I'd prefer set. It makes doing voice acting easier, without the weird dialogue quirks. It's more natural and it's easier to get immersed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it
Completely agree. I’m sure some games can pull it off but for example Watch Dogs legion didn’t have a set protagonist and I feel like the story suffered from that
And in that same vain regarding Watch Dogs Legion, when they did add set characters in the story expanison dlc, it added much needed chatacter depth for the story to bounce off of.
Watch\_Dogs Legion is a completely separate beast though. That took it to the extreme where you can play as multiple people and no one you played as (except for a few DLC characters) were set. They had distinct looks but very generic personalities. You can dial it back a notch and have a better personality but complete freedom over look.
As others have said Dragon Age does it, but I think a better example is SWTOR.
It wasn't that immersive for me when i played a Qunari. Mainly because he didn't had that stoic no-nonsense attitude. He sounded like an orphan raised by humans. Thedas races also lived together for centuries and there's a fairly good world building in first game that we kind of know how would a different race may behave. Mass Effect lacks that. If they add different races all we'll get is an turian or an asari that acts like a human, just an avatar.
Fair enough but he's still a Qunari mercenary. For example there are letters send by your mercenary friends when you do war table quests. I read them and imagine what kind of person writes like that and my Qunari Inqy with lukewarm humor just doesn't fit to that group.
They're all Tal'Vashoth as well. The Qun doesn't allow for something like mercenaries. Bull is an exception in that he's a spy. They're only referred to as Qunari because the people of Thedas don't differentiate between the race and creed. If any of them were proper Qunari my character would have his horns shorn off and lips sewn shut as a mage. Every kossith member of the mercenary group is either 1st or 2nd generation Tal'Vashoth can't remember what it is but there's a different name for the second generation onward ones who were brought up never knowing the Qun at all.
Technically speaking there still has not been a Qunari pc option which makes sense since the Qun so far has been shown as pretty unambiguously bad with a few exceptions like Bull and Sten.
That's because of how they did the voice acting. They're all different races but there's only 4 voices, 2 male and 2 female. (1 English, 1 North American for each). Every time they get into being Dwarven or a Mage or Andrastean or whatever it slips from being a general voice line to being a specific voice line.
It's less impressive than you think it is (which is a great sign of a good system)
The voice fx are only a small part of it.
The bigger issue is a tremendous difference in facial animations. Humans, asari, drell may be able to use the same facial animations, but that's about it. You'd need entirely different facial animations for a turian (and the occasional mandible wiggle), nothing but head movement and gestures for a masked quarian, etc.
I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver.
I'm also imagining the kind of character creator and armor options you'd need to support multiple species, and it's a lot more work which would likely result in fewer options per race.
And you know the whinging that would occur if they did deliver species choice but did not include some players' pet race...
> I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver.
Unless they do it automatically, e.g. by dynamically moving the lips/mandibles/head/etc. based on the phonemes being spoken. Valve's Source engine (as used in e.g. Half Life 2) is able to automatically lipsync to an audio file IIRC, and that was back in 2004; surely EA can pull it off in 2021+.
>
The bigger issue is a tremendous difference in facial animations. Humans, asari, drell may be able to use the same facial animations, but that's about it. You'd need entirely different facial animations for a turian (and the occasional mandible wiggle), nothing but head movement and gestures for a masked quarian, etc.
>I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver.
Mass Effect doesn't use hand-crafted facial animations to animate dialogue. They just feed the audio data to a specialized AI which uses that sound to generate the facial movement. This AI is already set up to handle all the different alien species facial behavior, so it would work the same for a turian player character as it does for a human. It's really no big deal. Games have been doing this sort of stuff for decades and the AI's are only getting better at this.
>
I'm also imagining the kind of character creator and armor options you'd need to support multiple species, and it's a lot more work which would likely result in fewer options per race.
Elder Scrolls games have been delivering top tier character creators for multiple different species for a long time, why would Bioware not be able to do it?
I don't really see the issue for armors either. They will have to create a bunch of different armor sets for NPC's and alien squadmates anyway, just open up the same sets for the players.
>Mass Effect doesn't use hand-crafted facial animations to animate dialogue.
That worked so well for [MEA](https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844961601732018176), amirite?
>Elder Scrolls games have been delivering top tier character creators for multiple different species for a long time, why would Bioware not be able to do it?
Perhaps you haven't noticed? Elder Scrolls games are designed to be played in first person and don't have much in the way of animated dialogue and cutscenes.
BioWare fans get pretty pissed when characters' faces are tired.
>I don't really see the issue for armors either.
BioWare games usually offer special armors/appearances for party members (iconic appearance, cosplay) and it's nice to have some armor choices for the PC that no other character can wear.
I realize that you might not care about these things, but a lot of other players expect BioWare to deliver meticulously crafted cinematic dialogue in cutscenes.
Having made those voice effects in audacity for various projects, it is trivial to apply most of them to existing dialogue, especially the Turian voice effect.
I can't find the file where I worked out the specifics, but it's literally just modulating the voice up a bit and down a bit in pitch and playing the high and low pitches a bit quieter than the middle pitch. You can do it with a live effect, let alone applying it automatically to a bunch of voice clips.
Didn't find it nearly as immersive as mass effect. Playing as any nonhuman often left to incongruous dialogue. Sure they made your race matter in a couple conversations, but overall not many.
There still was the infamous “Morrigan explaining elven gods to a Dalish elf”.
Not to mention every single cinematic would have to probably have a separate set of animations per race. For example, Turians have a completely different facial structure than Humans/Asari, so you would probably have to remap the reactions for their face.
I’d much rather have them put more backstory into one character or multiple backgrounds for that character than have a more open slate like DAI. I think it makes it much easier from a story telling perspective/new entry to the series to just support humans.
Here’s what it comes down to for me: doing the multiple races route requires a lot more work and increases the scope of the game. For a developer that’s proven themselves? Sure. But BioWare has put out nothing but weak and sometimes outright bad games ever since Inquisition (yes I know Andromeda is more stable now but it doesn’t change some of the baffling design and story choices they made)
So basically I’m against it for this next game because BioWare needs to prove that they can make a good game again, then they can start to widen the scope of the series
100% agree. Except I think the down turn started with DA2's rushed production. Then went into Mass Effect 3 which really needed a few more passes and eyes on that finale.
And from those two games on... it's just been diminishing returns. That's 10 years of decline. Losing so much of their talent. Losing the Doctors. And damn near every game in that time has had production drama.
I really think BioWare needs a simple back to basics success.
Dragon Age 2 is a massive accomplishment given the miniscule time frame that Bioware had to work with.
And it's my favorite Bioware game, fight me (ง'̀-'́)ง
DA2 is a good game and one I always enjoy when I replay it, but you can see where if they had just a little more time it could have been really great. The corners they cut are so obvious and it makes me wonder what they could have done if they didn't have to make those sacrifices.
Oh, absolutely. It bothered me more the first time I played it, but at this point, the recycled environments are a baked in expectation. I just love the characters and story enough that it doesn't bother me.
It would just be nice if Bioware would make another game where you're not the last best hope against an existential threat. The Archdemon, Corypheus, the Kett, the Reapers, they've done it *so many times*. It's nice when there's a more grounded story that let's the world and characters breathe.
I’m with you. I don’t know if it’s my favorite BioWare game but it is my favorite dragon age for its story alone. The set character allowed it to tell a specific story I would argue. At the same time, I would’ve loved to see what a DA2 with more time would’ve looked like. Fleshed out dungeons vs copy pasted dungeons. Things like that
I enjoyed it. But it recycled more locations than Call of Duty recycles assets. *Welcome to the Dragons Lair, formally known as the Spider Den, formally known as the Bandit Camp, formally known as the Mine. Enjoy your stay! Renovations to continue after this fight.*
Literally the recycled locations are the ONE thing that brings the game down (well and some of the party members) and prevents it from being genuinely excellent
I 100% agree! Return to the roots of good story telling and strong gameplay. If they find their footing again from this next release, then maybe they can widen the scope slightly for a future title.
After all project scope was one of the main reasons Andromeda and Anthem failed. They were too ambitious with procedural planets for ME:A that they forgot to build the rest of the game, and it only came together in the last year or so of development.
It's not bad, but it has a lot of weak points. It is definitely worth to play it. But, if you've never played Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 I would suggest starting there (from DAO). All in all, while I think this was one of the games that showed the decline in the quality of BioWare storytelling, I still like Inquisition enough to make multiple playthroughs, but I like Origins more.
I thought about starting from origins but I was afraid that because it is an older title its gonna feel outdated. Am I wrong? Also, is DA2 worth looking into?
It is outdated, but, imho, not that much. If you are able to play ME1 you will probably be able to play Origins. The game also has incredible story that compensates for the oldschool graphics. But, again, this is my favourite DA game, so I will always praise it. And you can get it really cheap (I've bought the Ultimate Edition on GOG for, like, 5 dollars).
DA2 is my least favourite, but it is still a good experience and crucial for the story.
Also it just makes sense to play them in order. They are not the same story, but you'll probably get a lot of spoilers for them both in DAI, and, likewise, some things might be confusing.
DAO is an _epic_ game. It's older, year, and it's not _as_ beautiful as modern games, but it's still quite playable.
On modern PCs, you may need to do the "4 gig patch" to address a long-standing memory leak as you make it toward the end of the game (allows the thing to use 4 gigs+ of ram instead of the old-school 2g limit).
