Mass Effect 3: Multiplayer has been confirmed! According to a website announcement Casey Hudson confirmed this to an Australian print magazine. The BioWare twitter account confirmed yesterday that multiplayer will indeed be present and the official announcement turned up today on the BioWare website.

• It’s called Galaxy at War and is 4-player co-op
• You will fight to take control of key conflict zones in the galaxy
• Succeeding in multiplayer will have an effect on the single-player campaign
• Rather than playing as Shepard, you will create custom characters – Turians, Krogans, Asari and more

Get all the info from the BioWare Forums multiplayer announcement.

Xbox Dashboard Update: I know, I know. it’s a bit of a dull topic but this one’s a biggie. Some time in late November, Xbox Live will bring a whole crapload of TV and film streaming services to your console. Most of them will require some sort of subscription or purchase while others will also require Xbox Gold. iPlayer and 4 On Demand will both be coming as well and presumably remain free. Check out the details on Xbox.com but be warned – a lot of those services are US-only. UK gamers will get Channel 4, Channel 5, BBC, Sky, LOVEFiLM, MSN, YouTube, Blinkbox, Sky and Muzu as well as some other services but we’ve no real details on pricing yet :\

Forza Motorsport 4: Our friends over at Spong.com are giving away 3 copies of Forza Motorsport 4 – Limited Collector’s Edition. To be in with a change of winning answer the simple quesion on their Forza 4 competition page. The closing date for entries is the 18th Oct 2011. Good luck.

London MCM Expo: Another game has been announced for MCM – Blaz Blue Continuum Shift 2. Company PQube will also be hosting an Arcana Heart 3 tournament on Saturday 29th Oct and a Blaz Blue Continuum Shift tournament on Sunday 30th Oct. Tickets for the Expo are still available online.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: Soldiers! Landmarks! Explosions! It’s another CoD trailer :)

On Friday 2nd Sep 2011, The London Philharmonic Orchestra will be taking part in a Video Game Heroes concert which will include some of the best symphonic music from Little Big Planet, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Angry Birds, Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto in the Royal Festival Hall, London. The concert starts at 7:30pm with tickets priced at £39, £33, £27, £21 and £16 which you can buy here. There’s still lots of seats available, even the £16 ones.

Talia al Ghul from Batman: Arkham City

You can now play Codemasters F1 2010 game on your iPhone/iPod Touch or iPad. It’s available from the App Store for £2.99. It features all the tracks and drivers from last years F1 World Championship, but doesn’t include any of the racing. On the bright side, at least you don’t have to worry about Lewis Hamilton crashing into you.

THQ have released a brand new trailer for their upcoming Saints Row: The Third game. It includes bits from the live demo that was shown at this year’s E3 Expo where I interviewed one of the writers Drew Holmes, who described the game as a toy box. I think you’ll agree, after watching this trailer, this game is looking mental!

[Thanks to @ChrisVideoGamer for the concert info]

BioWare has historically been extremely supportive of inclusive game design and writing. You may remember the story from a few months back about a BioWare forum poster complaining that the historical core audience of “Straight Male Gamer” was no longer being privileged and that Dragon Age 2 should have included a “no homosexuality” option for players like him. At the time David Gaider (lead writer, Dragon Age 2) posted a polite yet firm response informing him that yes, other gamers are people too and that they deserve no less attention. Of course, some people do take issue with the portrayal of gay people in the Dragon Age universe but the fact that such a high-profile title had gay romance options at all was a comfort to many.

Until now, the Mass Effect has been disheartening in its straight-male-centric focus. Yes, Miranda and female Shepard are inspiring women who kick ass and take names with the best of gaming protagonists. However, as I’ve blogged before, Miranda’s scenes are rife with male gaze pandering. So far, the closest that Mass Effect came to providing homosexual romance options was to allow all players to experience a sex cut-scene with Liara T’soni, an asexual non-human from a race which just happens to be comprised exclusively of beings shaped like human women. And they like to work in strip clubs. This is heteronormative titillation at its worst.

The new announcement reveals a drastic change in direction for the romance options in Mass Effect 3. As recently as last month, Hudson was saying to PC Gamer that “we don’t really have new characters that are part of the romance stuff in the way that we did in Mass Effect 2… …this is more about how you, if you’re a new player, how you start these romances with the existing characters.”. I’m glad that BioWare has chosen to add male and female gay options to the Mass Effect universe after all. Not only will this result in many gay gamers feeling more included, it’s just good for role-playing.

