Today we have even more details concerning Mass Effect 3's upcoming co-op mode. The information comes from an interview with ME3 producer Jesse Houston on the BioWare Blog. Highlights include skill level matchmaking, more weapon and armor customization, and co-op specific Trophies and Achievements. The major lowlight is the lack of local co-op play, for now. You can see a full list of details after the break.
Mass Effect 3 will be out on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on March 6th. It supports four player online co-op.
Mass Effect 3 co-op...
Does not support Kinect. Will offer some way to deal with griefers. "Just know that we are putting systems in place that will let you deal with people that you don't want to be playing with." Has playable races besides Krogan, Asari and Drell that "you may not expect" - "they wouldn't normally be looked upon as characters who are for the fight". Has a leveling system: "You gain experience points and those experience points go toward your level and you spend points exactly how you would as a SP and each character is its own so you could theoretically have 10 or 20 characters going, each leveling up independently." Will get playable character DLC. "We'll be releasing more and more characters through DLC later." Characters aren't involved in the single-player Mass Effect 3 campaign at all Has leaderboards Has its own Achievements, Trophies Has matchmaking based on skill level - no word on how the latter is computed Is on the main game disc. "Somewhat sizeable, but not so much that it affects the SP experience." Can't be played locally - yet. "It is definitely on the table as something we might add." Won't support user-run servers or offline severs "any time soon" Will be tracked by the BioWare Social Network website. "There will definitely be a lot of BSN integration. What the final list of things is, we don't really know yet." Won't have friendly fire - to begin with. "Maybe later as some sort of modifier to the game, but not at release." Has "slightly different" - and "in many ways more" - weapon and armour customisation. "They are structured differently so stats don't play the same way." Has a story: "At a high level, Shepard is marshalling the troops on behalf of the Earth Alliance so you are technically fighting for the Earth Alliance. From a story perspective, a lot of these groups have come together as a loose fighting force to stop the reapers therefore they don't fly the same type of banners that would have existed in pre- reaper invasion days." Will one day be taken offline - i.e. there is a 'sunset plan'. "Yes, absolutely. We won't be taking the servers down until we realize that there aren't enough players playing to warrant keeping them up and when we do take them down, we will make sure there are options so the players who are playing don't feel abandoned. If anything is a good example, you can see today that Neverwinter Nights is still supported and we've kept a lot of our servers live on it. So I wouldn't be too worried about us taking down the servers any time soon."