Mass Effect 3 : Discussion / Screenshot Thread - Page 125

A GameStop customer has revealed images of a DLC pre-order receipt – indicating that ‘Mass Effect 3′ it set to receive a yet-to-be-announced piece of downloadable content titled, ‘From Dust.’

The notion of a pre-launch DLC announcement is hardly shocking anymore – as more and more developers line-up large-scale post-release content campaigns.
While it’s nothing new to hear that DLC has been planned for Mass Effect 3, in the form of in-game items, playable characters, and single player missions, it might come as a surprise to some gamers to find out that GameStop (at least one of them) may already be taking pre-orders for a yet-to-be-announced add-on titled, “From Dust.”
At this point, the only “evidence” (using the term lightly) that we have of “From Dust” is an exceptionally bare-bones image of a GameStop DLC pre-order voucher – that allegedly cost the buyer $10. Check out the image below (courtesy of Joystiq):

Assuming the receipt voucher is valid (it would be simple enough to fake), it’s still unclear where exactly “From Dust” might fit into (or outside of) the events of the single player campaign. However, when talking about BioWare’s DLC strategy for the upcoming title, Mass Effect series executive producer Casey Hudson had previously stated: As a result, while some players might be imagining a DLC episode that serves as an external supplement to the Mass Effect 3 storyline (either as a prologue, spin-off, or epilogue), it sounds as though “From Dust” isn’t going to offer anything outside of the Shepard-centric narrative – and will be contained within the main game timeline.
It’s also a possibility that “From Dust” is little more than a multiplayer DLC add-on that offers new locations and equipment for the co-op mode. That said, titles for equipment-type add-ons in prior games were usually a bit less “poetic” – the “Aegis Pack” and “Alternate Appearance Pack,” as examples. The same logic could potentially be used to rule-out the possibility that “From Dust” will offer a new ally mission (and party member), since those add-on titles were typically formatted with the character’s name included – “Kasumi: Stolen Memory” and “Zaeed: The Price of Revenge.”
Of course, there’s nothing to stop BioWare from changing-up the way they market DLC; however, “From Dust” (in both price and titling) definitely pairs well with the series other single player DLC’s – such as “Bring Down the Sky,” “Overlord,” and “Arrival.”

We’re waiting to hear confirmation (and exact details) with regard to “From Dust”. That said, in the meantime, if we had to guess, maybe the outed DLC is actually the infamous scrapped Citadel mission from Mass Effect 2?
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Reports from customers in Gamestop suggest that some stores are selling a Mass Effect 3 DLC pack called “From Dust.” A Joystiq reader sent in a photograph of a receipt they got for buying the DLC, which suggested that the pack will cost $10. If it’s already on sale it’ll likely arrive as day one DLC when Mass Effect 3 comes out on March 6 in the US, and March 9 in Europe.
Meanwhile, Kotaku caught the announcement of a smartphone “Datapad” app that you can use to keep up with new Mass Effect 3 announcements. The app includes a Reaper fighting mini-game and will send you text messages from Mass Effect 3 characters. Bioware haven’t said what form these will take, perhaps it’ll be the Illusive man persuading you to pick up a new DLC pack, or messages from companions confessing their love.
You’ll be able to use the app to boost your Galactic Readiness level, the overarching indicator that defines how well you’re doing in your struggle against the Reapers. What do you think about receiving texts from in-game characters. Is that weird? It seems a little weird. Here’s a screenshot from Shepard’s phone while you ponder. Source

Even though Big Ben's Clock Tower was the scene of the very first Mass Effect 3 teaser, when the Reapers start dropping to Earth next March it'll be in Vancouver - not London - that Shepard makes his stand.
Our fallen hero (now dishonourably relieved of his Commander title after Mass Effect 2's events) is in the Alliance's Canadian HQ when the alien invasion starts, and within seconds he's called up for advice and help. Not that it's any use to the higher-ups: those poor fools are promptly evaporated in front of Shepard's eyes by a Reaper laser beam...

