Commander Shepard isn’t dead; we can tell you that much. At least, he doesn’t die —if in fact he croaks at all — until later on in Mass Effect 2. But first, let’s start at the beginning. It’s late April, still a chilly time of year at BioWare’s Edmonton HQ, and the Mass Effect team is deep in cloakand- dagger mode. As they hustled to prepare an E3 unveiling that’d launch Mass Effect 2 like a rocket, we spent a day with the team to bring you the world’s first look at this massive sequel, its improvements, and, yes, its secrets.

While our day up north raised plenty of questions that won’t be answered until E3, it also answered just as many of them. Frankly, even an elcor (the game’s adorably monotone elephant-like species) wouldn’t be able to contain its enthusiasm for all the details we uncovered — including the first news on Mass Effect 2’ s endings…

Still A Tease

BioWare sure knows how to make an entrance. A few months ago, the first Mass Effect 2 teaser hit the Internet like a nuke (watch it at tinyurl.com/me2trailer). Could Shepard really be dead? Did that geth really murder the series’ main character? When peppered with those questions, Casey Hudson, project manager at BioWare, smiles like a cat with canary feathers between his teeth.

“We actually didn’t say anything overt with the teaser, and the fact that so many people know why those things are interesting speaks to how much of the story got through,” he replies. “That’s been a really satisfying part of working on Mass Effect because we are trying to build a bigger story than has ever been done before. It actually is an interactive story that spans three games, and your choices cascade between the first two games and into the third one.”

Sweet, he just confirmed Mass Effect 3! But, um, what about Shepard? BioWare’s keeping his exact fate a secret until E3 (see sidebar, far right), but we saw a lot of the early portion of Mass Effect 2 in our visit, and you definitely play as Shepard for at least a decent chunk of the game. We checked out some fascinating gameplay sequences with our hero (details in a moment), and as you may have noticed on page 43 (where he’s on a new krogan planet), “Shepard appears much bigger and more powerful, and he’s presented in a darker, grittier style,” says Hudson. “This is all part of [the game’s] high-action descent into the darkest, most brutal parts of the Mass Effect universe.”

Interesting…but we still had to fling a few guesses about Shep’s fate at Hudson. He promptly shot them down, adding “I’ve read a lot of good theories, and interestingly, none have guessed it accurately.” So we’ll have to leave that mystery unsolved for now and get on to the mother lode of Mass Effect 2 dirt we uncovered.

In The Beginning

Some things haven’t changed: there’s still an ancient race of machines called reapers that harvest civilizations like a crop every 50,000 years — and kicking their ass is still your No. 1 priority. Hudson picks up that thread: “That’s always the main story of the trilogy, but in Mass Effect 2, you find out about a threat that might be associated with it. It’s really new to the galaxy, and it’s different from anything anyone has seen before. It might be behind [a rash of] disappearances — human colonies are literally just disappearing all around the galaxy.”

Naturally, Shepard’s the man (or woman) for that job, even though he’s told it’s a suicide mission. Maybe that’s how he ends up K.I.A. in the trailer? Hudson would only confirm that he has a good poker face, but he does tell us that the nefarious Cerberus organization and its head, the Illusive Man (both play starring roles in the Mass Effect: Ascension novel; read the sidebar on page 51 for a summary), will figure centrally in the game and its plot. You’re probably also wondering which characters and locations will be back, and while Hudson wouldn’t get too specific, we’re told key places like the Citadel and the Normandy definitely return.

In fact, Hudson hints that “a couple” of places in Mass Effect 2 will have the size and scale of the Citadel. One of them is Omega, which will be familiar to Ascension readers. If that’s not you, Hudson describes it as “the opposite of the Citadel — it’s a massive and really brutal, gritty mining station. It’s the bottom of society, the worst of crime and vice and all that good stuff.”

We also laid eyes on a handful of the game’s other new locations, and our favorite is an asari planet called Illium. It’s packed with elegant skyscrapers, dramatic vistas, and lines of flying-car traffic, so much so that art director Derek Watts likens it to a science-fiction version of Dubai. (We thought it looked more like Coruscant from The Phantom Menace.)

The main Cerberus outpost — a space station with gigantic curved engines on its underbelly — is also really striking, and so is Purgatory, a prison outpost where guards patrol in glass tubes overhead that separate them from the inmates. And two other outer-space locations that Watts showed us — one that gets ripped open and exposed to a glowing red nebula — suggest that you’ll be playing inside ships and stations a lot more than you were in the first game.

The Import Business

New locations in the Mass Effect universe will grab us every time, but we reserved our most intense curiosity for the prospect of importing a save-game from the first Mass Effect — and our characters, stats, and decisions along with it. After all, no videogame series has ever attempted something like this before, but BioWare seems ready to bear the weight of those expectations.

“We’re able to track virtually every choice through save-games,” explains lead writer Drew Karpyshyn. “But we’ve focused on the decisions that matter most to players and to the story so we can craft a narrative that feels personalized and really resonates with the decisions you made.”