Hudson has also said that the Mass Effect 3 romance options won’t all necessarily be permanent squad members. Sounds great to me – having played KOTOR, KOTOR 2, both Dragon Age and both Mass Effect games, the restriction of meaningful character interactions to party members was beginning to feel a little stale.

I just hope that these non-party romance options are a little more exciting than the inadequate brothel affairs of Dragon Age 2. How would you like the extended romance options to play out?

Update 16th May 2011: Hudson has just clarified that there will definitely be new love interests available for ME 3. Some sites have speculated that NPCs previously thought of as straight will be revealed as bisexual. According to Hudson, this is “not necessarily true”.

Yes, that’s is neither a full confirmation nor a denial. Dialogue is far from complete and the Mass Effect team are keen to hear feedback.

On the bright side, at least you’ve got some nice Mass Effect 3 wallpapers now. Just take a look at these beauties.

Now given that Nintendo is due to release a new and more powerful console sometime in 2012, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mass Effect 3 turning up on this hardware. That would give the game a much wider audience would it not? This is pure speculation on my part as Nintendo have yet to reveal any details about its successor to the Wii. We will have to wait until its pre-E3 briefing on the 7th June 2011 for that kind of info.

Mass Effect 3 is due for release during Q1 2012 on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

There will be a Q&A panel with the composers from 14:00-15:30, but seating is strictly limited so you will have to book your place by calling the store (number given below). Then between 16:00 – 17:00 there will be an in-store signing session. Fortunately, you don’t have to book a place for this. It’s open to everyone.

Composers:

• Greg Edmonson - Uncharted series, Firefly TV series
• Inon Zur – Dragon Age series, Crysis
• Jesper Kyd – Assassin’s Creed series, Hitman series
• Garry Schyman – Bioshock series, Dante’s Inferno
• Mike Reagan – God Of War series, Conan
• Penka Kouneva – Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
• Richard Jacques – Mass Effect, James Bond 007: Blood Stone
• Sean Murray – Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series, Call Of Duty: Black Ops

Presumably all these people are all in LA for the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 show which will have taken place a few days earlier, which The Average Gamer will be attending :-)

I’m a big fan of Jesper Kyd’s music, especially his Assassin’s Creed work. There are so many brilliant tracks on his Assassin’s Creed II soundtrack like Venice Rooftops and Flight Over Venice 1. Check out the rest of the album too, it’s full of great tracks.

Also Buffy and Firefly composers. Err, squee!

Event Summary:

Brink (13th May, PC/PS3/360)

Brink

L.A. Noire (20th May, PS3/360)

I love film noir, and both Blade Runner and L.A. Confidential are two of my favourite films of all time. Although it sounds as if conducting an investigation in L.A. Noire is more akin to Phoenix Wright than Mass Effect… mainly because you have to rely on clues and can’t bluff information out of suspects, or play “good cop, bad cop”. Still, this is high on my list of most anticipated games for this year. Rockstar have continually hit it out of the park, critically as well as commercially, and their status as one of the top studios is well-earned.

LA Noire

Red Faction Armageddon (3rd Jun, PS3/360)

I tend to lump the Red Faction series in with Just Cause and Just Cause 2– there are some fun physics playgrounds, but as a directed experience they are severely flawed. Armageddon brings a new mechanic, whereby you can re-construct your environment (not unlike Epic Mickey’s paintbrush) with nanotechnology. It looks a little goofy in practise, but it’s still an interesting addition to the formula.

Duke Nukem Forever (10th Jun, PC/360)

Okay, this one’s on here just for nostalgia. I have a soft spot for old Duke. Although the series has matured like a fine vintage of vinegar, deciding not to eschew its juvenile roots but instead to emphasise them. Against all probability, it has been delayed yet again, which goes beyond any self-effacing, self-referential sort of self-parody and has officially now become utterly preposterous. I’m afraid, Randy Pitchford and Gearbox software at large, I reject this game on the bounds that it is rendered invalid, in absentia, in extremis, ad nausea, et cetera. That being said, I will still probably buy it and play it if it comes out this year.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (26th Aug, PC/PS3/360)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Rage (16th Sep, PC/PS3/360)

I’m not sure what to think of Rage, to be honest. I got the chance to fire off one question at id Software’s Tim Willits at last year’s Eurogamer event and I specifically asked about the name, “Why call it ‘Rage’”? To paraphrase, Mr. Willits responded that it being a single syllable, “Rage” matched all of their other titles: “Doom”, “Quake”, et cetera. Hmmm. As is often the case with id, the graphics look terrific, and akin to all of the other engine factories out there, is more or less a showcase for their latest proprietary engine, id Tech 5. Unfortunately for id, the post-apocalyptic genre has recently been plumbed, some might say to death. Some of the gameplay elements, mainly the environmental effects, have been used in other games as well, but hopefully id Software is still keeping some of the better stuff under wraps.