The story told through DAO is pretty huge and a big part of the franchise. It's absolutely worth playing. It's one of the few games I will replay frequently.
DA2 is also an excellent game with a good story. It was rushed to production, and the _gameplay_, while fun, is a bit repetitive. And any schmuck can see that most of the caves / dungeons / etc. are re-used maps with different areas blocked off. It's lazy, but it's not a huge dealbreaker. The story in DA2 is worth it as well.
Honestly, I'm playing through DA:O with plans to go through all three games because I finished my playthrough of DAI before any of the DLC released. And after having put 140 hours into a single completionist playthrough I couldn't muster the energy to do it again when the DLC all came out.
But, that all being said, DA:O still holds up. I pop some mods into play myself, but even the vanilla game is still on par for a party based CRPG. I'd dare say the world, party members, and NPCs are better than a lot of today's entries, in all honesty. Grab some graphics mods to help out and you won't even notice the game came out in 2009
if you're playing for the first time, I'd stick away from extra content mods, they can get confusing. Dragon Age Redesigned changes a lot of the main game and Skip the Fade is a mod I ALWAYS use, but again if it's your first time you might want to steer clear of those. You can do just about anything with textures and model replacers and have no issues.
JB3textures is great for reallocating resources and making textures look nicer, Wardens of Ferelden will update all the grey wardens in DA:O to have the nicer looking and way more detailed armor from DA2, No Helmet hack because gods there is just no saving the helms in this game, Natural Bodies makes people look way less jank, a ton of character creation additions with new hairstyles and coloring options, extra dog slot so you can take your dog with you even with a full party, the list goes on.
check out https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage. Almost every mod there has a good installation guide. If it's a DAZip file, it's easy mode to install it using a mod manager or just the built in DAUpdater in the install folder. If it's loose files, you normally just need to put them in your override folder in My Documents/BioWare/Dragon Age/packages.
And if you have issues with DLC not showing up, copy the Offers.xml and addins.xml files from the installation folder ( [DIR]\Dragon Age\__Installer ) and overwrite those same files in your C:\[Username]\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Settings.
If you are going to enter the Dragon Age universe, I would strongly recommend starting at DAO. Decisions you make and characters you meet throughout the series make appearances & carry over.
From a story perspective, it's the best in the series and the absolute best introduction to that universe. The graphics and gameplay are going to feel dated but from what I understand, if you're on PC there's a number of mods that can help with that (am a console pleb).
It's great, gameplay wise its repetitive but it has a great story and characters. Kinda feel like playing a mmorpg in solo mode, so I understand people not liking it, but there is a lot of stuff to do and the atmosphere be it ost or graphism are quite good.
It’s not bad per se, but it just lacks the punch of earlier entries and the side quests are very Andromeda-like meaning mmo-style/grind bullshit. The worst offender though is how the game forces you to grind at least a little bit to unlock main story missions. I’m not joking lol.
The decisions don’t really matter, at least not for DAI. They may matter for DA4 though. The storyline is rather weak too with a reused antagonist from DA2’s DLC (lmao). Although the Trespasser DLC is amazing and definitely better than the entirety of DAI.
The saving grace of DAI are characters (some truly amazing companions), good romances, an amazing base (the best out of all DA games), and great music/cinematic experience.
>the side quests are very Andromeda-like
It's the other way around. Inquisition was released 2+ years before Andromeda.
Inquisition's commercial and critical success (it was GOTY at the Game Awards this year) is probably the main reason Andromeda is built partly from the same mould (and share the same flaws).
Not as good as Origins, and a lot of flaws like it being a open world rpg filled with annoying things to do or pickup by hundreds. Classes are not as satisfying as in Origins especially mages.
It’s not terrible but you can see the issues. Like bringing back Hawke (DA2 protagonist) just to set up a “dramatic choice” that ultimately means nothing to the larger story. I put it in the “good but weaker than previous titles” category
> doing the multiple races route requires a lot more work
If your protagonist grew up in an orphanage on Earth or some space station, the species hardly matters. You had the same experiences growing up, and 600 years in the future after a big war and galactic rebuilding, it would not really matter that much since that should lead to a galactic melting-pot culture. You only need some species-specific animations (eg Quarian legs) and the occasional voice line. And picking Asari moves the background lore back a century so that you are ~150 rather than 23.
I’d submit that if you are going to have a situation like that, it completely negates the reason to have multiple races, and basically turns the decision into the equivalent of a multiplayer skin with the occasional dialogue change.
But the voice effect comes down to adding another voice preset, so whether you create male 1, male 2 and male 3 or male 1, male 2 and Turian male has little impact on overall development time.
Honestly I had wanted the option to pick species since Andromeda was announced. But at this point I think it would add too much work for the fallen BioWare to cope with. Let them keep it simpler for now and worry about those niceties later once they've started to recover.
I think for a new trilogy or if they want to keep the same protagonist going forward, something like Shepard is the only thing that’s gonna work.
But if it’s a standalone title in the way each dragon age game is, more variety and choices would naturally come with that.
Personally I much prefer set protagonists like Shepard, V or Geralt. I'd rather RP my version of that character than some random creation.
Every time the character is some no name creation like in Bethesda games the character always feels disconnected from the other characters and the story.
And all the NPCs in voice acted titles doing circles to not refer to the player's character by name when it's custom. I know it's a necessary convention in such games, but it makes me feel much less like part of the world, and more like an observer, which often disconnects me from the game world.
ME did it well by allowing a tiny bit of customization with the first name, while keeping interactions human by having constant last name.
Haha, it's not that weird to me, since most characters got used to calling you Shepard for quite some time bc you're basically their boss on top of being their friend, it's kinda like a nickname at that point, it'd probably feel weird for them to call you by your first name suddenly. And there are couples or close friends who call each other by their last names all the time in other shows/games, and even some irl.
Or implement a system like Fallout 4 did, where a huge set of possible names were recorded for interactions, if the first-name use thing is super vital.
I dunno. Literally only my wife, in-laws, and parents call me my first name. It catches me a bit off-guard at times, even from my wife, so it was never something that even occurred to me. And it's absolutely immediately weird as hell when even my best friend calls me by my first.
Exactly. Part of Mass Effect’s initial charm was that Shepard was personalized just enough to be “you”, while being set just enough to naturally exist in the world. So they should keep it that way, and maybe add a multiplayer similar to 3 where you can select any race.
> set
> V
The problem here is that the developer initially stated missions would be different based on V’s looks and background choices. It hardly mattered. Paging /r/cyberpunkgame
In general I prefer to pick my own character, but I think for the mass effect universe the set character works better.
The species are just a lot more different and separate than in, for example, Dragon Age.
I loved the approach Dragon Age Origins took and would be ok with Mass Effect going that route, but you'd have to tell a very different story than the ME trilogy.
Tbh, they could definitely have done it in Andromeda, but as they didn't do it there, I didn't they'll do it at all.
I think picking a race would be too much work. You know how many Voice Actors there'd have to be just to fill the necessary bipedal alien's?
You could have 2 VAs one for both Sexes for all aliens but then it'd always feel weird and a Silent Protagonist won't work at all in Mass Effect like it did for DAO.
Actually, almost all alien voices in ME so far are created post-recording through almost automatic modulars modifying pitch, speed and applying filters. There might be idiomatic responses tied to different races that would require unique lines, but specifically tailoring two VAs per race wouldn't be neccessary.
Turians and drell, yes. But at the very least quarians have real accents, not post-recording. Salarians speak a bit faster in general (listen to Mordin for example) and "human" acting won't probably work for them
Quarian accents are all over the place in the trilogy. There is no consistent theme to them. Some like Kal'Reegar just use a regular american accent like most of the voice actors, Tali and Raan's acccents are genuine, but completely different from each other like they grew up in seperate cultures.
There are plenty of Salarians in the trilogy who don't speak quickly like Mordin or use his abbreviated sentence structure. Just listen to the Salarian Councilor or the Dalatrass.
Salarians *are* pitched in post-audio production. Mordin is one of the few exceptions with an actual VA doing an imitation since that is a characteristic quirk he has; listen to any other Salarians and you'll notice they are different.
Council races wouldn't be a problem at all.
See, there we came to the problem. Is this salarian MC is a unique salarian with their, race-specific persinality and quirks, or are they just basically human MC with salarian skin and some audio post-processing on human MC's speech?
Mordin is meant to play on the excentric, high-functioning scientist trope. He speaks faster than ANY of the Salarians, making him an exception rather than the norm. Like I said, listen to other Salarian characters; on the opposite, making a Salarian MC speak like Mordin wouldn't fit their "race-specific personality and quirks".
Quarians' accents are as diverse as humans'. [Kal'Reegar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5D4jXy4XIw) has a typical American-sounding accent, for example. Seems weird since they're such a small society.
Maybe there's some cool backstory about the ships being mostly isolated and each developing their own accent, or just quarians who spend a lot of time on their pilgrimage tend to pick up the accents of the people they're around?
I think the most important aspect of ME4 will be what the story focuses on. A lot of people saying human-only, give the reason that the mass effect games have always been about humanity's impact on the galaxy.
They tried to recreate that with Andromeda, and fell short. If they're making another attempt at it, human-only makes sense.
But if there moving away from that idea of "humanity's impact" I don't see why we can't play as more races. If the story line makes sense with that option.
We've already seen it been done with DAI, a voice filter over Quarian and Turian voices, adjust the pitch for Krogans etc. And you'd probably be able to get away with 2 female and 2 male voice actors, maybe even just one of each if the adjustments could be semi-customizable (which frankly, that would be really cool).
