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Playing the spin-doctor, Casey managed to create more questions than he answered, but we have to admit that we still hung on his every word, “It’s more that this mission is the most dangerous thing that Shepard has done. Ultimately what you’re trying to do is to prove that Shepard can come out alive. You know what you have to do and you know it’s dangerous. If you do the minimum then you get the bloodbath ending, which is what you’d expect from a player who just wants to get to the end and finish. But if you play it well you’re going to get better and better versions of success, all the way up to the ultimate ending where you hit all your objectives and get everybody out alive. You’re gonna know how well equipped you are for the ending, put it that way. If you’re really under-equipped, you’ll know before you head in. You can go and do it and you might complete the mission, but the whole point is to get the best people and equipment. If you don’t do a lot of that and you head into this suicide mission then you’re going to get something that is along the lines of a bloodbath.” There’s also the question of that enigmatic Geth, apparently wearing Shepard’s armour at the end of the teaser. Casey virtually stonewalls when it comes to revealing any more information on that particular character, but apparently he’s friendly and can become a playable part of your team.

We’ve seen more than enough to make us believe that this character has stronger ties with Shepard’s death that we initially thought – especially the fact that there’s a gaping hole in the torso of its second-hand armour. We’ve got a feeling your old Quarian companion Tali and her mechanical genius have a part to play in all of this too... Teasing conclusive plot information from the project director was proving difficult, so we changed tack and began to talk about combat. Casey was much more open about how BioWare has improved upon the old combat system, which wasn’t an entirely minor thorn in our gameplay experience. Squad controls have been split so that you can direct your team mates individually, allowing you to perform more tactical manoeuvres than before, and the cover system has been made far more dynamic – now with over 220 animations directing it. “The combat system is more fluid, more real-time, there’s better aiming and camera behaviour, better squad AI, better enemy AI, more physics-based gameplay, the powers are more at your fingertips, better use of cover... you could tell that when a lot of people were playing Mass Effect they also played Halo, for example. They would do a lot of strafing and then slide past objects. But in Mass Effect they would get stuck in the auto cover system. So looking at that, a few changes to the way cover works allows them to play that way but still make use of cover.”

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