In fact the first piece will be "pretty shortly after" its release later this month. The studio has already begun work on Mass Effect 3's story.
"We are already at work on Mass Effect 3," project manager Hudson told IGN. "Building the first bits of the story, putting that together." Mass Effect is a trilogy, though it could go beyond that if BioWare still has a taste for it - in the mean time...
"There will be great downloadable content throughout the time that Mass Effect 2 is out there while people are waiting for the third one. You'll always have great stuff. New adventures to play. New things to do," noted Hudson.
"We don't have anything specifically announced yet, but we basically plan for DLC pretty shortly after the release of the game and then a pretty intense schedule of downloadable content throughout," he continued.
"This is one of the big improvements that we've been able to do for Mass Effect 2. Lots of DLC and lots of really high quality DLC that players can look forward to." The original had two pieces of DLC but the game wasn't easy to add things to.
Mass Effect 2 took two years to develop thanks to all the work on Mass Effect as a foundation, meaning we could see Mass Effect 3 in the same time frame. "We always wanted to make sure that we got the entire trilogy of games done within this console's life cycle. We didn't want to take forever with it," said Casey, referring to Xbox 360.
"So we definitely want to make Mass Effect 3 a fairly short turnaround, but also being that it needs to be a tremendous and epic conclusion to the trilogy." Mass Effect 2 is releasing on Xbox 360 and PC January 26th. Check out the voice talent we'll be getting.