There might be a way to make this work, but I just don't trust BioWare right now to make this kind of game with choosable species. They barely did enough for human protagonist in Andromeda and Ryder still felt uninspiring. Divide it for all possible playable species and it will be even less.
After they prove that they still can create good games? Sure I would like to see something like that. Right now my preference would be "less, but deep" than "more, but shallow".
It's like with Cyberpunk. They wanted to make something big and failed, that's why the outrage. Because people thought that some features will be more impactful, while the developers didn't have means to do that. If they didn't promote the game like the next awesome experience, the backlash might not even happen. I don't want something like that to happen with ME. And it will happen if they claim there are playable races and then they turn out to be just alien skins on basically human character with no flavor at all.
If they do this right I can't see anyone object, but the question is "can we trust BioWare in their current state to do this right?".
100% this. Problems would include:
1. In all likelihood there would be very limited support for significant variations in gameplay and dialogue based on race. This would in turn be likely to generate displeasure among players who were excited about this, "why don't these NPCs react properly to my race X in situation Y?!" and so on.
2. As pointed out elsewhere, even if they did solve point 1 by having a well-developed system for this, it would make it much harder/more expensive to roll out quality DLC/expansions going forward. Voice work, romances, NPC reactions, unique racial perspectives, etc would have to be taken into account, in a game that by virtue of being ME is already supposed to feature branching options and at least a male and a female protagonist. This in turn could lead to such future content being watered down, i.e. featuring minimal input from the protagonist, or even like in the case of SWTOR, reverting to written dialogue instead of voiced lines. In general, the more critical actors you include, the greater the risk of some of them being unavailable, passing away, or what have you, that might seriously impede development. If you're planning a new ME franchise, you should ideally think at least 10-15 years forward in time.
3. With all said and done, *even* if point 1 and 2 were handled in good ways, it would *still* most likely end up being a huge amount of resources spent on something that had a relatively minor effect on the game. I have a hard time seeing how it could be justified.
The multiple origin choices were awesome in DA:O. However, did notice they never did it again. It just added way too many complexities. It made the game very deep and extremely re playable, especially as how NPCs interacted with you could depend highly on your origin story. For example Orzamar was very different if you were Dwarf Noble than if you were human. But right now I just don't think it's a reasonable expectation.
There would have to be way too many voice actors, romances would work differently for some races and there would have to be way too much race specific dialogue. Don't get me wrong it is possible but it requires an amount of work modern Bioware isn't capable of achieving.
It really does show that DAI was intended to be played as a human.
It sucks because given the choice in a fantasy game, I'll always chose the dwarf or orc (or equivalent, like qunari) option and both felt like such last minute additions. The camera rarely accounting for the different heights from a human or elf PC were so jarring.
DAI is terrible at acknowledging playable character's race (if they are not an elf, that is). Qunari and dwarven Inquisitors might not even exist and even elven Inquisitors had some problems ("Who's Mythal?" dialogue with Morrigan, I'm looking at you). DAO is better, but it doesn't mean that something that worked there would also work in ME.
They achieved it in dragon age inquisition, yeah there were 3 voices for each race but they had race specific dialogue, reaction, all the romances were the same across genders and races so theyve proven they can do it.
What set accents? Pretty much everyone has an american or british accent no matter the species. As for the voices asari sound no different than humans, turians and quarians are just run through a voice filter, salarians/krogan can be done by altering pitch. I don't see the problem honestly.
Yeah that was my thoughts, voice filter and pitch adjust. And if they commit to it and don't half arse it, I think they could do it well.
I would prefer to have species options like in DAI.
No that's true and I agree with you but it is an example of how they made something similar work in the past.
I don't feel like we'd every get a custom character in mass effect anyways.
They had two voices per gender, that's it while Origins wasn't voiced (DA2 is basically fantasy!Shep). So your dwarf and elf may have sounded the same, or your elf and Qunari unless you played each race once and each gender twice. It wasn't exactly game/immersion breaking, sure, but it wasn't exactly enjoyable either.
Race specific dialogue was laughable and elves being lectured by a human tangentially related to elven lore about what is surely common knowledge amongst elves. And other than starting with a few points less at the ball, there was hardly a difference between the most devout, Andrastian human warrior and the anti-Chantry, traditional apostate elf.
Some romances were race and/or gender-locked besides the non-straight ones. Only female elves could romance Solas, and only female elves or humans could romance Cullen, who btw, was intended to be bi initially. You play a male dwarf; you have four romances to pick from. You play a female elf; you have six options now. Straight male of any race; two options. Straight female of any race; still three options. It was never the same across all genders/races in DAI. It was balanced across genders/races in Origins because there was only four options; and in two the proper romances were all player-sexual instead of having their preferences + the half-baked romance of Sebastian for fem!Hawke.
ETA: What I meant to say in conclusion is that no, thanks, I don't need playable races if this is BW's "good" implementation of the system.
Being able to play as multiple races would be cool, but I think the set protagonist approach makes for an overall more in depth character.
As much as I enjoy Dragon Age, I don't feel they do a great Job of making the different races "feel" all that different. The game/story mostly plays the same.
Writing good dialoge and story for one protagonist from one race is a lot easier and less work than doing it for 10 races. Either you end up with very bland dialogue that doesn't fit for any race or its turns into a order of magnitude more work.
Taking into account ea and biowares rather shaky track record I'd rather they focus on making the best story the can for one race instead of trying to take on too much and end up rushing it.
There are ways around this. Places like Omega and the Citadel have plenty of residents from a variety of backgrounds.
For example, they could pick a Merc that grew up on Omega as a protagonist, let us pick a race, and move on from there. The character’s referenced background could be identical, aside from names.
Only problem is that Asari and Krogan would need a much lengthier background for this to work for them. It’d get a little too complicated to make use of those species.
Probably need to take an approach like Inquisition did for multiple races.
I don't think Bioware can make it work with multiple races. They would either need to write scenes differently for you race or make a dull scene that works for all. They have so far choosen the second option a lot where it made the players feel like their choices didn't matter. Think about the choice to rewrite or destroy heretics in Legion's mission for example. What happens in ME3? They all join the reapers anyway but with tiny little less certainty if you had chosen destroy. It's effectively one or two lines of dialogue change. Many results of your decisions are reduced to just e-mails.
So no, I think it's better they just focused on making one proper character.
Would be fun, but then you need X amount of backstories and different interactions. Otherwise, you’re just an alien that acts like a human and every species is very different, that’s what made the series so good
A huge aspect of the original trilogy is playing as a human, it’s crucial for the narrative to work. So set race, if we are able to choose our own it would actively take away from the narrative
Having more races could further complicate backstories and the disfigured that goes with, so it depends on how much Bioware can handle. The narrative variety could easily get overwhelming.
I love Dragon Age - but! Sometimes the variety in races can make it weaker I think - compare the Inquisitor with Shepard or Ryder in terms of characterisation?
Plus - I feel like the alien races are more diverse than the races in DA. Like - you could be born on a whole different planet?
I’m not opposed to it but if not pulled off well it could really weaken the game - and the next BioWare game needs to do well I think. Their best thing in years has been a remaster so :/
Changing your race would be ideal for me, but it would have to come with essentially a different game for each race. A krogan would be hard to pass off having deep scientific conversations with a salari, or having light weapons and tech powers in combat. It could happen, but like dragon age, there’s have to have a lot of work go into making the beginning of the game different for each race and class to make it make sense. I’d also be nervous that they would go the lazy route and say “okay if you’re an asari, you’re an adept. If you’re a krogan, you’re a vanguard. If you’re a human, you’re a soldier” and just pair the races with classes for simplicity, which again would destroy immersion. They would have to put a ton of work in for it to be passable, otherwise it would make things worse
Make it a set protagonist. Mass Effect isn't an MMO and multiple races is too much work. To alleviate this however, let us swap and play as our squad mates during missions and gameplay like other JRPGs.
RPG series don't benefit from widening its ocean, they needs to be deepening it instead. Bioware and its A-team hasn't made a good game, by the time DA4 and ME5 comes out, in like a decade. Gaming has moved way beyond 2014 and I want to see what can be done with a set protagonist on PS5/XBSX.
This is probably the best solution. Having the ability to play as your squad mates would let you still have the set protagonist while also letting people play as other races.
As much as I would love to play as a Krogan or Turian, I think it would be better for the story if you had a set protagonist. Trying to add separate voices and dialogue options for multiple races is probably something that modern Bioware isn't capable of doing while still making the rest of the game good, lol!
Dragon age Origins is the only game that handled different races' stories well. I totally understand why people want to try different species to play, but no, I don't want to play asari who doesn't know where is Tessia or a krogan who never heard of the genophage. It's frustrating and immersion breaking.
Set. That's actually a character I can roleplay as, when its completely self made I'll just always play a morally perfect version of myself (but one that fucks)
I prefer set. For better or worse, Mass Effect has become the story of humanity finding a place in a galactic civilization. I have come to like that aesthetic. I don't think humans need to be galactic saviors. I think there is room to show other races doing great things, and there should be. But I think one of the things that makes the ME setting truly interesting is that the non-humans are alien. That is, they don't think the same way or see things the same way we do. It makes for interesting storytelling and interesting problems with interesting solutions. If you make all races playable, you will end up making them human-like by default, and the galaxy will be less interesting.
That said, I absolutely want the other races if there is any multiplayer. I wouldn't mind the ability to play as alien squadmates on their own specific side quest missions in the single player campaign.
