Mass Effect 3: Where are you Shepard?

Before I get started, I just want to say that there are no spoilers for Mass Effect 3 in the following piece. Please let’s make sure they stay out of the comment too. Between Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect I’ve talked a lot about BioWare on this site. The internet likes to complain about their games a lot lately. I’m in a minority, I liked Dragon Age 2. I recognize the problems with the game, but I still enjoyed it. I’m currently 20+ hours into the single player portion of ME3 and while I love the game so far, I was extremely disappointed with the first 5 minutes of the game.

There is currently an issue with Mass Effect that if you created your Shepard with a custom face way back in Mass Effect 1 that the face will not carry over to Mass Effect 3. You’re pretty much left to try to recreate your face from memory. This probably sounds like a minor gripe, but I don’t think it is. One of the major points of Mass Effect is crafting your own story over the games. Decisions you made in the first game carry over into the third. I take a long time with my play throughs. I could easily say that adding my play time from ME1 and ME2 together is 100 hours.

I have a really hard time understanding how that wasn’t caught before the game was launched. I’m not angry. I’m not demanding anyone’s job or anything. I re-created a face that is passable to the one I used before and I’m enjoying the rest of the game. I am disappointed though. The excitement of the midnight launch quickly faded when I ran into the error.  I know BioWare says they are working on a fix for the issue. It’s too late for my first playthrough, hopefully it will be working when I’m ready for my next Shepard.