Nuh-uh-uh, you won’t be able to squat behind a cinderblock and let everybody else do the hard work for you in Mass Effect 3’s Hardcore and Insanity difficulty modes, Commander Shepard. Not this time.

“We really thought about it hard. On Normal you’ll be able to power your way through the game or shoot your way through the game, but when you try Hardcore or Insanity, you’re not going to be able to do that any more,” lead designer Preston Watamaniuk told OXM.

“You really will have to think about each combat, who the enemies are, what kind of resistance you’re presented with, and then strategise to take them down. I’m hoping that it’ll feel like you made a mistake, and the game called you on it, rather than ‘I thought I was playing well, and then I died’.

“We’ve tried to make it so that it just feels like if you’re working the problem, using all your squad, all your powers, picking the right guns, you’re going to get through that combat. It’s not going to be ‘I sat in cover and popped out five or six times to use powers and stuff’.”

So expect to get red-pasted a whole lot unless you really know exactly what you’re doing with your combat powers, and doing it a lot.

“You’ll notice that if you play on Insanity, that sort of general rule of thumb is even harsher. You’d better be doing everything well, or you’ll die,” Watamaniuk explained.

Nobody said saving the universe was going to be easy.

Mass Effect 3 is out on PC, Xbox, and PS3 in March.

Source: OXM