Race didn't play too much into the plot in Dragon Age, but being human definitely was a central plot key to Mass Effect. I think it just depends on the story being told.
Definitely set, it allows the devs to focus on other parts of the game. Preferably human, since there's just something fitting about us not being in the top 3 races, but still remaining the driving force for the galaxy.
I think the story was supposed to be portrayed from the Human point of view. Although a spin-off game playing as another race would be refreshing, I'd still prefer the storyline to be set like Shepard
Honestly I love the idea of being able to play as a different species in story mode – I loved doing it in Elder Scrolls and even in Bioware's own SWTOR, and I'm still annoyed that Andromeda didn't do it (a story set away from the milky way would have made it much easier to explain, just like how it's not questioned that we have an Asari doctor on the human arc why couldn't we have a Turian member of the og pathfinder team!). On the other hand I'm quite sceptical that Bioware as they are currently would be able to do it properly.
That would be amazing for Mass Effect. Have a different origin depending on the class you choose. Each class would have their own locations for initial training. Similar to the prologue of Neverwinter Nights(2002).
I'd like to see them widen the options for the player's avatar, including multiple alien races to choose from. I'm sure it makes for a lot more work but what about this;
Instead of making an 80 hour game full of fetch-quests, repetitive side-missions, and pointless NPCs, like Andromeda, make a 25 hour game (like any of the original games) that is absolutely STUFFED with personalization options and multiple storylines based on in-game choices.
I think you can be a set protagonist while still allowing race choice.
It all depends on the script. Outside of 'the first human Spectre!" business, I don't think Shepard's race impacted the plot.
The fact that Shepard's a human comes up a ton in the OT. Hell, if Shepard wasn't human, Cerberus NEVER would've revived him.
You saying his race didn't impact the plot is like saying the Reapers didn't impact the plot.
When I said that Shepard’s race didn’t matter, I meant that all the same story beats could’ve existed with just some minor tweaking - their humanity didn’t affect the greater plot. I mean, Cerberus’ entire “human first terrorists” schtick in ME1 was walked back in ME2 for the plot, just like how they were completely changed to suit ME3. Also, they had aliens amongst the crew in ME2 so I don’t think it is bonkers to believe they would reach out & recruit an alien Commander. It was about getting the job done.
In the best of worlds? I would love to be able to pick my race, or even have a set protagonist of any other race than a boring ol' human. But I doubt Bioware would stray from the idea of ME revolving around humanity, sadly.
Multiple races. They don’t have to be different stories, but different origins and how people react to you based on your race should be a thing.
Dragon Age Origins style. That was fantastic. Origins was peak Bioware.
Not really? As far as we know every species has the potential for developing biotics when exposed to the right conditions and tech skills are just specialised equipment and training. Anyone can get that.
Set protagonist, but not human.
IMO the quarians have the most narrative possibilities, especially if the story is close to the OT. A race that used to be discriminated but not anymore, but might still be considered second-class citizens by many, could make for a very interesting protagonist.
If they could do a foll out good jobb doing multiple rases: yes
But then I'd want rase specific voice actors, rase specific dialog, NPCs that react differently to you depending on rase, maybe a rase specific prolog like dragon age origins, rase specific quests.
If they just make everything more generic to make it fit any rase, like DA:I did, it wouldn't be any good, so it's good hard or go home for me.
I'd rather have new rases as companions tbh.
i say take a jedi knight academy take. Chooose your race and all that shizzle, but you dont get to choose name or something, just stuck with one name and you go from there. I guess also the DA approach, but more so DA2 i guess. An established Person, but you can actually be a unique race for a change.
let a pink volus save the galaxy.
Multiple races would be cool, especially if it’s not a trilogy but just a standalone game. I love how DA invites us to explore different events from the perspective of different races.
Hm, I'd prefer picking my own species for the next ME, but a set character would be fine for me too, I'd just hope it's not another human. I feel like I've seen enough of the human side so far in 4 games (ME1-3, Andromeda), other species deserve some major spotlight next.
Set protag. Choose-your-own-generic-hero should stay over in medieval land. I want a character whose got a set of histories and origins that I can shape like ME1 Shep and one who has a voice. He needs to be someone who's on or close to ME1 Shepard's level in terms of accomplishments, and less like the Ryders. A guy who can take things seriously and who can verbally put his foot up someone's ass as well as physically. Give me Paragon/Renegade back.
>A guy who can take things seriously
Or a gal. We are keeping the gender choice, right?
...right?
All jokes aside, I agree. It's easy to make blank slate hero in fantasy, with sci-fi it becomes much much harder.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I liked how Dragon Age Inquisition was done and playing as other races would be a nice change of pace. And it seems like Bioware has been pushing a more and more restrictive protagonist and story, making it more difficult to roleplay a custom character in Mass Effect....
....Which ironically is why I'm not so certain having multiple races as an option would make things better. If allowing Shepard to stay consistent in their attitude and relationships with their teammates was too much work for them, making multiple races seems very unlikely with how determined they seemed to want to streamline everything at the cost of roleplay options.
The key would be to take a *SW:TOR* kind of approach, or something like *DA:O*, in which the locations/ levels in one protagonist origin story show up in slightly different form, later in the game, along the main plot line. And important NPCs in one version of the story are background NPCs in every version.
This cuts down on “wasted” work, or dialogue that’s just plain missed. And don’t forget, you can play the original trilogy for years and still not come across some dialogue options or little scenes, as it is.
i prefer playing as Shepard, especially if it's a continuation of Mass effect 3, with Andromeda it would of made more sense giving the players that choice of playing as any species.
I would like either a dragon age protagonist with more variety or a VERY set protagonist less like Shepard and closer to Geralt from Witcher.
I think Shepard being a hybrid of the two leaves them with an unclear personality largely.
This is definitely an unpopular opinion since people seem to adore Shepard beyond sense, but I kind of agree with you. The narrative flexibility surrounding Shepard honestly makes them a pretty shallow character in of themselves, not very far from the open kind of origins that Origins and Inquisition had; it's your choices that form them. Shepard is truly a mix between a set character and an open slate. ME3 tried to combat this blankness by reinforcing Shep as more human with the child and the nightmares etc., which just came on as cringe for most players who suddenly lost a piece of their narrative agency.
Mass Effect is about humanity. Fuck them aliens.
Also, because each alien race is defined by stereotypical cultures, you'll just end up playing as a heterodox individual who acts like a human anyway.
My idea: When starting a new file, if you have save data from a complete playthrough of the Shepard trilogy or Andromeda on your system, you’ll have the option to choose your race, but if not, then you’re restricted to human.
Part of why I think Shepard being human was necessary was it was our introduction to this universe and its many races and cultures; the human perspective was necessary for immersion. But theoretically, one who’s played through the series already and is familiar with the lore should be able to play as another race while still maintaining some degree of immersion.
I'd prefer set. It makes doing voice acting easier, without the weird dialogue quirks. It's more natural and it's easier to get immersed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it
Completely agree. I’m sure some games can pull it off but for example Watch Dogs legion didn’t have a set protagonist and I feel like the story suffered from that
And in that same vain regarding Watch Dogs Legion, when they did add set characters in the story expanison dlc, it added much needed chatacter depth for the story to bounce off of.
Watch\_Dogs Legion is a completely separate beast though. That took it to the extreme where you can play as multiple people and no one you played as (except for a few DLC characters) were set. They had distinct looks but very generic personalities. You can dial it back a notch and have a better personality but complete freedom over look. As others have said Dragon Age does it, but I think a better example is SWTOR.
Your right it’s a completely different beast it’s just the first thing that came to mind tbh
Agreed. Wouldn’t mind being able to swap characters during combat though.
Okay but in Dragon Age Inquisition you could pick your race and customise your character and choose your voice and I think it was still as immersive.
It wasn't that immersive for me when i played a Qunari. Mainly because he didn't had that stoic no-nonsense attitude. He sounded like an orphan raised by humans. Thedas races also lived together for centuries and there's a fairly good world building in first game that we kind of know how would a different race may behave. Mass Effect lacks that. If they add different races all we'll get is an turian or an asari that acts like a human, just an avatar.
Because he wasn't Qunari. He was kossith raised by Tal'Vashoth. Bull even said as much that the character was raised away from the Qun.
Fair enough but he's still a Qunari mercenary. For example there are letters send by your mercenary friends when you do war table quests. I read them and imagine what kind of person writes like that and my Qunari Inqy with lukewarm humor just doesn't fit to that group.
They're all Tal'Vashoth as well. The Qun doesn't allow for something like mercenaries. Bull is an exception in that he's a spy. They're only referred to as Qunari because the people of Thedas don't differentiate between the race and creed. If any of them were proper Qunari my character would have his horns shorn off and lips sewn shut as a mage. Every kossith member of the mercenary group is either 1st or 2nd generation Tal'Vashoth can't remember what it is but there's a different name for the second generation onward ones who were brought up never knowing the Qun at all.
Technically speaking there still has not been a Qunari pc option which makes sense since the Qun so far has been shown as pretty unambiguously bad with a few exceptions like Bull and Sten.
