New Mass Effect 3 co-op details

A bountiful space-cache of Mass Effect 3 co-op details has been opened.

They come from the mouth of Mass Effect 3 producer Jesse Houston, who was interviewed by BioWare's social media coordinator "Erika".

The only answers out of place below are those about PC DRM and whether decisions in ME1 and ME2 affect Galactic Readiness in ME3. Galactic Readiness, remember, is what you can contribute towards by playing Mass Effect 3 multiplayer co-op.

"Mass Effect 3 PC will require the internet connection when you initially launch and authorise it," said Houston of DRM, "but then you will no longer require the connection."

"The choices from ME1 and ME2 will have an effect of the overall Galaxy at War system," added Houston, "but not directly on the Galactic Readiness level."

Mass Effect 3 co-op...

• Does not support Kinect.
• Will offer some way to deal with griefers. "Just know that we are putting systems in place that will let you deal with people that you don't want to be playing with."
• Has playable races besides Krogan, Asari and Drell that "you may not expect" - "they wouldn't normally be looked upon as characters who are for the fight".
• Will get playable character DLC. "We'll be releasing more and more characters through DLC later."
• Has characters that aren't involved in the single-player Mass Effect 3 campaign at all.
• Has leaderboards.
• Has its own Achievements, Trophies.
• Has matchmaking based on skill level - no word on how the latter is computed.
• Is on the main game disc. "Somewhat sizeable, but not so much that it affects the SP experience."
• Can't be played locally - yet. "It is definitely on the table as something we might add."
• Won't support user-run servers or offline severs "any time soon".
• Will be tracked by the BioWare Social Network website. "There will definitely be a lot of BSN integration. What the final list of things is, we don't really know yet."
• Won't have friendly fire - to begin with. "Maybe later as some sort of modifier to the game, but not at release."
• Has "slightly different" - and "in many ways more" - weapon and armour customisation. "They are structured differently so stats don't play the same way."
• Has a story: "At a high level, Shepard is marshalling the troops on behalf of the Earth Alliance so you are technically fighting for the Earth Alliance. From a story perspective, a lot of these groups have come together as a loose fighting force to stop the reapers therefore they don't fly the same type of banners that would have existed in pre- reaper invasion days."
• Will one day be taken offline - i.e. there is a 'sunset plan'. "Yes, absolutely. We won't be taking the servers down until we realize that there aren't enough players playing to warrant keeping them up and when we do take them down, we will make sure there are options so the players who are playing don't feel abandoned. If anything is a good example, you can see today that Neverwinter Nights is still supported and we've kept a lot of our servers live on it. So I wouldn't be too worried about us taking down the servers any time soon."