Continued on page 2

This will probably be the last Mass Effect 2 DLC pack before the Mass Effect 3 juggernaut arrives later on in the year.

Save the agent, save the world!

Mass Effect 2: Arrival is out now for PC (560 Bioware Points) and Xbox 360 (560 MS points). No UK release date yet for PlayStation 3.

Among other things, we talked about the challenge involved in making a protagonist with whom all fans can identify. As a leading RPG development house, BioWare has supported female avatars all the way back to the original 1998 PC version of Baldur’s Gate and is known for integrating gender and sexuality into their worlds (albeit with varying levels of success).

Debbie Timmins: [When it comes to female and homosexual characters] How do you find that affects the whole design?

Mike Laidlaw: I don’t think it does actually. I think… an awareness of it, and just understanding that it’s something you want to incorporate… if you do it right and you build for it from the ground up, and you have a writing team that’s good at that kind of stuff; it doesn’t add a particularly heavy load on top of it.

Sorceress Hawke sets the world on fire

Having a character notice that you’re playing a female is not a huge amount of effort once you figure out how to do it once. It’s like “Oh yeah, we’ll just do this check” and then away we go. We can write some alternate lines. Not to trivialise the effort that’s involved but it is something that, when it becomes habitual, is not arduous.

DT: Do you think games in general are going more that way [i.e. inclusive], or less?

ML: I don’t know. It’s one of those things where I think as an industry the awareness and comprehension of female gamers, let’s say, is certainly something that everyone is keenly aware of. Whether you’re putting it in the somewhat mercenary context of “untapped market potential”… or you’re looking at it from a standpoint of “are there alternate game type or alternate game needs you could be serving that might actually appeal more to a female audience?” which is clearly out there.

Warrior fem-Hawke kicks villainous butt

DT: Mass Effect. Well, the advertising more than the design

ML: Sure, but I mean there’s also the push of the iconic character, right? Someone that’s recognisable; face of the game kind of thing. Do you muddy the waters if you suddenly have two characters? That’s like, “Wait, do I play two people now?” and that kind of stuff so it’s just a matter of having clarity.

In our case it’s been leading with a male character on the majority of stuff but making sure that there are some events where it’s like “Ok, so while we’re talking about character customisation, let’s take advantage of that and talk about, y’know let’s roll a female character and make sure that she’s taking the lead for this time. It just helps contextualise it.

DT: Does that happen?

ML: Yeah, actually. I did a live chat last week that was like, 20 minutes of me playing the game as female Hawke. So that stuff’s always fun. And it’s good especially when you can deliver it in a way where the medium is the message. “Yes, we have character customisation, speaking of which, check out a customised character, right?” and so on. So you keep it to the feature and the point and people kind of come out of it going “That’s really cool” as opposed to “Wait, confused,” which is always bad.

DT: Does your wife play games?

ML: Yeah, yeah. She’s pretty avid, actually. She’s beat Dragon Age 2 three times now. Origins probably four or five. She digs into a JPRG as well, I think Grandia 3 or something, she just demolished. We have a baby now so things are a little tighter in terms of time but yeah, she still loves it. She’ll sit down with shooters, sit down with just about anything really. Tends to like RPGs, tends to like things that are a little bit less twitchy but can play either.

DT: So she’s definitely not one of the untapped market potential ladies at all.

ML: Nooo, I don’t think so. I mean, she keeps stealing my games. Which is good, which is good. I love it. And then, you know, some casual stuff too. That’s kind of cool, like Echo Bazaar is the one we’ve both been playing through recently that’s been kind of cool – neat text-based kind of stuff.

Male Hawke bloodies the battlefield

The Guardian has posted much more info about Laidlaw, Camarillo and Shift 2′s Andy Tudor from the Gamesblog Live events – definitely worth reading.

Powered by the new Mass Effect 3 engine and featuring 6 hours of bonus missions (that DLC that Xbox 360 owners had to pay for separately!) it is looking like a very tasty proposition. Exactly what improvements using the Mass Effect 3 engine brings to the game is unclear at the moment, possibly some extra shine to the shiny spaceships maybe?