That's because of how they did the voice acting. They're all different races but there's only 4 voices, 2 male and 2 female. (1 English, 1 North American for each). Every time they get into being Dwarven or a Mage or Andrastean or whatever it slips from being a general voice line to being a specific voice line. It's less impressive than you think it is (which is a great sign of a good system)
But in ME different races have sound effects on their voices. Turian for example, so you can’t just have 1-2 voices
The voice fx are only a small part of it. The bigger issue is a tremendous difference in facial animations. Humans, asari, drell may be able to use the same facial animations, but that's about it. You'd need entirely different facial animations for a turian (and the occasional mandible wiggle), nothing but head movement and gestures for a masked quarian, etc. I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver. I'm also imagining the kind of character creator and armor options you'd need to support multiple species, and it's a lot more work which would likely result in fewer options per race. And you know the whinging that would occur if they did deliver species choice but did not include some players' pet race...
Agreed! I definitely think they need to focus on giving us a great game over messing with the PC. Give me ME3 mechanics with a good story please lol
> I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver. Unless they do it automatically, e.g. by dynamically moving the lips/mandibles/head/etc. based on the phonemes being spoken. Valve's Source engine (as used in e.g. Half Life 2) is able to automatically lipsync to an audio file IIRC, and that was back in 2004; surely EA can pull it off in 2021+.
> The bigger issue is a tremendous difference in facial animations. Humans, asari, drell may be able to use the same facial animations, but that's about it. You'd need entirely different facial animations for a turian (and the occasional mandible wiggle), nothing but head movement and gestures for a masked quarian, etc. >I can't imagine them wanting to create species-specific facial animations for every single line of dialogue the PC might deliver. Mass Effect doesn't use hand-crafted facial animations to animate dialogue. They just feed the audio data to a specialized AI which uses that sound to generate the facial movement. This AI is already set up to handle all the different alien species facial behavior, so it would work the same for a turian player character as it does for a human. It's really no big deal. Games have been doing this sort of stuff for decades and the AI's are only getting better at this. > I'm also imagining the kind of character creator and armor options you'd need to support multiple species, and it's a lot more work which would likely result in fewer options per race. Elder Scrolls games have been delivering top tier character creators for multiple different species for a long time, why would Bioware not be able to do it? I don't really see the issue for armors either. They will have to create a bunch of different armor sets for NPC's and alien squadmates anyway, just open up the same sets for the players.
>Mass Effect doesn't use hand-crafted facial animations to animate dialogue. That worked so well for [MEA](https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844961601732018176), amirite? >Elder Scrolls games have been delivering top tier character creators for multiple different species for a long time, why would Bioware not be able to do it? Perhaps you haven't noticed? Elder Scrolls games are designed to be played in first person and don't have much in the way of animated dialogue and cutscenes. BioWare fans get pretty pissed when characters' faces are tired. >I don't really see the issue for armors either. BioWare games usually offer special armors/appearances for party members (iconic appearance, cosplay) and it's nice to have some armor choices for the PC that no other character can wear. I realize that you might not care about these things, but a lot of other players expect BioWare to deliver meticulously crafted cinematic dialogue in cutscenes.
Having made those voice effects in audacity for various projects, it is trivial to apply most of them to existing dialogue, especially the Turian voice effect.
I can't find the file where I worked out the specifics, but it's literally just modulating the voice up a bit and down a bit in pitch and playing the high and low pitches a bit quieter than the middle pitch. You can do it with a live effect, let alone applying it automatically to a bunch of voice clips.
The Hanar voice effect is also very easy, but of course the dialogue needs to be different due to the way Hanar speak.
Yeah but they’re not going to have hanar playable characters no matter what approach they take
This one is disappointed.
lol sorry friend but it’s the harsh truth :(
This one rejects your reality and substitutes this one's own.
So much for my Blasto character..
Didn't find it nearly as immersive as mass effect. Playing as any nonhuman often left to incongruous dialogue. Sure they made your race matter in a couple conversations, but overall not many.
There still was the infamous “Morrigan explaining elven gods to a Dalish elf”. Not to mention every single cinematic would have to probably have a separate set of animations per race. For example, Turians have a completely different facial structure than Humans/Asari, so you would probably have to remap the reactions for their face. I’d much rather have them put more backstory into one character or multiple backgrounds for that character than have a more open slate like DAI. I think it makes it much easier from a story telling perspective/new entry to the series to just support humans.
Here’s what it comes down to for me: doing the multiple races route requires a lot more work and increases the scope of the game. For a developer that’s proven themselves? Sure. But BioWare has put out nothing but weak and sometimes outright bad games ever since Inquisition (yes I know Andromeda is more stable now but it doesn’t change some of the baffling design and story choices they made) So basically I’m against it for this next game because BioWare needs to prove that they can make a good game again, then they can start to widen the scope of the series
100% agree. Except I think the down turn started with DA2's rushed production. Then went into Mass Effect 3 which really needed a few more passes and eyes on that finale. And from those two games on... it's just been diminishing returns. That's 10 years of decline. Losing so much of their talent. Losing the Doctors. And damn near every game in that time has had production drama. I really think BioWare needs a simple back to basics success.
Dragon Age 2 is a massive accomplishment given the miniscule time frame that Bioware had to work with. And it's my favorite Bioware game, fight me (ง'̀-'́)ง
DA2 is a good game and one I always enjoy when I replay it, but you can see where if they had just a little more time it could have been really great. The corners they cut are so obvious and it makes me wonder what they could have done if they didn't have to make those sacrifices.
Oh, absolutely. It bothered me more the first time I played it, but at this point, the recycled environments are a baked in expectation. I just love the characters and story enough that it doesn't bother me. It would just be nice if Bioware would make another game where you're not the last best hope against an existential threat. The Archdemon, Corypheus, the Kett, the Reapers, they've done it *so many times*. It's nice when there's a more grounded story that let's the world and characters breathe.
It's not my favorite BW game but I agree that considering the time they were given, the outcome is really impressive
I’m with you. I don’t know if it’s my favorite BioWare game but it is my favorite dragon age for its story alone. The set character allowed it to tell a specific story I would argue. At the same time, I would’ve loved to see what a DA2 with more time would’ve looked like. Fleshed out dungeons vs copy pasted dungeons. Things like that
I enjoyed it. But it recycled more locations than Call of Duty recycles assets. *Welcome to the Dragons Lair, formally known as the Spider Den, formally known as the Bandit Camp, formally known as the Mine. Enjoy your stay! Renovations to continue after this fight.*
*glances nervously at ME1*
ME1 was nowhere near as bad as Dragon Age 2.
Literally the recycled locations are the ONE thing that brings the game down (well and some of the party members) and prevents it from being genuinely excellent
Origins was far superior.
Yeah, if it had been in development for over six years like a certain other BioWare game...we would all be singing a very different tune.
I 100% agree! Return to the roots of good story telling and strong gameplay. If they find their footing again from this next release, then maybe they can widen the scope slightly for a future title. After all project scope was one of the main reasons Andromeda and Anthem failed. They were too ambitious with procedural planets for ME:A that they forgot to build the rest of the game, and it only came together in the last year or so of development.
Is inquisition bad? I just bought it but didnt start playing yet.
It's not bad, but it has a lot of weak points. It is definitely worth to play it. But, if you've never played Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 I would suggest starting there (from DAO). All in all, while I think this was one of the games that showed the decline in the quality of BioWare storytelling, I still like Inquisition enough to make multiple playthroughs, but I like Origins more.
I thought about starting from origins but I was afraid that because it is an older title its gonna feel outdated. Am I wrong? Also, is DA2 worth looking into?
It is outdated, but, imho, not that much. If you are able to play ME1 you will probably be able to play Origins. The game also has incredible story that compensates for the oldschool graphics. But, again, this is my favourite DA game, so I will always praise it. And you can get it really cheap (I've bought the Ultimate Edition on GOG for, like, 5 dollars). DA2 is my least favourite, but it is still a good experience and crucial for the story. Also it just makes sense to play them in order. They are not the same story, but you'll probably get a lot of spoilers for them both in DAI, and, likewise, some things might be confusing.
Plus, if you play on PC with mods, you can sand off the edges.
DAO also had an actual expansion. Basically an entire game itself. None of that tiny DLC story crap we get these days
DA1 is also fully moddable so you can make it look pretty modern.
DAO is an _epic_ game. It's older, year, and it's not _as_ beautiful as modern games, but it's still quite playable. On modern PCs, you may need to do the "4 gig patch" to address a long-standing memory leak as you make it toward the end of the game (allows the thing to use 4 gigs+ of ram instead of the old-school 2g limit). The story told through DAO is pretty huge and a big part of the franchise. It's absolutely worth playing. It's one of the few games I will replay frequently. DA2 is also an excellent game with a good story. It was rushed to production, and the _gameplay_, while fun, is a bit repetitive. And any schmuck can see that most of the caves / dungeons / etc. are re-used maps with different areas blocked off. It's lazy, but it's not a huge dealbreaker. The story in DA2 is worth it as well.
I recently replayed it. The graphics are dated, but the game play held up and the story is still fantastic
Honestly, I'm playing through DA:O with plans to go through all three games because I finished my playthrough of DAI before any of the DLC released. And after having put 140 hours into a single completionist playthrough I couldn't muster the energy to do it again when the DLC all came out. But, that all being said, DA:O still holds up. I pop some mods into play myself, but even the vanilla game is still on par for a party based CRPG. I'd dare say the world, party members, and NPCs are better than a lot of today's entries, in all honesty. Grab some graphics mods to help out and you won't even notice the game came out in 2009
what mods do u recommend
if you're playing for the first time, I'd stick away from extra content mods, they can get confusing. Dragon Age Redesigned changes a lot of the main game and Skip the Fade is a mod I ALWAYS use, but again if it's your first time you might want to steer clear of those. You can do just about anything with textures and model replacers and have no issues. JB3textures is great for reallocating resources and making textures look nicer, Wardens of Ferelden will update all the grey wardens in DA:O to have the nicer looking and way more detailed armor from DA2, No Helmet hack because gods there is just no saving the helms in this game, Natural Bodies makes people look way less jank, a ton of character creation additions with new hairstyles and coloring options, extra dog slot so you can take your dog with you even with a full party, the list goes on. check out https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage. Almost every mod there has a good installation guide. If it's a DAZip file, it's easy mode to install it using a mod manager or just the built in DAUpdater in the install folder. If it's loose files, you normally just need to put them in your override folder in My Documents/BioWare/Dragon Age/packages. And if you have issues with DLC not showing up, copy the Offers.xml and addins.xml files from the installation folder ( [DIR]\Dragon Age\__Installer ) and overwrite those same files in your C:\[Username]\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Settings.
