This was going to be my post where I recommended Mass Effect 3 based on 3-5 hours’ worth of, I was imagining, absolutely *AWESOME* gameplay.
While we’re discussing counterfactuals, I could point out that one other thing I considered back when I was considering the occasional change was changing the one word titles to phrases in Latin. Had I done that, this post could have been titled “homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto“. Then, I suppose, the first line of this post could have been “except for this.”
Alas, it was not to be.
I was asked “so, how’s the game?” today about three or four times. I sighed each time. “I haven’t played it yet”, I said. “I can’t import my face.”
“What?”, was the usual reply.
Well, each time, I had to explain the idea of character importation from game to game and how faces that were made in Mass Effect 1 then imported over to 2 weren’t importing over to 3 (only faces that originated in 2 imported over properly). After yelling incoherently when asked “why didn’t they test for that?”, I was usually asked “why is the face important?”
Well. I’ll tell you.
In Mass Effect 1, you are given the option of customizing your character. Like most Gary Stus, I am a fan of making my protagonist look like a vaguely idealized version of me (hey, they give you that option for a reason). Anyway, I played through Mass Effect 1 and put in my 35-45 hours with that game with “my” Shepherd. When I sat down to play Mass Effect 2, I immediately loaded up “my” Shepherd and got fully into that game without a hitch. How? Well, I saw “my” Shepherd and heard his voice and he was the same guy I’d already spent time with.
Trying to recreate a not-quite-right version of “my” Shepherd would take me out of the game and it’d feel like I was playing someone else’s game. (A friend came over when I was playing a similar game a few years back and, during a cut scene, told me “it’s so weird to hear my voice coming out of someone else’s mouth”.)
As such, that’s why there isn’t a recommendation this week.
I hope to have one next week.
I’M COMMANDER SHEPARD AND THIS IS MY FAVORITE BLOG POST AT THE LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN
Sorry about your face. That sucks 🙁
This should be the unofficial motto of this blog.
That’s why we have gravatars.
Interesting, I go with FemShep every time, Jennifer Hale FTW!
Femshep is my Renegade character.
Hale does badass antihero very well. Mind you she does all sorts of characters very well.
She retweeted me the other day. I was happy.
Oh, that’s awesome!
“I’d go with you, but…” – Gracie Law
“I know, there’s something wrong with your face.” – Jack Burton
I do not get it. I rarely even care about having a face on my guys. They could just do that TV blotting on it and I would be fine.
Sheppard is female. And not blonde.
End of story. 🙂
Shepard is a female and blonde (designed to match my daughter’s hair).
End of story 😉
When I did my circle elf mage for my rental of Dragon Age 1, I gave her tattoos and then altered the shading so they looked more like scars.
I found I liked her that way. It somehow added something to her story that she looked like she had been in a horribly scarring incident.
My imported face was … freakish. But it was a very lightly modified femshep, so going with the default was OK.
Jaybird, I would point out that my Shepard, who looked FUCKED UP on import, was on the PS3 version and created and customized in ME2. The problem isn’t just for people who imported from ME1.
This problem has just now become incomprehensible to me.
One of the freaking *SELLING POINTS* of this game is the fact that you can take *YOUR* character across three games! WHY IN THE HELL WERE THEY WORKING ON KINECT BULLCRAP INSTEAD OF FACIAL MIGRATION???
Remember when Wizardry did that?
They even had an entry for “I made the world end — import my game, plz.”
The gold box games from SSI did it too. .. but I was never able to move from the 2nd one to the 3rd one, successfully. I had to use a hex editor to make it work.
For some reason, I minded having to recreate my 6 stats far less than having to recreate my face.
Hey, you remember when Suikoden….
Nah, not helpful.
(Spoilers for the first couple minutes of ME2)
When I did Wing Commander, I wove an elaborate story to myself about how Christopher Blair and Grayson Burrows (Privateer) were the same person despite differing looks.
With Resident Evil, I have worked out each game, including Outbreak, fits together (I consider the upcoming ORC an Elseworlds/What If?/Infinities).
Which brings me to this:
Why can’t you just remake your character or a close approximation of said character? As we saw in ME2 , they can rebuild someone. So, due to injuries between ME2 Arrival and ME3, he has to be rebuilt again and they erred slightly in facial reconstruction (or, if you really want some laughs, turn MaleShep into FemShep. “I’m sorry, Commander but your medical records got mixed up and we may have accidently removed a couple things. When we realized our cock-up, we had all these hormones lying around and we should just make the best of it.). There is a Reaper invasion going on so, as resources get stretched, this sort of thing could happen. Thusly, it’ll still be the same person.
Because it’s not the same. (Maribou and I sat for 10 minutes trying to reconstruct my CanonShep… we came close, close enough to call him a cousin…)
Okay, we’ll go a little more esoteric.
During Arrival, he saw what he thought to be an attractive Reaper and, despite his crew yelling that it’s a bio-mechanical monstrosity bent on destroying all life, Shepard decided that it was time to check off another box on his “Alien tail I’ve successfully bagged.”
The hideous injuries sustained by trying to stick it to something whose sexual organs could best be described as a cross between a blender, an electrified porcupine, and a cheese grater were so horrific that they just couldn’t reconstruct his body in the exact form that it had been before.
Thus, a newer, grimmer, less-tail-obsessed Shepard emerges. As his face has changed, so too has his purpose: To save Earth and to wreak vengence upon the Reavers for his junk.
Got another one taken from “how Mark reconciles the Mortal Kombat TV series with the games”.
Shepard did die in ME2. Knowing what a blow to morale it would be, it was decided to “create” a new Shepard by kidnapping some poor sod then overwriting his memories with those of Shepard’s. This new one believes himself to be the real Shepard and has no knowledge of his previous life. Joker agrees to keep the secret for the survival of Earth.
I’ll wait for the fix.
Or wait for the announcement that the fix ain’t coming.
I mean I can understand, in theory, failing to test 1 -> 2 -> 3 faces and only testing 2 -> 3 faces.
What you are telling me is that they didn’t even test *THAT*!!!
no, jay, what they’re doing is “it’ll be patched soon.” that’s what happens with anything that doesnt’ work by deadline. And most things don’t, anymore.
This is seriously making me question the whole “day 1 purchase” thing.
but you give people some allowance for “it’s gotta be out by christmas”… it’s gotta be out by March? Jesus, give the coders a break and Let It Work!
Oh, well, at least it’s not the “mad comma” bug, where a random byte somewhere gets turned into a comma every minute or two. (surprisingly, the game still functions for hours…)
My character was just barely modified – slightly higher cheekbones and blonder hair, blue eyes to make Shepard look like a theoretical adult version of my daughter. The import worked, but the cheekbones were straight up freakish – distracting and weird. I stopped the game and just accepted a generic femshep because it was so close to “my” Shepard.