Out for revenge, Shepard scoops up a handgun and starts battling back against familiar husks and cannibals, with newer Reaper-mutated alien races promised later on. BioWare are boldly claiming that the leap in quality between Mass Effect 2 and 3 is as significant as that between 1 and 2, and within five minutes of game time it's clear they're talking sense.
So much so that they could comfortably have stripped out the RPG elements and released this as an all-out action game. Shepard is much lighter on his feet and thinks nothing of sprinting across skyscraper ledges and leaping over gaps at the press of a button. Combat rolls, hopping over cover, melee executions from behind cover (thanks to a yank and a vicious neck stab) and SWAT turns are all part of a day's work in Shepard's new life. During the acrobatic display he even finds time for a spot of surfing, albeit down a collapsing rooftop as the cityscapes are reduced to rubble by the Reapers. It's new territory for Mass Effect, and we love it.
After 20 minutes of playing Earth Defence Force the Normandy swoops in and picks up our boy Shep. To hammer home the struggle facing the planet, the camera cuts away to a small boy we tried to coax out of an air duct earlier. He climbs into a transport carrier and is whisked to safety - safety that lasts all of three seconds before the vehicle's reduced to a smouldering wreck by another Reaper laser.
Suitably motivated and sharply reinstated to Commander status by Admiral Anderson, we head straight to Mars to skim Prothean data to try and find a means to fight back.
RED ALERT
Mars is just as hostile, but for different reasons. While the Reapers are concerning themselves with Earth, the Martian researchers are being executed one-by-one by former 'allies' Cerberus. The bad-guys-turned-good are back in full-on bad mode now, partly because they want to use the Prothean technology to control the Reapers rather than destroy them, and partly because of a spoilerific reason too juicy to reveal.
And it turns out that Shepard's not the only one who has brushed up on his combat skills since the last game. Enemies do everything they can to force you out of cover, and love nothing more than chucking grenades (regular grenades too, not the floating discs of old) and flanking to catch you unawares.

Cover-to-cover hopping is the only way to survive, and even then victory isn't assured as cartwheeling Phantoms and hulking mechs make you squeeze every last drop of tactical nous out of your squad to survive.
As the Mars level continues it's obvious Mass Effect 3 is doing things we'd only dreamed of before. Modular armour and customizable weapons ramp up the options, while experience is scooped up thick and fast during combat and goes towards a deeper character progression system with much more in the way of upgrade options.
Each character skill has six ranks to unlock (with ranks carrying over from Mass Effect 2 if you import your data): ranks one to three are bog-standard upgrades, but four to six each boast two flavours of stat bonuses to choose between.

Then there are the torch-lit tip-toes through dark, depressurised areas and foot-chases against fleeing assassins - all new strings to Mass Effect's bow. And looming over everything like a giant, ominous umbrella is the Galaxy At War concept: a unifying system that takes data from your single-player game, your multiplayer progress, your time on the upcoming Facebook and Google+ apps, your performance on next year's iOS game and your interaction with 2012's iOS Data Pad app (BioWare are keeping the exact details of all these interactive goodies close to their chests), and plugs it all into your ending.
KISS MY ASSET
It works as follows: as you play ME3 you'll collect 'War Assets'. These are people, places and armies you befriend along the way, and each one has a numerical value associated with it. Asari Justicar Samara might be worth, say, +25, while a squad of soldiers is worth +65 to your asset total.
Add them all up and you have your 'Total Military Strength' value, which is then multiplied by your 'Readiness Rating'. We're told all the external experiences - the co-op multiplayer mode and the social games - feed into this Readiness Rating to let you win with fewer assets. Plug in the numbers and out pops your 'Effective Military Strength' value - a total figure that seems to let you trigger the endgame once you hit a threshold.
In an interesting twist, not every 'good' choice is going to bump your Assets. It was hinted that characters such as Wrex may have a nuisance factor and hinder those gamers who saved them, and we'd bet that you'll have to make some cruel sacrifices for 'the greater good' at some point.