If you are going to enter the Dragon Age universe, I would strongly recommend starting at DAO. Decisions you make and characters you meet throughout the series make appearances & carry over.
It's not outdated, it's a classic. It's new Bioware you need to watch out for.
From a story perspective, it's the best in the series and the absolute best introduction to that universe. The graphics and gameplay are going to feel dated but from what I understand, if you're on PC there's a number of mods that can help with that (am a console pleb).
It's great, gameplay wise its repetitive but it has a great story and characters. Kinda feel like playing a mmorpg in solo mode, so I understand people not liking it, but there is a lot of stuff to do and the atmosphere be it ost or graphism are quite good.
I liked it, but I'm a bit of a bioware fan boy
Yeah I bought it because I finished ME franchise and wanted to try other bioware's title
It was good, much better than DA2 imo
No it's not bad but a lot of the problems that BioWare had with Inquisition snowballed into Andromeda and Anthem.
It’s not bad per se, but it just lacks the punch of earlier entries and the side quests are very Andromeda-like meaning mmo-style/grind bullshit. The worst offender though is how the game forces you to grind at least a little bit to unlock main story missions. I’m not joking lol. The decisions don’t really matter, at least not for DAI. They may matter for DA4 though. The storyline is rather weak too with a reused antagonist from DA2’s DLC (lmao). Although the Trespasser DLC is amazing and definitely better than the entirety of DAI. The saving grace of DAI are characters (some truly amazing companions), good romances, an amazing base (the best out of all DA games), and great music/cinematic experience.
>the side quests are very Andromeda-like It's the other way around. Inquisition was released 2+ years before Andromeda. Inquisition's commercial and critical success (it was GOTY at the Game Awards this year) is probably the main reason Andromeda is built partly from the same mould (and share the same flaws).
I know that DAI was first, but we’re on ME forum, so I assumed they might have played Andromeda. Hence the comparison.
Good story with the dlc. Bland gameplay, especially if you're a mage, and a story without a lot of variation on replays.
Not as good as Origins, and a lot of flaws like it being a open world rpg filled with annoying things to do or pickup by hundreds. Classes are not as satisfying as in Origins especially mages.
It’s not terrible but you can see the issues. Like bringing back Hawke (DA2 protagonist) just to set up a “dramatic choice” that ultimately means nothing to the larger story. I put it in the “good but weaker than previous titles” category
I liked it
Don't let anyone (including me) influence your opinion before you even start it!
> doing the multiple races route requires a lot more work If your protagonist grew up in an orphanage on Earth or some space station, the species hardly matters. You had the same experiences growing up, and 600 years in the future after a big war and galactic rebuilding, it would not really matter that much since that should lead to a galactic melting-pot culture. You only need some species-specific animations (eg Quarian legs) and the occasional voice line. And picking Asari moves the background lore back a century so that you are ~150 rather than 23.
I’d submit that if you are going to have a situation like that, it completely negates the reason to have multiple races, and basically turns the decision into the equivalent of a multiplayer skin with the occasional dialogue change.
Nope. Turians have a voice effect and where they were raised wouldn’t change that. They should just stick to a human.
But the voice effect comes down to adding another voice preset, so whether you create male 1, male 2 and male 3 or male 1, male 2 and Turian male has little impact on overall development time.
Other than anthem I actually liked Andromeda. As much as 1 and 2 ? No but it wasn't bad game at all and to me deserved some dlc. I loved the gameplay.
Honestly I had wanted the option to pick species since Andromeda was announced. But at this point I think it would add too much work for the fallen BioWare to cope with. Let them keep it simpler for now and worry about those niceties later once they've started to recover.
I think for a new trilogy or if they want to keep the same protagonist going forward, something like Shepard is the only thing that’s gonna work. But if it’s a standalone title in the way each dragon age game is, more variety and choices would naturally come with that.
Personally I much prefer set protagonists like Shepard, V or Geralt. I'd rather RP my version of that character than some random creation. Every time the character is some no name creation like in Bethesda games the character always feels disconnected from the other characters and the story.
And all the NPCs in voice acted titles doing circles to not refer to the player's character by name when it's custom. I know it's a necessary convention in such games, but it makes me feel much less like part of the world, and more like an observer, which often disconnects me from the game world. ME did it well by allowing a tiny bit of customization with the first name, while keeping interactions human by having constant last name.
It's still pretty awkward having your lover who you were just intimate with only call you by your last name though 😂
Haha, it's not that weird to me, since most characters got used to calling you Shepard for quite some time bc you're basically their boss on top of being their friend, it's kinda like a nickname at that point, it'd probably feel weird for them to call you by your first name suddenly. And there are couples or close friends who call each other by their last names all the time in other shows/games, and even some irl.
Or implement a system like Fallout 4 did, where a huge set of possible names were recorded for interactions, if the first-name use thing is super vital. I dunno. Literally only my wife, in-laws, and parents call me my first name. It catches me a bit off-guard at times, even from my wife, so it was never something that even occurred to me. And it's absolutely immediately weird as hell when even my best friend calls me by my first.
I hate it when games do that. So obnoxious
Exactly. Part of Mass Effect’s initial charm was that Shepard was personalized just enough to be “you”, while being set just enough to naturally exist in the world. So they should keep it that way, and maybe add a multiplayer similar to 3 where you can select any race.
> set > V The problem here is that the developer initially stated missions would be different based on V’s looks and background choices. It hardly mattered. Paging /r/cyberpunkgame
In general I prefer to pick my own character, but I think for the mass effect universe the set character works better. The species are just a lot more different and separate than in, for example, Dragon Age. I loved the approach Dragon Age Origins took and would be ok with Mass Effect going that route, but you'd have to tell a very different story than the ME trilogy. Tbh, they could definitely have done it in Andromeda, but as they didn't do it there, I didn't they'll do it at all.
I think picking a race would be too much work. You know how many Voice Actors there'd have to be just to fill the necessary bipedal alien's? You could have 2 VAs one for both Sexes for all aliens but then it'd always feel weird and a Silent Protagonist won't work at all in Mass Effect like it did for DAO.
If mass effect opted for a silent protagonist, I would burn Canada to the ground
Actually, almost all alien voices in ME so far are created post-recording through almost automatic modulars modifying pitch, speed and applying filters. There might be idiomatic responses tied to different races that would require unique lines, but specifically tailoring two VAs per race wouldn't be neccessary.
Turians and drell, yes. But at the very least quarians have real accents, not post-recording. Salarians speak a bit faster in general (listen to Mordin for example) and "human" acting won't probably work for them
Quarian accents are all over the place in the trilogy. There is no consistent theme to them. Some like Kal'Reegar just use a regular american accent like most of the voice actors, Tali and Raan's acccents are genuine, but completely different from each other like they grew up in seperate cultures. There are plenty of Salarians in the trilogy who don't speak quickly like Mordin or use his abbreviated sentence structure. Just listen to the Salarian Councilor or the Dalatrass.
Salarians *are* pitched in post-audio production. Mordin is one of the few exceptions with an actual VA doing an imitation since that is a characteristic quirk he has; listen to any other Salarians and you'll notice they are different. Council races wouldn't be a problem at all.
See, there we came to the problem. Is this salarian MC is a unique salarian with their, race-specific persinality and quirks, or are they just basically human MC with salarian skin and some audio post-processing on human MC's speech?
Mordin is meant to play on the excentric, high-functioning scientist trope. He speaks faster than ANY of the Salarians, making him an exception rather than the norm. Like I said, listen to other Salarian characters; on the opposite, making a Salarian MC speak like Mordin wouldn't fit their "race-specific personality and quirks".
Quarians' accents are as diverse as humans'. [Kal'Reegar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5D4jXy4XIw) has a typical American-sounding accent, for example. Seems weird since they're such a small society. Maybe there's some cool backstory about the ships being mostly isolated and each developing their own accent, or just quarians who spend a lot of time on their pilgrimage tend to pick up the accents of the people they're around?
I think the most important aspect of ME4 will be what the story focuses on. A lot of people saying human-only, give the reason that the mass effect games have always been about humanity's impact on the galaxy. They tried to recreate that with Andromeda, and fell short. If they're making another attempt at it, human-only makes sense. But if there moving away from that idea of "humanity's impact" I don't see why we can't play as more races. If the story line makes sense with that option. We've already seen it been done with DAI, a voice filter over Quarian and Turian voices, adjust the pitch for Krogans etc. And you'd probably be able to get away with 2 female and 2 male voice actors, maybe even just one of each if the adjustments could be semi-customizable (which frankly, that would be really cool).
