Prepare to have your more intimate choices come back to haunt you. According to a PC Gamer interview with Mass Effect 3 Project Lead Casey Hudson, players will come into contact with specific consequences based on the romantic choices made across Bioware’s sci-fi franchise. For example, if Shepard was unfaithful to his/her Mass Effect 1 partner during the events of the second game, that first relationship might be strained.
“A lot of people had romances with [the] characters [from Mass Effect 2], and now the fun is bringing back some of those characters from Mass Effect 1 and putting them back in the mix, and looking at what you did in Mass Effect 2 and bringing some … interesting scenarios around those things.” Hudson declared, “Sometimes when we do certain things, it makes players realize what kinds of things are possible. So … if you had a Mass Effect 1 romance [and] you stay true to the character from the first game, there’s a scene where you look at the picture of that character, and that’s essentially the romance scene in Mass Effect 2.”
Originally, it was thought that no new love interests were going to be added to the third game due to Bioware’s earlier statement about “trimming excess squad mates”. Hudson later clarified the “oversimplification” on Twitter, saying that there will be both new love interests, and same sex love interests, in Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3 was recently delayed until Q1 2012, and will launch on the PC, PS3, and 360.