Although you can play as a male or female Commander Shepard you wouldn’t know that listening to the trailer’s voice over:

One man might be all that stands between humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence.

Replace the word “man” with “person” and it would sound much better. Although it is hardly surprising that Commander Shepard is portrayed as a man in Mass Effect 2 given the gender based marketing that we are seeing and have seen before with the Mass Effect cover art.

Mass Effect 2 is released on the PlayStation 3 on the 21st Jan 2011 and is out now on Xbox 360.

Now let’s talk about games. Over the weekend, a load of game trailers premiered at the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Among them were the first trailers for two brilliant role-playing franchises, Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls. Quite apart from the thoroughly fleshed-out universes and epic storylines available in both series’, I love these games because they don’t shoehorn me into the default male grunt role. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very much looking forward to playing Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution – but any game where I’m referred to as “he” will always lose a degree of immersion.

BioWare is one of, if not the most progressive triple-A developers in the world. They’ve consistently created female-inclusive games since at least 1998. NPCs respond differently depending on your gender and you are never disempowered for choosing to play as a woman. Mass Effect 2 even has female cannon-fodder henchwomen, which was practically unheard-of in games until very recently. IIRC, Morrowind and Oblivion by Bethesda Game Studios are more gender-neutral – most character interactions are the same whether you are male or female.

When releasing sequels in two of the top-selling RPG franchises in the world, you would think that this might be an opportunity to stick your heads outside the 18-35 male demographic, wouldn’t you? Bioware have already put a tremendous amount of investment into making female-friendly games. Mass Effect is filled with male and female romance subplots. The Dragon Age series is making a respectable attempt with homosexual options.

Yet the teaser trailers for both Mass Effect 3 and Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim both seem to cast the protagonist squarely as a man. Skyrim’s is very subtle – “But, there is one they fear. In their tongue he is known as…” The line could have so easily been “The one they fear is known as…” Yes, it’s just a teaser and for all I know the entire game is going to be about how the dragonborn dude failed everyone and that it’s up to me to save the world. I’ll come back to why that subtle line is important.

With Mass Effect I understand the argument that the franchise has been heavily branded towards this particular John Shepard for years now. I’ve blogged about that approach to Mass Effect’s marketing before (albeit facetiously). The thing is, both games so far have received incredible critical acclaim. The people who have bought and loved the first two games will undoubtedly buy the third. Mass Effect already has a core user base – why not continue the winning streak of breaking down design barriers by tackling a few in marketing as well? With the proven success of the franchise so far, EA have as close to a risk-free environment as any game is ever likely to get.

I’m certainly not calling for some insipid “find-and-replace John Shepard with Jane Shepard” tactic. Marketing can be far more nuanced than that.

Trailer editors take it upon themselves to summarize and sell the most commercial possible product, whether it bears even a fuzzy resemblance to the film it’s ostensibly promoting. Oftentimes, that means cutting different trailers for different demographics. Consequently, the same film can be marketed as a raunchy teen sex comedy, a heartfelt romance, or an earnest coming-of-age drama.
- AVClub.com

As with Skyrim, yes this was only a teaser trailer but this time last year I was hoping for more inclusiveness around the marketing for Mass Effect 2 as well. The closest we got was Miranda’s character trailer, rampant with male-gaze camera angles and talk of her following “him”. Yup, the ass-kicking female heroine will submit to the mighty John Shepard. You don’t even need to win her loyalty. With Dragon Age 2 also prominently featuring male heroes, I think it’s pretty clear what the EA marketing strategy is for 2011.

Stepping outside the world of games for a moment. If you’re a man, you’re probably at least somewhat interested in your health, right? Maybe you could do with some info about maintaining a steady weight? Perhaps you’d be into learning an abdominal workout or two that you can do in the privacy of your own home?

There’s a yearly London show that offers all this info. If you are a man, I’d put money on your never having looked at the posters twice:

It’s not for you. The marketing makes that pretty damn clear from the outset.

Every time games marketing is geared solely towards men, your average woman will hear that same phrase – subliminally or otherwise. The foretold saviour of the world is addressed as “he”? It’s not for me. The game where every single piece of marketing features a burly man staring me down? It’s not for me. The browser-based game that allows me to create my own dungeon and play socially against my friends? It’s. Not. For. Me. Though to be fair, that one may be appealing to lesbians as well. I couldn’t possibly comment.

All I’m saying is that it would nice if games marketers could stop marketing AGAINST women, especially when the games themselves are clearly designed to appeal to both genders. Is this all you need to be a labelled a rabid feminist these days?