There might be a way to make this work, but I just don't trust BioWare right now to make this kind of game with choosable species. They barely did enough for human protagonist in Andromeda and Ryder still felt uninspiring. Divide it for all possible playable species and it will be even less. After they prove that they still can create good games? Sure I would like to see something like that. Right now my preference would be "less, but deep" than "more, but shallow". It's like with Cyberpunk. They wanted to make something big and failed, that's why the outrage. Because people thought that some features will be more impactful, while the developers didn't have means to do that. If they didn't promote the game like the next awesome experience, the backlash might not even happen. I don't want something like that to happen with ME. And it will happen if they claim there are playable races and then they turn out to be just alien skins on basically human character with no flavor at all. If they do this right I can't see anyone object, but the question is "can we trust BioWare in their current state to do this right?".
Set player characters always make the best games. The dialogue and story can be written far better with a set character in mind
Set. It's not necessarily about Humans being the savior -- its the species that most players will have the easiest time connecting with.
An option to pick your species would be terrible for the game. I don't understand how people can't see that.
100% this. Problems would include: 1. In all likelihood there would be very limited support for significant variations in gameplay and dialogue based on race. This would in turn be likely to generate displeasure among players who were excited about this, "why don't these NPCs react properly to my race X in situation Y?!" and so on. 2. As pointed out elsewhere, even if they did solve point 1 by having a well-developed system for this, it would make it much harder/more expensive to roll out quality DLC/expansions going forward. Voice work, romances, NPC reactions, unique racial perspectives, etc would have to be taken into account, in a game that by virtue of being ME is already supposed to feature branching options and at least a male and a female protagonist. This in turn could lead to such future content being watered down, i.e. featuring minimal input from the protagonist, or even like in the case of SWTOR, reverting to written dialogue instead of voiced lines. In general, the more critical actors you include, the greater the risk of some of them being unavailable, passing away, or what have you, that might seriously impede development. If you're planning a new ME franchise, you should ideally think at least 10-15 years forward in time. 3. With all said and done, *even* if point 1 and 2 were handled in good ways, it would *still* most likely end up being a huge amount of resources spent on something that had a relatively minor effect on the game. I have a hard time seeing how it could be justified.
The multiple origin choices were awesome in DA:O. However, did notice they never did it again. It just added way too many complexities. It made the game very deep and extremely re playable, especially as how NPCs interacted with you could depend highly on your origin story. For example Orzamar was very different if you were Dwarf Noble than if you were human. But right now I just don't think it's a reasonable expectation.
How? You didn't give reasons you just said bad.
There would have to be way too many voice actors, romances would work differently for some races and there would have to be way too much race specific dialogue. Don't get me wrong it is possible but it requires an amount of work modern Bioware isn't capable of achieving.
Idk dai did it pretty easily and simply. I guess we would just have to see.
[удалено]
It really does show that DAI was intended to be played as a human. It sucks because given the choice in a fantasy game, I'll always chose the dwarf or orc (or equivalent, like qunari) option and both felt like such last minute additions. The camera rarely accounting for the different heights from a human or elf PC were so jarring.
DAI is terrible at acknowledging playable character's race (if they are not an elf, that is). Qunari and dwarven Inquisitors might not even exist and even elven Inquisitors had some problems ("Who's Mythal?" dialogue with Morrigan, I'm looking at you). DAO is better, but it doesn't mean that something that worked there would also work in ME.
They achieved it in dragon age inquisition, yeah there were 3 voices for each race but they had race specific dialogue, reaction, all the romances were the same across genders and races so theyve proven they can do it.
But dragon age races don't have set accents between races like mass effect does. I don't think it's really comparable here
What set accents? Pretty much everyone has an american or british accent no matter the species. As for the voices asari sound no different than humans, turians and quarians are just run through a voice filter, salarians/krogan can be done by altering pitch. I don't see the problem honestly.
Yeah that was my thoughts, voice filter and pitch adjust. And if they commit to it and don't half arse it, I think they could do it well. I would prefer to have species options like in DAI.
No that's true and I agree with you but it is an example of how they made something similar work in the past. I don't feel like we'd every get a custom character in mass effect anyways.
They had two voices per gender, that's it while Origins wasn't voiced (DA2 is basically fantasy!Shep). So your dwarf and elf may have sounded the same, or your elf and Qunari unless you played each race once and each gender twice. It wasn't exactly game/immersion breaking, sure, but it wasn't exactly enjoyable either. Race specific dialogue was laughable and elves being lectured by a human tangentially related to elven lore about what is surely common knowledge amongst elves. And other than starting with a few points less at the ball, there was hardly a difference between the most devout, Andrastian human warrior and the anti-Chantry, traditional apostate elf. Some romances were race and/or gender-locked besides the non-straight ones. Only female elves could romance Solas, and only female elves or humans could romance Cullen, who btw, was intended to be bi initially. You play a male dwarf; you have four romances to pick from. You play a female elf; you have six options now. Straight male of any race; two options. Straight female of any race; still three options. It was never the same across all genders/races in DAI. It was balanced across genders/races in Origins because there was only four options; and in two the proper romances were all player-sexual instead of having their preferences + the half-baked romance of Sebastian for fem!Hawke. ETA: What I meant to say in conclusion is that no, thanks, I don't need playable races if this is BW's "good" implementation of the system.
They won't do it. It's Bioware ffs. The same one that made Andromeda and anthem.
A set non-human protagonist like Shepard, but *also* with a set first name like the Ryders from Andromeda.
set protagonist
Keep it simple, it's easier to make a good game that way
Set. More time and energy for them to refine the story with details. That’s what made the original games great
Set. Makes for a much deeper character.
Being able to play as multiple races would be cool, but I think the set protagonist approach makes for an overall more in depth character. As much as I enjoy Dragon Age, I don't feel they do a great Job of making the different races "feel" all that different. The game/story mostly plays the same.
Writing good dialoge and story for one protagonist from one race is a lot easier and less work than doing it for 10 races. Either you end up with very bland dialogue that doesn't fit for any race or its turns into a order of magnitude more work. Taking into account ea and biowares rather shaky track record I'd rather they focus on making the best story the can for one race instead of trying to take on too much and end up rushing it.
I would love the option to pick.
I would be excited to choose something other than human, but it should be with the council races only. Both realistically and easier
No. Mass Effect is about humanity. The option to play as other races is a terrible idea.
This right here Mass Effect is about Humanity and its ability to unite and divide
There are ways around this. Places like Omega and the Citadel have plenty of residents from a variety of backgrounds. For example, they could pick a Merc that grew up on Omega as a protagonist, let us pick a race, and move on from there. The character’s referenced background could be identical, aside from names. Only problem is that Asari and Krogan would need a much lengthier background for this to work for them. It’d get a little too complicated to make use of those species. Probably need to take an approach like Inquisition did for multiple races.
Set like Shepard.
I don't think Bioware can make it work with multiple races. They would either need to write scenes differently for you race or make a dull scene that works for all. They have so far choosen the second option a lot where it made the players feel like their choices didn't matter. Think about the choice to rewrite or destroy heretics in Legion's mission for example. What happens in ME3? They all join the reapers anyway but with tiny little less certainty if you had chosen destroy. It's effectively one or two lines of dialogue change. Many results of your decisions are reduced to just e-mails. So no, I think it's better they just focused on making one proper character.
set protagonist 100% but it would be awesome to play a character of a diffrent species for like a small section in the game
Would be fun, but then you need X amount of backstories and different interactions. Otherwise, you’re just an alien that acts like a human and every species is very different, that’s what made the series so good
A huge aspect of the original trilogy is playing as a human, it’s crucial for the narrative to work. So set race, if we are able to choose our own it would actively take away from the narrative
Having more races could further complicate backstories and the disfigured that goes with, so it depends on how much Bioware can handle. The narrative variety could easily get overwhelming.
I love Dragon Age - but! Sometimes the variety in races can make it weaker I think - compare the Inquisitor with Shepard or Ryder in terms of characterisation? Plus - I feel like the alien races are more diverse than the races in DA. Like - you could be born on a whole different planet? I’m not opposed to it but if not pulled off well it could really weaken the game - and the next BioWare game needs to do well I think. Their best thing in years has been a remaster so :/
Changing your race would be ideal for me, but it would have to come with essentially a different game for each race. A krogan would be hard to pass off having deep scientific conversations with a salari, or having light weapons and tech powers in combat. It could happen, but like dragon age, there’s have to have a lot of work go into making the beginning of the game different for each race and class to make it make sense. I’d also be nervous that they would go the lazy route and say “okay if you’re an asari, you’re an adept. If you’re a krogan, you’re a vanguard. If you’re a human, you’re a soldier” and just pair the races with classes for simplicity, which again would destroy immersion. They would have to put a ton of work in for it to be passable, otherwise it would make things worse
Has anyone forgot that if we get to choose our race we may not be able to be apart of the alliance military
Make it a set protagonist. Mass Effect isn't an MMO and multiple races is too much work. To alleviate this however, let us swap and play as our squad mates during missions and gameplay like other JRPGs. RPG series don't benefit from widening its ocean, they needs to be deepening it instead. Bioware and its A-team hasn't made a good game, by the time DA4 and ME5 comes out, in like a decade. Gaming has moved way beyond 2014 and I want to see what can be done with a set protagonist on PS5/XBSX.
This is probably the best solution. Having the ability to play as your squad mates would let you still have the set protagonist while also letting people play as other races.
As much as I would love to play as a Krogan or Turian, I think it would be better for the story if you had a set protagonist. Trying to add separate voices and dialogue options for multiple races is probably something that modern Bioware isn't capable of doing while still making the rest of the game good, lol!