The good news though is that you won't be forced into participating in all the extra features if you want to succeed at Mass Effect 3. They just make the overall job simpler. And whether Mass Effect 3 is easy or hard is somewhat irrelevant. Because if our hands-on spell made one thing clear it's that your time spent saving the galaxy, no matter the difficulty, will be up there with some of the best gaming experiences of the generation.
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Some people, eh? What reward do you get for gathering a crew, heading off on a suicide mission, and returning triumphant, having struck a major blow against the villainous pro-human Cerberus Network while you were at it? Prison. That's your reward.
That's certainly where we catch up with Commander Shepard, anyway, at the start of Mass Effect 3, after he sacrificed millions of Batarian lives at the end of the last game's DLC episode.
Let's wind it back a little first, as how to get out of chokey isn't the first thing you'll be tasked with thinking about when you sit down with the new single-player campaign.

Before all that, unless you're importing an existing Shepard, you'll have to make a brand new one, fiddling around with your eyes and nose until they look really strange, picking your class and backstory, and telling the game a little bit about some of your actions in the previous adventures - who lived, and who died, for example. Then you have to decide which of three different versions of ME3 you'd actually like to play.
Your choices are pretty simple, thankfully. Story mode dials down the combat but allows you to make all the big decisions throughout the game, choosing what happens at crucial - and not so crucial - moments, and who you end up making sweet, slightly creepy, dead-eyed zero-gravity love to.
Action mode offers you exactly the opposite experience, turning conversations into standard non-interactive cut-scenes, while providing you with a straight-up cover-based shooter, with no morality nonsense to get in the way of the headshots.
Role-playing mode, finally, is the traditional Mass Effect mode. If you're reading this, it's the mode you'll almost certainly end up playing. (If you're not reading this, what's on telly at the moment? Is it time for Diagnosis Murder yet?)
Where were we? Oh yes, Prison. Military detention, which is probably much the same thing, but with tidier bed linen and more people doing one-armed push-ups in the yard. Shepard's in the slammer due to her - or his - crazy, law-breaking, risk-taking, genocide-committing actions in the last game's DLC, stripped of his - or her - command, and ordered to report to a futuristic tribunal to explain what she - or he - has been doing recently.
Mass Effect 3 throws you right into things, then, marching you straight to the courtroom where you'll have one last chance to convince the stupid counsellors that the Reaper threat is real, and planet Earth is about to get a royal shoeing from ageless and uncaring space robots who take the form of vast, city-sized hermit crabs.

The courtroom sequence isn't particularly long, but playing through it at a recent EA showcase did give us a chance to catch up with Ashley - or presumably Kaidan, if you decided that he should live instead.
It's also an opportunity to enjoy what feels like a series of gentle improvements to the character models. Ashley's probably still a big alien-hating racist, of course, but she's bagged herself some much nicer make-up this time around, and the rest of the game's cast have come on a long way, too.
Eyes are a little more sparkly, gestures are a touch less robotic - except on the robots, obviously - and at least one of your inquisitors offers cast-iron proof that the 'severe bun' schoolmistress hairstyle has survived, against all odds, well into an era of flying cars, laser guns, and chatty food-vending machines. If it works for you, why change it? (Because it's horrible.)
Court is quickly dismissed, however, and not because you make a very convincing case. Instead, it's the darn Reapers calling a recess, by arriving on Earth just as you're getting to the good bit of your speech, and proceeding to blow the entire building to pieces. Flame and rubble follow, as does the obligatory movement tutorial, as you and Anderson make your way through the disaster zone towards an evac ship.
Mass Effect 3 is a far more gymnastic game than its predecessors, by the looks of things. Previous instalments certainly took you to exciting alien lands, but you tended to then wobble around them as if you'd had all your joints fused together, or had thrown a disc out while having vigorously unpredictable intercourse with an alien crewmember.
This time, if the opening level is any indicator, you can expect to spend a lot of the adventure climbing up gantries, leaping across death-defying drops, and generally sprinting around like the galaxy depends upon it.

