Christina Norman Describes Mass Effect 2 Systems

A neat little treat to gamers who are salivating over any new information that is released regarding Mass Effect 2 is the updates and contributions that lead gameplay designer Christina Norman is gracious enough to put up on BioWare's blog. It's worth reading in its entirety, but here's a healthy taste of what to expect. First off is how enemy defenses will work:

Enemy defenses are broken up into three different types, all of which can be stacked making for tougher enemies and more strategic fights. They are Shields, Armor, and Barriers.

Shields are the kinetic barriers you're accustomed to from the previous game and can be easily depleted using the tech power Overload, rapid fire weaponry, an up-close and personal shotgun blast, or disruptor ammo (which is meant for bypassing shields).
Armor is the physical armor an enemy (or you) is wearing and best dealt with using the sniper rifle or the heavy pistol, you can Warp an enemy and drain their life that way, or negate their armor altogether by setting fire to it using Incinerate or incendiary ammo.
Barriers work as an extra shield to get through and can be eliminated using Warp, rapid-fire weapons, or a nice Concussive Shot from a Soldier.

All enemies will have a health meter above them when targeted by you and will reflect any number of these defense combinations. Coupled with area-specific damage, all of your fire/biotic/tech fights will surely be filled with an equal amount of strategy and brute force. I know eventually, with my Vanguard Shepard, when all else failed, a shotgun blast to the face took care of a lot of my problems.

The second topic Norman chose to talk about was something I, and many other gamers, wanted to have changed desperately was the inventory system. The inventory system, I felt, was something that really pulled me out of the experience of Mass Effect 1 because there was no stacking of items. If you had 5 copies of the same weapon/ammo type/upgrade, they would all count as separate items and therefore, take a lot of your inventory space. And upon finding new items, if you didn't manage your inventory properly, you were not able to pick them up lest you converted something you found into omni-gel.

This problem is now addressed via a very interesting system. Whenever you encounter new items in the world, you scan them with your omni-tool and the weapon becomes replicated on board the Normandy and any squad mate who has that particular weapon training will have access to it. If you scan a weapon that is better than the one a squad mate has, he will automatically replace his inferior weapon with the newer one. You may still choose to opt out of this particular function and equip your squad as you see fit, though.

Last, and possibly the most interesting, is unique weapons for each squad mate. That's right, you may find weapons that are only usable by one member of your party. This feels like a nice throwback to classic RPGs where you had quests to find that one weapon one of your group has been searching for so long. Certainly interesting and no doubt, these weapons will be incredibly powerful.

And just to satiate anybody's curiosity, weapons will not have actual ammunition, but usable heat-sinks, which will deplete and be unusable and therefore require replacements. Not exactly bullets, but it's not going back on the concept first introduced in ME1.

Hopefully all of this information will give you some interesting thoughts on the game system and help ease the pain of waiting for this game.