Well, it’s here and it’s official, and most of the speculation proved to be entirely correct. BioWare has announced, officially, Mass Effect 3, which is due in late 2011. The trailer, oddly enough, almost entirely avoids showing Shepard, until the very end; the action centers on a lone soldier (who looks and sounds an awful lot like Jason Statham), fighting a losing battle with an M-29 Incisor in Reaper-devastated London. The death toll on Earth is mounting, and Shepard…can’t get there soon enough, it seems. There’s a few echoes of Halo 2 in the wide shot of Earth at the end of the clip, if I do say so myself. Not that count that a bad thing.

My question is: from where Mass Effect 2 left off, where this trailer is at seems…pretty distant, perhaps too distant for BioWare to effectively explain away with a short prologue. I could be wrong; BioWare have some talented writers who could potentially pull off that sort of thing. Still, it seems a fair far leap, narrative-wise.

It’s possible, of course, that this means more downloadable content is coming for Mass Effect 2, to fill in some of the story and perhaps explain how the Reapers got to Earth so darn quickly (since, let’s face it, so-called “dark space” is millions of light years away from this planet). Then again, it’s also possible that Mass Effect 3 won’t start with the Reaper invasion, but will progress to that point. Heck, maybe that fate can even be staved off, depending on whether you killed off or preserved all your potential allies in the first two games in the series. Who is to say?

Well, BioWare, of course, but anyone else is just speculating. And BioWare won’t say until the game goes on sale…and even then, they’ll say it with the game. Which I am, by the way, totally stoked for.

Interestingly, there didn’t appear to be any mention of the rumoured multiplayer aspect of the game, which could mean that the multiplayer entry to the Mass Effect series is yet to be revealed. I’m actually kind of mixed on this point: the idea that it might be possible to play through a Mass Effect game in a co-op campaign mode had a certain appeal (especially if BioWare managed to do it right, like Bungie did with Marathon), but the idea that they’d announce, in effect, Call of Mass Effect with a diminished single-player campaign certainly was a worry I entertained. It also seems to be a worry that I don’t need to carry around (yay!).

Anyhow, drop comments if you got ’em. I’ve got to get back to mapmaking and worldbuilding.