And it probably does. Earth certainly isn't doing so well, with the Reapers descending silently from the clouds and setting the surrounding skyscrapers on fire with apparent ease. It's clear that this is more mass-murder than two-sided battle, and BioWare isn't afraid to crank up the pathos, sliding in a tiny cut-scene in which Shepard spots a golden-haired scamp, separated from his family, hiding in a ventilation shaft. (Not saying what happens, but you probably shouldn't get too attached to him.)
Luckily, you've got other things to take your mind off the human misery and genocide, as your route across the shattered skyline takes you through a series of quick battles against husks and cannibals.
Husks can now clamber up walls, swarming over the edges of parapets in a distinctly creepy manner. Cannibals just pootle about like boil-infested walruses, but take a lot more damage before going down. Enemies are now quick to flank - and the environments are a little larger too, giving them room to do that - so you've been given a new charge-up melee attack that provides you with much meatier options when fighting toe-to-toe. Thwack.
This is just a quick introduction to the fighting, mind, and pretty soon you're getting ready to head off-world so you can find some way of sticking it to the Reapers permanently. Anderson decides to stay behind and protect what's left of the planet - within a few hours, he'll probably be able to fit most of it in a Pop-Tarts box - and you're back on the Normandy - yay! And there's Joker, too! -reinstated as Commander, and looking for some kind of battle plan that will allow you to rally a fleet and save humanity.
The solution, as I believe Arnie once said, is to get your ass to Mars. Down on the Martian Archives, it looks like somebody may have unearthed an old Prothean device that could do the Reapers in for good. The ancient civilisation designed a weapon, anyway - they just never had the time to build it. Maybe they got side-tracked by unblocking the Hoover or something.

There's just time for a little light levelling - each power you select now has an upgrade tree attached to it, meaning you have to be a bit more tactical when assigning points - and then you're landing on the Red Planet with Ashley and some hulking muscular guy called James, who I don't know very much about at this point. He looks like a tank character, anyway, and he says things like, "This is loco!" so he's alright with me. After all, this is loco.
The Martian Archives are minutes away from a major dust storm when you touch down, and even worse, they appear to be in the process of being raided by Cerberus assault troopers who are executing scientists out in the back yard. It's time to take them down and make your way indoors, where you'll discover that Ashley still doesn't entirely trust you, because of your past history with the pro-human terrorists. Maybe you should have let Kaidan live, eh? Less attitude.
What follows from here is classic Mass Effect level design: staggered enemy encounters in a mixture of tight industrial spaces and slightly roomier chambers, and a surprise reuniting with Liara. She's as blue as ever, and she's also certain that the Prothean plans discovered in the archives will be just the trick for taking on those Reapers. The only problem now is that the Cerberus Network knows about them too, and they're moving in on their location fast, with a sexy female spy leading the way. Typical.
It's a race against time, then, and this is where Mass Effect 3's rebalanced combat really starts to shine. Aiming feels a little more precise, entering and leaving cover is less fiddly, and the AI, crucially, is a lot more engaged in shooting at you in entertaining ways.
Mixing up standard weapons with biotic attacks like the Singularity, which creates a localised black hole, and the Biotic Charge, which remains the best teleporting head-butt any game has ever delivered, is still a brisk and exciting business, and there's always that improved melee to get you out of trouble when you really mess things up.

The staging has become a little more inventive, too, allowing you to experiment more with squad orders. Fighting through the archives drops you into rooms that are pitch black and warehouses filled with auto turrets where you must pick your way from one vantage point to the next, taking as little damage as possible as you move.
Best of all, there's a fight on a tramway car, where you find yourself a sitting duck for Cerberus. Exposed and in a real tight spot, it's the kind of combat a developer can only pull off when it's given you some exciting options to use in battle.
Shepard reaches the Prothean blueprint just in time to see The Illusive Man deleting all the local data. What's he up to? What are Cerberus' plans? Will Martin Sheen ever star in anything quite as good as the West Wing again? How does he keep his cigarettes alight in space? All of these questions hang in the air as our demo ends.
What's certain is that Mass Effect's back, and this is looking like the sharpest instalment yet. The RPG elements might feel increasingly side-lined as the shooting continues to hog the limelight, but when it comes to galactic heroics with a human interest twist, this is still the biggest show in town.
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