that’s gradually killing them.