Cerberus reloaded: how Mass Effect 3's enemies look and fight

The Mass Effect games are saturated in lore, their codex screens covering every aspect of the universe from the controversial adoption of heat-sink clips to the officially sanctioned view of Sovereign's attack on the Citadel.

Pictures are worth a thousand encyclopaedia pages, however, and nothing better expresses the trilogy's drift from gentle role-playing odyssey to galaxy-straddling free-for-all than the chunkier, meaner look of Mass Effect 3's enemies - many of them derived from the ranks of Cerberus, your sometime pro-human allies.

"One of the things we wanted to branch away from is the skin-tight outfits, we wanted the enemies to be bulkier," art director Derek Watts tells OXM. "They're harder to shoot, they're bigger, they're more beat up, they're more armour-covered.

"It's going to take a lot of bullets to defeat these guys. These guys have seen a lot of combat all over the galaxy, they are fighting you, they are fighting everyone else. "

Passing around concept artworks we're regrettably unable to publish here, Watts shows how the original Mass Effect's clean, figure-hugging elegance has evolved into bristling, war-torn pragmatism. Art design doesn't happen in isolation to the rest of the development process, of course; Watts and his team have thrown concepts back and forth between level and combat designers, working out how best (for instance) to hint at an enemy's behaviour via his appearance, and adapt his silhouette to fit against cover.

Having established key design principles with Mass Effect 1, BioWare was able to work in bulk on Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 benefits from this "block feature" approach. "If you've decided the trooper is going to be one of your main enemies, let's get a block version of him and get animation involved, get combat involved and figure out what's going to make this guy shoot. Are we going to fix his AI, how are the designers going to know how to put him down and build the levels.

"So we build these block levels so we know if we have this many guys we know how they are going to react to some of the powers - you'll see a guy shooting, you'll see him doing the roll. That was the first prototype that we did, how they would evade some of the shots.

"This is important for us because then we know how he will react on certain levels, what kind of cover he needs and how far the cover needs to be spread about, how high it needs to be, so instead of the designer going in and building whatever they want they know if they have a trooper, a surface guy, this kind of level works best.

"Then as we get further along we have the trooper in some quick animations, and a turret we made that we put on him to see how it looked as it unfolded. One of the early prototypes, the turret had legs that fold out at the same time. But it felt too "cute". We want to shoot it, not take it home to show the kids."

Watts reassures us that all this is turret-lugging lunacy won't scupper what fans loved about the first two titles. "It still falls within the same style, it's still Mass Effect, but we've added a lot of details. Our guys are getting better at doing the cloth, the materials. Part of the concept has added little rivets which is a small detail but it helps the realism."

There's always room for purely ornamental flourishes. "Some of the bigger pieces, we're not sure what they do but they look cool. Like the back spines for people with slots for the weapons."

Tricking out enemies to be easily identifiable is of particular importance in multiplayer, with three other leaderboard ranks on the line. "We looked at the silhouettes of the enemies, because especially in multiplayer, when you're looking at an enemy you want to know: 'OK, this guy is probably going to do this.'

"So when this guy sets down the turret you know you are going to have to get out of there quick. When you see that guy out there you start to panic and say 'Oh my god there's an engineer out there - we have to get that guy.'

Watts touches on an unseen breed of Cerberus nasty in closing, the ninja-powered Phantom. "To break up the silhouettes we decided to make them female. So it's a smaller, thinner look, and she's very stealthy. She cartwheels around, she has a sword, she's very hard to shoot and she comes up behind you with her sword. There's a lot of panic when she's in the room."

Watts is conscious that the foot-tapping efficiency of Mass Effect 2's gun battles occasionally made it hard to tell one foe from the next. Between the new art and revamped, crunchier AI, there's a lot more to appreciate about Mass Effect 3's goons. "A lot of work has gone into the combat and making it so you aren't fighting the same mercs all the time. We revisited all the Geth and make them all look kind of unique."

Stay tuned for more Mass Effect 3 news later today, and check out our Mass Effect 3 hub for all the unmissable info so far.