Mass Effect 3 - Interview @ Game Informer

Game Informer has published a three page interview with Casey Hudson from Bioware.
They talk about  multiplayer, DLC plans, the presence of a "clearer foil" for Shepard and his crew, the alleged superior gameplay variety in ME3 and much much more. Some spoilers abound, so read at your own risk:

Here's something about the narrative structure in ME3:

You mentioned that mission structure of Mass Effect 2 – you’re collecting these crew members by going around and recruiting. Does Mass Effect 3 have an identifiable mission structure like that? The feeling that I started getting from the bit of the story that I got to play was that you’ll be recruiting the different races in this one and getting them to come help you, but does it play out in that identifiable way?

No, it’s different, because it’s unclear to Shepard and the player what you have to do to win the war against the Reapers. Part of what you’re trying to do is to explore the story and the galaxy and the experience so that you can understand what has to be done. Some missions start to shed light on what you need to do. As things progress in the high-level storyline, we’re constantly trying to do redirects. You think you win the war by doing one thing, and then you realize it’s something else.

And here's something about the Citadel:

Yeah, when we got to the Citadel during my demo just now, we loaded up a different save. I was a little bit disappointed. I kind of just wanted to walk around the Citadel and talk to people and see what was going on there.

The Citadel is really big in this game. It’s bigger than it’s ever been, in terms of stuff to do. But yeah, it’s those moments where there’s fun and silly, neat stuff to explore. Once you get out into the missions, it returns to seeing the face of the galactic war. What we’re doing with Mass Effect 3 that’s a little bit different than what we’ve done before is exploring the idea of getting the player to understand and feel what Commander Shepard is experiencing versus just reacting to other characters.

And here's something about the three modes we can choose as playstyles:

When you start Mass Effect 3, you have to choose between three new game modes – action, roleplaying, and story. How early into development did you come up with the idea of splitting it up into the different types of players who are likely to be checking this game out?

That’s actually another thing that we wanted to do in previous games. It’s simpler than it seems. It looks like we’ve done something really crazy, but all it’s doing is – first of all, we realized that it’s not ideal that when someone starts the game, they don’t know that much about it and we dump a huge options screen on them. Automatic squad powers and this and that – you’re asking them to make too many decisions about stuff they haven’t even played yet. That wasn’t ideal. We also have a lot of feedback from people who say, "Your games look really cool, and I love the idea of the story and the characters. It looks awesome when I watch it on YouTube, but I’m just not that coordinated with a shooter. I would play it if I could figure out how to do combat." So we always thought we should have a mode where combat isn’t going to kill you. You still go around and fight, but you’re playing it for the story experience. We thought we should be able to do that relatively easy, but there’s still work involved in that.