Woah there…before you start raising your pitchforks and plan on storming Bioware’s castle – they don’t mean they’re dumbing the game down to make it more accessible (Although that’s pretty much what the did with Mass Effect 2). They just mean that players new to the series had no idea what in the hell was going on  – and it’s something they plan to fix with the third game.

“In all honesty, we didn’t do a really good job of new player orientation,” BioWare’s marketing manager Nick Clifford  told IGN. “If you didn’t play the first game then 2 was pretty jarring for the first half hour.”

BioWare plans to make the experience better for new players – and one way they’re addressing that is by changing the dialogue if players haven’t imported a save from the previous game.

“If I’m a new player and some guy walks up to me and is like ‘Ohhhh Shepard! Remember that one time?’ I would be like ‘No. I don’t remember that one time,’” Clifford said. “So we wanted to make sure that there aren’t those moments that the player is like, ‘Who is this? What’s going on? What are they talking about?’”

For those of you who have played the first games, but have pretty much forgotten what happened, the game will include a "story so far narrative," within the game – probably not dissimilar from Mass Effect Genesis, the interactive backstory comic that brought PS3 players up to speed.

Mass effect 3 will be available on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on March 6 for the US, and March 9 for the rest of us. I know what I’ll be doing that weekend.