Multiplayer: “Mass Effect” was announced as a trilogy. Creatively, how do you go about determining that you’re making a trilogy?
Ray Muzyka, BioWare co-founder:
Great science fiction arcs often occur in trilogies. It seems like it’s sort of the way of it. Maybe it’s a convenient number. But it allows you to have different pacing in parts of the story. So we’re excited about the next installments.
This is really just a medium-sized combat-heavy side-quest that wouldn't have had many players rushing to check it out. Despite the compelling race-against-time concept, there's no game-clock running - probably because disaster looms in four hours in-game, but you can finish the mission in a quarter of that in real time. So instead of plot twists and role-playing, it's just blast, blast, drive, drive, blast, blast.
Despite its comfortable new digs at Electronic Arts, it looks like BioWare plans to keep its Mass Effect trilogy exclusive to Xbox 360 - for at least the time being.
There’s no question that BioWare’s Mass Effect made quite an impact on the gaming world upon its release last November. In fact, it received our 2007 Game of the Year award, so it goes without saying that we’ve eagerly been anticipating the first of a series of planned downloadable contact packages from BioWare. Today, that wait was over as the Mass Effect universe was expanded by way of the “Bring Down the Sky” DLC.
Speaking with a group of industry analysts, EA Games president Frank Gibeau said that sci-fi opera Mass Effect will be a franchise for the company "for a very long time" ... Boy, that didn't sound sinister at all, did it?
After making some calls to local Targets, none of whom had a problem ringing the game up on their registers, we followed up with Target Corporate Communications.
A Target spokesperson got back to us this afternoon after double checking with all the right folks and told us unequivocally, "This is just a rumor. There are no plans to remove this game, it's available at Target stores and Target.com."
According to a supposed insider, the next issue of OXM will offer tantalizing information for XBOX 360 fans. That being the magazine is expected to announce that the Mass Effect Sequels will remain exclusive to the 360. Will this rumor pan out? We shall see.
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