Mass Effect series has 'so much to draw from' for future games

Mass Effect 3 will be the end of Shepard's story and, presumably, the Reaper threat. But, it's far from the end of the series. As the third installment nears completion, executive producer Michael Gamble talks about how exploring the established fiction could serve as a basis for future games.

"Without going down any specific path, you can think of many, many different areas throughout the IP, throughout the history, where there are large wars to be won, large battles to be had, and a lot of development to be done around where these races came from, how they came about."

"We have so much to draw from," Gamble told OXM. That sounds like those bits of back-story in the codex, like the first war with the Humans or the Genophage, could serve as starting points for a another game in the franchise.

Meanwhile, Gamble says the studio has already consolidated the various hanging plot threads from both games and bits of downloadable content, which may vary from player to player. "If you play and you've never played before, the dialogue choices that are shown reflect that," Gamble said. "If you don't import a save, it'll be more descriptive, giving you more back-story, it will assume you know less. Whereas if you did import a save, the dialogue choices will be more to the point of what you've previously played. So that allows us to satisfy the existing audiences and help new players who don't know who the characters are."

A demo of the game launches February 14, and the company kicked off a Facebook promotion today. The game is due March 6.