BioWare Discloses Mass Effect 3 Combat Changes

BioWare's Casey Hudson has described the combat in Mass Effect 3 as being "quite different" from its series predecessors. 

Speaking to PC Gamer, Hudson said that the studio would be changing combat for the better by "putting a lot of our fun new special activities, around these new abilities that they (the characters) have."

"So we're giving them heavier melee stuff that they might do, or one of them is able to suck back the health of enemies you've killed around it," he said, describing an aspect of the game's new combat. "So as you're killing enemies next to it, your squadmates are working on this character, and it's able to suck in the health." 

The developer shed some light on the game's new mech-based combat.

"One of them is an Atlas that you saw, so it's the big kind of mech thing," he said, when asked about one of the game's mechs. "The cool thing about that is obviously once you see it moving, you get more of an idea of what it's about—it's a massive, heavy thing that's got a huge cannon on it." 

Hudson said that it will be possible to target specific parts of the mech in order to disable it. 

"[The mech] is piloted by a Cerberus trooper that's on the inside—you can actually see him in there, and if you concentrate on the little glass shield that he's behind, if you can take that shield out. Then you can damage the guy that's in there, and you can kill the guy and the machine's dead. Or likewise if you kill the machine, the guy can hop out and you fight him. So there's some fun stuff in there in terms of fighting a machine that's actually piloted by a guy." 

Mass Effect 3 is slated for an early 2012 release on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.