Your romantic choices may come back to haunt you, says Mass Effect 3’s project leader.
If you’ve been waiting for just the right man/woman/flying jellyfish to come along in the Mass Effect series, then prepare to be disappointed, because BioWare says that it isn’t adding any new love interests to the third game.
Casey Hudson, executive producer and project lead for Mass Effect 3 said that none of the game’s new characters were part of the series’ romantic subplots. Instead, all the love interests would come from the first two games, and there would be consequences if the player had been unfaithful. “A lot of people had romances with [the] characters [from Mass Effect 2], and now the fun is bringing back some of those characters from Mass Effect 1 and putting them back in the mix, and looking at what you did in Mass Effect 2 and bringing some … interesting scenarios around those things.”
Hudson said that there was actually a large amount of data to keep track of across the previous two games, as the relationship statuses weren’t just binary, yes/no, deals. In both games, there was the opportunity for the player to pursue multiple romantic options before making his or her final choice, and these would all be taken into account. He also said that the romance options taught players to take the decisions they made more seriously. “Sometimes when we do certain things, it makes players realize what kinds of things are possible,” he said. “So … if you had a Mass Effect 1 romance [and] you stay true to the character from the first game, there’s a scene where you look at the picture of that character, and that’s essentially the romance scene in Mass Effect 2.”
“I think when people realized that we were thinking about that kind of thing,” he continued, “and that we were going to reflect those kinds of decisions, then it’s like ‘Wow, the game actually knows that I didn’t cheat on my Mass Effect 1 love interest. So if it knows that, then it probably knows other stuff that it will reflect. Then that means I need to think about that stuff [when] talking to characters and making decisions and the like.'”
Hudson has said in the past that there were hundreds of different permutations of the Mass Effect story. Some of them will likely pass under the radar, but the choices made in the romance subplots are going to have repercussions that players will notice. Players will probably enjoy them though, because like Hudson says, even if they’re on the awkward side, they’re going to be interesting. Does anyone else have the urge to romance Ashley and Jack, just to see the fireworks when they meet?
Mass Effect 3 comes out for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC early next year.
Update: According to Hudson, there will be new love interests in Mass Effect 3. What’s more, they will finally add lesbian and gay options, something that was notably absent in Mass Effect 2.
Hudson said on Twitter that the idea that there were no new romantic possibilities in Mass Effect 3 was based on “an oversimplification” of an answer he gave over a month ago. The discrepancy between the two answers, he said, was simply a product of the game evolving over time.
Source: PC Gamer
