Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer

Posted by Webgolfing on February 22, 2012 10:32 am 10

So I played the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer component included in the Demo that was released last week. To be honest, I was expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed compared to the Single-player campaign. Well, I have to say I'm glad my initial expectations were wrong.

I've played a few other games with "Horde" modes such as Halo:Reach (I have Gears of War 3 but my Xbox friends don't really play it much). In other games, it seems more of a stationary activity to see how many bad guys you can take on before you become overwhelmed. While I can't say that ME3 is terribly different, I do like that it gives the player some objectives to force you to move around the map. It seems like a simple design change that makes a huge difference in how you produce a strategy.

So my question is "Is there anyone else that was pleasantly surprised by the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3?"

Now I have to say that I still have some questions, like how is the multiplayer component going to affect my single-player campaign. I also think it would be cool to add in some sort of persistent world activity with factions akin to what Mechassault 2 did with its multiplayer. Obviously, I don't think PvP multiplayer would work well in a game like ME3 but what other features would make multiplayer components of single-player focused game better? I ask this because I don't think triple A games will be strictly just single-player or just multiplayer in the coming years. I think game publishers see that games need single-player campaigns and multiplayer components in order to be a complete marketable games (See Battlefield 3, The Darkness, and Dead Space 2 for examples).