Live-Action Mass Effect 3 Trailer Makes Its Way to Earth

Watch Shepard run past Reapers, rioters, and romance in the newest Mass Effect 3 trailer from BioWare.

Maybe it’s just me, but having now seen five or so trailers for BioWare’s upcoming sci-fi behemoth Mass Effect 3, I’m starting to get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Earth gets attacked by the Reapers or something. This most recent trailer for the game does nothing to prove my nagging little assumption wrong, as we watch a standard selection of major world cities start to go boom in this recent live-action promo, moderately titled “Fight.” Of course, denizens of said cities react exactly as you’d imagine when the Reaper death squads arrive, with an impressively calm, well-organized urban exodus. It’s a good thing they listened to Shepard and knew this was coming, otherwise there would probably have been a good deal of screaming, rioting, and unnecessary causalities. Oh, wait …

This trailer recently premiered during an episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead, in a move perhaps designed to remind the general populace that there are many “cool” ways to wreak havoc on mankind, and not all of them involve zombies. And while the video may seem to have more in common with a Michael Bay movie than a deliberately-paced, story-driven RPG, I’m not sure it was even designed for the core Mass Effect player base. After all, the majority of those fans have been around for at least two games now, and have been fed more than their share of trailers, making-of videos, and demos to date. Maybe “Fight” was simply designed for those unfamiliar, those who need to see something advertised in what, to them, may be the more comfortable medium of film before getting interested.

But even keeping BioWare’s likely purpose of producing a trailer like this in mind, there’s still one thing that disappoints me. Couldn’t we have seen just one of the crew members other than Shepard dodging those doom lasers between the broken-down cars? Personally, I couldn’t care less about seeing a living Shepard (I tend to imagine he just looks like that other Shephard guy, for better or worse) but come on! Show us a Turian, Krogan, or Drell! Heck, I’d even have settled for a conservatively-garbed belly dancer being passed off as a Quarian.