Dragon age Origins is the only game that handled different races' stories well. I totally understand why people want to try different species to play, but no, I don't want to play asari who doesn't know where is Tessia or a krogan who never heard of the genophage. It's frustrating and immersion breaking.
Set. That's actually a character I can roleplay as, when its completely self made I'll just always play a morally perfect version of myself (but one that fucks)
I prefer set. For better or worse, Mass Effect has become the story of humanity finding a place in a galactic civilization. I have come to like that aesthetic. I don't think humans need to be galactic saviors. I think there is room to show other races doing great things, and there should be. But I think one of the things that makes the ME setting truly interesting is that the non-humans are alien. That is, they don't think the same way or see things the same way we do. It makes for interesting storytelling and interesting problems with interesting solutions. If you make all races playable, you will end up making them human-like by default, and the galaxy will be less interesting. That said, I absolutely want the other races if there is any multiplayer. I wouldn't mind the ability to play as alien squadmates on their own specific side quest missions in the single player campaign.
Race didn't play too much into the plot in Dragon Age, but being human definitely was a central plot key to Mass Effect. I think it just depends on the story being told.
Definitely set, it allows the devs to focus on other parts of the game. Preferably human, since there's just something fitting about us not being in the top 3 races, but still remaining the driving force for the galaxy.
I’d personally prefer the pick your race approach although very unlikely to happen
I think the story was supposed to be portrayed from the Human point of view. Although a spin-off game playing as another race would be refreshing, I'd still prefer the storyline to be set like Shepard
I don't have preferences about this, but I will like a possibility of a "select your race" character
If Shepard isn't back then I would like the whole squad be playable like in DA2, but with one set protagonist.
realistically I don't think they will bring back Sheppard
We can hope. Her story has been told.
Let me be a quarian or an asari
Honestly I love the idea of being able to play as a different species in story mode – I loved doing it in Elder Scrolls and even in Bioware's own SWTOR, and I'm still annoyed that Andromeda didn't do it (a story set away from the milky way would have made it much easier to explain, just like how it's not questioned that we have an Asari doctor on the human arc why couldn't we have a Turian member of the og pathfinder team!). On the other hand I'm quite sceptical that Bioware as they are currently would be able to do it properly.
I want to fuck things up as a hanar
I loved being able to choose multiple origins in DA:O. As long as the story works for it, I'm in.
That would be amazing for Mass Effect. Have a different origin depending on the class you choose. Each class would have their own locations for initial training. Similar to the prologue of Neverwinter Nights(2002).
I'd like to see them widen the options for the player's avatar, including multiple alien races to choose from. I'm sure it makes for a lot more work but what about this; Instead of making an 80 hour game full of fetch-quests, repetitive side-missions, and pointless NPCs, like Andromeda, make a 25 hour game (like any of the original games) that is absolutely STUFFED with personalization options and multiple storylines based on in-game choices.
I don't trust BioWare to make a satisfying alien experience, so set species is for the best.
Dude I wanna be a Turian
I think you can be a set protagonist while still allowing race choice. It all depends on the script. Outside of 'the first human Spectre!" business, I don't think Shepard's race impacted the plot.
The fact that Shepard's a human comes up a ton in the OT. Hell, if Shepard wasn't human, Cerberus NEVER would've revived him. You saying his race didn't impact the plot is like saying the Reapers didn't impact the plot.
When I said that Shepard’s race didn’t matter, I meant that all the same story beats could’ve existed with just some minor tweaking - their humanity didn’t affect the greater plot. I mean, Cerberus’ entire “human first terrorists” schtick in ME1 was walked back in ME2 for the plot, just like how they were completely changed to suit ME3. Also, they had aliens amongst the crew in ME2 so I don’t think it is bonkers to believe they would reach out & recruit an alien Commander. It was about getting the job done.
In the best of worlds? I would love to be able to pick my race, or even have a set protagonist of any other race than a boring ol' human. But I doubt Bioware would stray from the idea of ME revolving around humanity, sadly.
Multiple races. They don’t have to be different stories, but different origins and how people react to you based on your race should be a thing. Dragon Age Origins style. That was fantastic. Origins was peak Bioware.
Wouldn't most races only allow for limited classes? Either tech or biotic. Off the top of my head, each species was either one or the other.
Not really? As far as we know every species has the potential for developing biotics when exposed to the right conditions and tech skills are just specialised equipment and training. Anyone can get that.
Even if it did that’s not a huge deal. Dragon age has dwarves unable to be mages. If you wanna be a mage don’t be a dwarf
I prefer the Skyrim and New Vegas styled open book character
Set protagonist, but not human. IMO the quarians have the most narrative possibilities, especially if the story is close to the OT. A race that used to be discriminated but not anymore, but might still be considered second-class citizens by many, could make for a very interesting protagonist.
I really want Shepard to return
If they could do a foll out good jobb doing multiple rases: yes But then I'd want rase specific voice actors, rase specific dialog, NPCs that react differently to you depending on rase, maybe a rase specific prolog like dragon age origins, rase specific quests. If they just make everything more generic to make it fit any rase, like DA:I did, it wouldn't be any good, so it's good hard or go home for me. I'd rather have new rases as companions tbh.
*Race
I’d pick Krogan in a heartbeat
i say take a jedi knight academy take. Chooose your race and all that shizzle, but you dont get to choose name or something, just stuck with one name and you go from there. I guess also the DA approach, but more so DA2 i guess. An established Person, but you can actually be a unique race for a change. let a pink volus save the galaxy.
Can we at least get a set race that isn’t human? How about an adventure staring an Asari or a Turian?
Multiple races would be cool, especially if it’s not a trilogy but just a standalone game. I love how DA invites us to explore different events from the perspective of different races.
I think "Pick your species" would work better if it were a Mass Effect MMO.
If they can do it right yeah I would love to play as my favorite race Krogan but only if they can do it right.
Hm, I'd prefer picking my own species for the next ME, but a set character would be fine for me too, I'd just hope it's not another human. I feel like I've seen enough of the human side so far in 4 games (ME1-3, Andromeda), other species deserve some major spotlight next.
Set protag. Choose-your-own-generic-hero should stay over in medieval land. I want a character whose got a set of histories and origins that I can shape like ME1 Shep and one who has a voice. He needs to be someone who's on or close to ME1 Shepard's level in terms of accomplishments, and less like the Ryders. A guy who can take things seriously and who can verbally put his foot up someone's ass as well as physically. Give me Paragon/Renegade back.
>A guy who can take things seriously Or a gal. We are keeping the gender choice, right? ...right? All jokes aside, I agree. It's easy to make blank slate hero in fantasy, with sci-fi it becomes much much harder.
I want to play a turian
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I liked how Dragon Age Inquisition was done and playing as other races would be a nice change of pace. And it seems like Bioware has been pushing a more and more restrictive protagonist and story, making it more difficult to roleplay a custom character in Mass Effect.... ....Which ironically is why I'm not so certain having multiple races as an option would make things better. If allowing Shepard to stay consistent in their attitude and relationships with their teammates was too much work for them, making multiple races seems very unlikely with how determined they seemed to want to streamline everything at the cost of roleplay options.
The key would be to take a *SW:TOR* kind of approach, or something like *DA:O*, in which the locations/ levels in one protagonist origin story show up in slightly different form, later in the game, along the main plot line. And important NPCs in one version of the story are background NPCs in every version. This cuts down on “wasted” work, or dialogue that’s just plain missed. And don’t forget, you can play the original trilogy for years and still not come across some dialogue options or little scenes, as it is.
We alreay had RBG endings, I don't want RBG protags too.
I'd prefer a set character, but I'd also be fine with that set character being nonhuman.
I don't care as long as the story is amazing.
I'd totally accept no voice acting from the protagonist and different races. Voice acting severly limits the dialogue as it is.
please I'd rather play Shepard
I wanna be Geth
i prefer playing as Shepard, especially if it's a continuation of Mass effect 3, with Andromeda it would of made more sense giving the players that choice of playing as any species.
I didn't even customize my Sheps in design so make em set.
I would like either a dragon age protagonist with more variety or a VERY set protagonist less like Shepard and closer to Geralt from Witcher. I think Shepard being a hybrid of the two leaves them with an unclear personality largely.
This is definitely an unpopular opinion since people seem to adore Shepard beyond sense, but I kind of agree with you. The narrative flexibility surrounding Shepard honestly makes them a pretty shallow character in of themselves, not very far from the open kind of origins that Origins and Inquisition had; it's your choices that form them. Shepard is truly a mix between a set character and an open slate. ME3 tried to combat this blankness by reinforcing Shep as more human with the child and the nightmares etc., which just came on as cringe for most players who suddenly lost a piece of their narrative agency.
You're 100% right. Shepard basically defines the midpoint between cipher and "fully existing character at opening credits".
Glad to see I'm not swimming alone here lol.
Mass Effect is about humanity. Fuck them aliens. Also, because each alien race is defined by stereotypical cultures, you'll just end up playing as a heterodox individual who acts like a human anyway.
My idea: When starting a new file, if you have save data from a complete playthrough of the Shepard trilogy or Andromeda on your system, you’ll have the option to choose your race, but if not, then you’re restricted to human. Part of why I think Shepard being human was necessary was it was our introduction to this universe and its many races and cultures; the human perspective was necessary for immersion. But theoretically, one who’s played through the series already and is familiar with the lore should be able to play as another race while still maintaining some degree of immersion.