I was sent an email the other day from the Bioware newsletter about the new "Galaxy at War" mode in the upcoming Mass Effect 3, and I have to say I'm quite excited by it. Here's the link.

The basic gist is you can team up with 3 other players over Xbox Live, PSN, or your internet connection on PC and take on special missions that are separate from the main story. You create a character (race, class and abilities) and are placed as part of a special ops team to try and increase the galaxy's overall readiness level for the reaper invasion by completing missions in key war zones. Apparently whilst completing these missions can help you in the storyline, you can still achieve the best ending without ever touching the mode so you won't miss out on anything by not doing them.

To be honest, it sounds like the best way to include a multiplayer system in the game. Those who didn't want it or can't play it won't miss out on anything in the single player game, and for those who did want it it sounds like an ideal game mode. Any one here think they might be up for some squad-based action when ME3 comes out?

If only Skyrim had some sort of multiplayer component

But my fear with SP oriented RPGs trying to find a way to add a MP component is that their SP will somehow suffer from quality/length, but if they don't, more power to them

They've already addressed that worry since this news came out a few days ago. Apparently the MP component will be another avenue to boosting your SP endgame success, but the SP campaign will still allow full endgame success (ie: cannons, hull plating, engines, nobody dies, from ME2). If that's the case, I'm fine with it. I know I won't touch MP 'til I've played through at least one whole SP campaign.

According to Bioware, a separate team worked on the multiplayer component, so other than physical constraints there shouldn't be any reason for this.

That's cool, but I really hope primary focus is SP. Which is probably so is so good work bioware.
Just don't pull a Dragon Age 2 please.

I'm pumped. I follow Casey on twitter and I love getting little updates like this.

Probably won't bother with MP...no internet.

But I've been replaying the **** out of one and two to have characters ready for every possible play through.

I can't imagine why you would want multiplayer in an Elder Scrolls game.

COOPing a dungeon might be neat.

Maybe it's just me, but when playing an RPG, I prefer to go solo.

Your mistake is assuming skyrim is an rpg.

Sounds like most of this boards' sex lives;)

When I said component I meant actual component, the more optional the better. There have just been times where me and friends have talked about the game and we've said "Wouldn't it have been awesome if we went through that first oblivion gate together?" "Wouldn't it have been awesome if we could've done the battle of bruma together instead of just with AI?"

But I do realize there are many complications with trying to do this, any many negatives

I'm wondering how it works, really. I'm guessing there are just a list, maybe progressable or open, of stand alone missions. No other way to really do it since so much time is involved. Can't commit to doing it all with the same team. Unless its kind of like a re5 thing where they join/quit as they please.

Not sure about that. It makes it sound like it's 4 players or nothing, and since you need to make your own character to play I don't know if they'd let the AI take over if a player had to drop out, but then it'd be a bit silly if the mission just quit out because of one person leaving, so I don't know. It'd be cool if we got some of the folks here to team up for a few missions every now and then. I definitely get the vibe that it's standalone missions, so I'd guess you picked one of the galactic hotspots and launched the mission there like the galaxy map from the single player.

Yea...it really has to just be a list of missions. A "host Sheppard" picking missions wouldn't work. Probably a lobby for every mission. i'm guessing a member dropping out wouldn't end the mission...you just continue like in sp if you had no medigel. The way they made it sound like with you actually leveling up, i'm thinking it might be a story based theme...you have to finish mission one before two, rather than just selecting a mission.