Mass Effect 3 Has More Action Adventure Features, Keeps RPG Mechanics

BioWare has once again talked about its upcoming Mass Effect 3 title, and how it will try to strike a perfect balance between offering a fun, action-adventure experience, through its third-person shooter mechanics, but also a deep role-playing narrative, where players can customize various things and feel they're becoming more powerful.

The Mass Effect series started out as a bit of a clumsy third-person shooter with many role-playing mechanics, in the first iteration, but quickly established itself as a more fast-paced experience with the second title, which scrapped quite a few of the RPG mechanics, much to the disapproval of the fans.

Now, with the third game, it seems that the series is set to resemble an action-adventure game even more than its predecessors, but BioWare Marketing Executive David Silverman highlighted to CVG that quite a few role-playing mechanics were still present.

"We're hoping for a big hit. It's the best game we've ever made at BioWare Edmonton. The stuff we're doing - making the gameplay more action-adventre-y, making it on a par with some of the best action games you see today, whilst on top of that adding in these RPG elements that maybe people were upset we didn't focus on as much in Mass Effect 2 - it strikes a balance."

Mass Effect 3 has lots of new RPG elements than its predecessor, as BioWare studied many popular games and extrapolated what players enjoyed, in terms of customization or strategy layers, and what they didn't touch.

"We've done a lot of research about what people liked about Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and other games too - what they like about Gears Of War, Assassin's Creed, Halo, Call Of Duty and lots of RPG games too."

"We've looked at all these games to see what's resonating and what's not. On the one hand, we don't want to go too far down the RPG rabbit hole where Shepard starts rolling dice, but on the other hand we don't want to ignore that coolness - where people can customize parts of their character and making them feel that it's them in the adventure. We capitalize on that in spades in ME3."

Mass Effect 3 is set to blend all these experiences on March 3, 2012, when it is released for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.