The Mass Effect 3 team wanted to channel an even stronger sense of urgency and high-stakes for Shepard and the human race, building on the intensity of the previous Mass Effect games while bringing Shepard’s story to a resounding crescendo.
The team drew inspiration from World War II to develop the tone and themes for Mass Effect 3.
They wanted the game to feature a large-scale conflict that would pull various disparate factions together and unite them under difficult circumstances to fight a common enemy. The theme for the game, therefore, became one of survival.
This theme unified all the campaigns, levels, and encounters in Mass Effect 3.
In the game’s stunning opening mission, Earth experiences the Reaper invasion firsthand, making the story personal for the player by raising the stakes for all of mankind. During development, the survival theme for this mission was “Rome is burning”, with players having to escape and then reluctantly leave the cradle of humanity to pursue an even greater responsibility thrust upon them.
The theme of survival within the massive galactic conflict carries throughout the game. Within the safety of the Citadel, civilians chatter about how the war has affected them, providing players with various points of view on the conflict.
Combat is intense, raging within massive set-piece battles that serve as constant reminders of threat the galaxy faces.
Gameplay systems like the “Galaxy at War” metagame involve the player’s actions in gathering support and material for the liberation of Earth.
Even subplots, such as the krogan’s relentless pursuit of a cure for the genophage, focus on survival. Collecting these war assets are vital to Shepard saving the galaxy.
Even the Normandy, the player’s home base and secondary avatar in the game, returns in a much leaner, meaner form than the gratuitously sleek Cerberus Normandy from Mass Effect 2.
The retrofitted Normandy in Mass Effect 3 is utilitarian, intensely focused, and ready for battle—a warship in the spirit of the classic WWII battleships.
In addition, soldiers are more prevalent than scientists on this mission. Even talented biotic students on a distant school ship become a weapon in humanity’s arsenal against the Reapers.
It is up to the player to marshal their resources and hone them into a sharp spear point with which to strike at the heart of the Reapers.
The theme of survival is strongly present in all areas of the game. It is communicated through the art direction, the music, the plot, the dialogue, the environment design, the levels, all the way down to the encounters themselves.
This strong cohesion of game elements makes this third and final chapter in Shepard’s story the strongest expression of Mass Effect’s creative and thematic ideals set forth in the first game nearly five years ago.