So yes, that means that if you didn’t buff your Charm enough to save Wrex at the end of Mass Effect, the lovably surly lizard is history for the rest of the series. “It’s important that choices have consequences, and part of what makes a choice compelling is knowing that you can’t go back,” offers Karpyshyn. And who can argue with that…aside from Fable II’s dog?

When asked if Mass Effect 2 resets your character’s skills to Level 1, Hudson gets evasive…but drops some tantalizing hints. “I can’t say exactly,” he laughs. “I can say that the answer won’t be a literal yes, that’s for sure. But I can’t say a definitive no because the way you start the game is different if you literally have a new character who starts at Level 1.”

So in other words, if you begin Mass Effect 2 without importing a save, your history will be drawn from a “canon version” of what previously happened (which you’ll see in the intro), and you interact with characters from the first game as though you played it that way. But what about that Intimidate skill we worked so hard on, our dastardly Renegade level, or that hawt omnitool we found at last?

“Without being specific, if you chose to make a specific type of character and get good at certain things, then it’ll be acknowledged in Mass Effect 2,” Hudson says cryptically. Before we could get exasperated, he went on to speak frankly about how Mass Effect 2’s endings will work.

Choose Your Own

But first, it’s important to understand two things: BioWare’s aiming for a much more replayable game, so they’re designing wider, branching paths that sprout from your choices. And they’re also trying to “push the boundaries on character interactions, making your squad and the relationships you develop (or don’t) with them into a much more important element of the narrative and gameplay,” says Karpyshyn.

Essentially, they want to make a game where you can’t just reload one key save and see most of the endings. Instead, Mass Effect 2 becomes a different experience depending on which characters you add to your party and what you do with them. To support all these story threads, the writers and audio team are creating 20 percent more dialogue than they did for last time, which is a pretty huge amount.

And now, let’s turn the floor over to Hudson: “The ending, I think, is going to blow people away. The scope of it goes far beyond what happened in Mass Effect 1. The things that are happening, the choices you get to make…it gets really dark. It all starts to diverge, and a lot more of your squad members can die for real, forever. You realize all bets are off; anything can happen. The scale of it just skyrockets.”

“And,” he continues, “the ending is, by far, the hardest level we’ve ever designed. It takes a really large squad of characters and the things that happen to them, and all of that determines the outcome. Who’s going to live? Who’s going to die? What choice affects what and how? All of this stuff just snowballs, and there are so many [endings] that it’ll be really good water-cooler stuff. I think it’ll be almost impossible to actually decode the game logic. It just becomes relationships: I don’t want this person to die, so I’ll keep them with me, and will that actually help?” Somewhere, a strategy-guide editor just started sobbing.

Grab The Popcorn

Since much of that drama will go down in conversations and cutscenes, you’ll be pleased to learn that Mass Effect 2 takes big strides in making the talky bits more engaging. “We’re using a lot more Hollywood effects and camera language now,” offers lead cinematics animator Parrish Ley. “And we’re driving a lot of performances with more close-ups and more acting.”

The difference is really striking. We checked out a conversation between Shepard and an asari named Seryna. Zipping across Illium in a flying car, they discuss whether Shepard should stop a planned assassination or let it go down. As they do, the camera flips to views from the back seat, shows their reflections in the windshield, and then blends seamlessly into a cutscene where the car peels out of traffic and touches down.

Hudson also described another interaction made possible by the more cinematic conversations: a firefight early in the game. “Previously, we would’ve had to do it before or after the fight,” he admits. “But now, when you’re fighting and you talk to someone, you’re in cover and the other guy’s in cover while bullets are whizzing over your head. As you’re ducking down, you see tracers coming in, and you’re yelling over the noise of battle.”

While you still make dialogue choices from the familiar wheel interface, you can also now snatch a brief chance to interrupt the conversation. In another conversation we saw, Shepard argues with a turian named Sidonis as a familiar squadmate (who must remain nameless) tracks Sidonis in his sights, barking at you over comms to get out of his line of fire. The perspective flits between a down-the-scope view of Shepard physically blocking the shot and a more traditional angle of him arguing with the turian. When Sidonis storms off, you have a brief chance to activate a Paragon interrupt by tapping RT, which makes Shepard accost him and attempt to reason with him some more. Or you can let him stride into the open and get smoked, quenching your party member’s thirst for revenge.

High Caliber

And since we’re in a firefight, what better way to wrap things up than Hudson’s impassioned assurances that improvements to the A.I. and the controls make Mass Effect 2’s battles way more entertaining? “When you pick up the controller,” Hudson says firmly, “it just feels like a better game.” More concretely, you can now issue individual orders to each squad member, you can mantle over barriers, your powers recharge faster so you can use them more often, and you actively control when you take or exit cover. We saw only a brief combat sequence, but those additions all sound wise.

And then, BioWare’s fearless leaders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, chime in with the last word on why Mass Effect 2 intensity of the combat situations, the dialogue, the emotional engagement, and the storyline,” says Muzyka, “[make] the moment-to-moment experience just bigger and better in every way.”

“And,” adds Zeschuk with a broad grin, “we guarantee faster elevators.”