PREVIEW – How wonderful it is when several news details surface because of someone, who just took a survey about the upcoming Mass Effect 4? Last year, Bioware had a big game with Dragon Age: Inquisiton, but it seems that they will succeed yet again with the new Mass Effect game. Everything is showing towards that direction.

BioWare’s already working on Mass Effect 4, so it’s not a surprise, but now that someone on Reddit has shown several new details of a survey related to this game, it’s giving ME4 a different kind of light – the game is planned to hit PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC later on.

No more Shepard

The new game has effectively zero relations towards Shepard and co, as this game will be in the Helius cluster, on a four times bigger area than seen in ME3. Now this itself is an unbelievable fact already, as despite according to the main story of finding a new home for the humanity, if we really have that much to discover, it’ll take at least 50 or 60 hours to see everything that awaits us.

Although in order to have enough resources to find a new, peaceful home, we will have to take a trip to several planets – this will be seen as trespassing by either the wildlife there, or the other alien races that live on that planet. Combat will be still important then, and we will be helped by tools and artifacts left behind by the Remnant, giving us a huge helping hand. This will play an important role in the story, as we get deeper into the Remnant history and their technology, we will end up racing for victory against the other enemies to get our hands on the prize of the Remnant base, so humanity is on the line.

Why do we need to improve and develop? Simple, just to survive and defend ourselves, so we have to keep an eye out for the Remnant technology. What can we tune? Leg armor for jetpack jumps, laser cannon for enemy targeting, or even better, to cause area damage. All this is just a small, brief slice of what else can be in development…

It’s even better with a team

Obviously, we won’t succeed alone, so a team will be needed to help us – we can have a maximum of seven team-mates, with each of them having a different personality, a background story and also, with different skills. This will definitely make us think about who to go with to our missions as only two of them will join us in battle! For example, Cora’s special skill is having a shield for us – we can attack through that bubble, but our enemies can’t do the same.

Don’t ignore the teammates though, and in several ways: do not be greedy and just take all the upgrades for yourself and try to give them new gear and weapons; and secondly, always try to get some time to communicate them to know them better. They all have well-developed stories and with Bioware’s well-known dialogue system having an effect here as well, it can change the ambience and the way how they will feel about us.

The dialogue system is likely to get a huge boost: now, we will be able to use actions to make others do what we want, like using our gun to make an action instead of talking them into doing it. Same with our team-mate: getting those ties is important to make them loyal to us. For example, if a Krogan colony’s ship gets stolen, a Krogan member in our crew (Drack) will immediately recommend us getting it back – if we complete this task, Drack will not only be more loyal to us, but it will also unlock a skilltree as well.

Hire me!

However, the area is big, so our team will not be enough to discover everything. Hiring AI members to make some dirty work instead of us in a Strike Team mission is possible. Spend some money, pray to have good results from those randomly generated missions and then you might spend more money on upgrading their gear and weaponry – an army might be possible in the end. However, you can give these Strike Team missions a try yourself with up to three friends as well – these missions are usually divided into things like defending a base from Khet, getting a Remnant item before others and stuff like that. You’ll not only get multiplayer equipment as a reward, but also, your team-mates will receive extra money and multiplayer XP.

Horde mode: ON!

Speaking of multiplayer, there’s going to be a Horde mode, with a maximum of four players against a few… hundred enemies. Our task will be not only surviving – defusing a bomb or eliminating a target will be also necessary to win. Rewards will be multiplayer XP, gear, weapons, but also APEX, which is the currency of the game – you can spend them easily on single player missions.

It will be spent quite quickly, because creating settlements is not cheap, especially on multiple areas, this will bring up the question of where to spend your resources later on, especially because of their types. Mining ones will give minerals for crafting and Recon ones will give us more opportunities for Strike Team missions and so on – this kinda reminds us of Supremacy on the C64.

The Final frontier

What will we use to move in space? It’ll be our ship called Tempest, but on terrains, our Mako vehicle will be used and you can pimp it up from paintjobs through nitros to radars in order to make driving enjoyable as well, not just the combat. Combat – we will need them in the optional Khet Outposts, which are basically the single player form of horde with waves of enemies with XP as reward as well as our team mates rating us positively.

The Andromeda Galaxy awaits us and we await Mass Effect 4

-V-