One of the hallmarks of playing a Bioware game is getting to make your own character. I think Jade Empire might have featured the least amount of customization (you only get to pick six premade characters, even if you can fart with their stats), and I also think Dragon Age has the most, letting you pick your character's look, race, voice and dick length. One of you is welcome to call me out on that, however.
"BUT WAIT, BEAN, SONIC CHRONICLES --"
Moving on, Mass Effect lets you pick out Shepard's gender and face, but not much else. Shepard's always voiced by Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer, Shepard's always a human, so on. It lets you pick out a background story for your Shepard, but it doesn't help you out that much.
That means the first time you're ever dumb enough to pick up a Mass Effect disk -- let's just say for the sake of simplicity that we're starting in Mass Effect 1 -- you're greeted with a face maker.
All right! So then the Battle of the Citadel happens, Shepard keels over, and then Cerberus reconstructs her. Cerberus figures they'll ask you if you'd like to make any improvements, and they present you with the Mass Effect 2 face maker, made super red to denote that we're now with the bad guys, oooo:
K, so we finish that, discover reaper fuck juice, blow up a batarian star system, and begin Mass Effect 3. There's no plot reason for the game to start with a face maker, but by now it's tradition anyway so there's no need to stop.
...?
HOLD THE FUCK ON
Mass Effect 3 has some wildly updated art resources, and as such, they had to make Shepard HD to fit in with her new surroundings. They even added new hair styles, you can give your Shepard pink hair if you wish --
-- but in return, they fucked with the "neon orange" option of the previous games. It's now a ... brownish color? Myself and the three whole other people who picked neon orange hair were very upset.
The neon orange color is technically defined as "half red half brown". If you take a Shepard in Mass Effect 2 and put her under a super white light (like those on the Normandy), then squint real hard, you can kind of see where they got the idea, but it is way brown in Mass Effect 3. I think it's an art trick: so many of the art assets in ME2 are red or orange that anything you put in the lighting automatically looks warmer, and so many of the art assets in ME3 are super SUPER blue, so if you take anything orange and put it in that lighting environment it looks brown.
Don't care. This is a protest: I am going to keep coloring Shepard's hair day-glo orange and you and Bioware and everyone else are going to like it.
... I was kind of dancing around showing you my Shepard, but photographs would be nice, wouldn't they? Plus, she's the only Shepard I've got. I don't feel like she translated well through all three of the games, but damnit, she's still my favorite Shepard.
Mass Effect 1, with all the spoilers cropped out. My phone camera is sort of washing out the colors, but my capture software sort of washes out the colors too so this is the best you're getting until one of you buys me a dedicated gaming PC.
Mass Effect 2. I love this picture, she looks like a kitty.
Mass Effect 3. WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE HAIR. Uncool, Bioware.
Just for funsies, I grabbed this screenshot of my Shepard in Mass Effect 1 while I was working on this post. It's not a great shot of her face but I still REALLY like it.
lookit that hair, bioware
lookit the orange
My Shepard had the same haircolor as yours in ME1 & 2. I'm still pissed about the ME3 hair!
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