Mass Effect Interview

ActionTrip has published a two-page interview with BioWare’s Casey Hudson, quizzing the project director about their upcoming sci-fi RPG for the Xbox 360, Mass Effect.

Q: We’d like to know more about character development and the way players will get to improve the skills and attributes of their avatars. Can you reveal any specific abilities or special powers we’ll be able to enhance as we proceed through the game?

A: As you complete portions of the story or survive new combat engagements, you’ll gain experience that can be put towards developing your character. Improving your character’s ability in a certain area is as easy as spending some points on it. When you reach a maximum in certain abilities, that may unlock new areas of expertise that you can start developing. In demos we’ve shown how you can use these things in combination during combat to pull off some amazing combinations. For example, at X06 we showed how one character in your squad can use an electromagnetic pulse attack to destroy an enemy’s shields. Then we ran up and fired a “carnage” shotgun attack which involves overloading your shotgun for an extremely powerful close-range attack. The result of that combination tore a huge mechanical enemy to shreds! You’ll also be able to develop abilities such as creating temporary dark energy force fields to take cover behind, attacks that use gravity-like effects to squeeze enemies to death, and tons of other combat, technical, and dark energy abilities.