@rafaelfc said:

looks a bit like Ashley Birch.

She's good! <3 Chloe

That seems like a terribly wonderful idea, having the protagonist be voiced by the Burches.

Consider how terribly alien your companions were throughout Mass Effect. Personality-wise, they weren't particularly strange or impenetrable at all. Outside of cases where you're particularly getting into the nitty gritty of their respective culture, alien companions tended to behave in a manner as people (or at least our understanding of "people") are wont to do. Which is to say, they already in many ways acted "human." The reactions of a human player character wouldn't really be so greatly distinct from one you might expect to get from Liara or Garrus. That was a huge takeaway from all of these games: how relatable each of the species were merely as other people.

In the case of Andromeda, you wouldn't really need to focus down on what an "Asasi background" or a "Krogan background" would mean to the narrative. What would matter would be the "Milky Way background." You could have minor differences, sure, but ultimately everyone would be there for the same reason. It would also be a great way to tie up and reference the original trilogy by having some of the more prominent species playable as a main character, as the Milky Way was essentially united by the end of things. Now, going into another galaxy, they'd all basically be in the same boat heading forward.

The only stories that would be handicapped would be ones expressly lionzing humans, which the first Mass Effect sorta did as an underdog story (and to some degree the second; Ceberus was xenophobic right?). I'd imagine at this point in the series, we'd kinda be past the whole "rah rah humans!" thing. The air of superiority inherent to the Reapers trying to make a "human" Reaper was already pretty dumb, and Andromeda's whole pitch is already a bit close to sounding like Mass Effect: Manifest Destiny.

You will be ablet o customize your character, that is a hall mark of the series. The Sheps I created and brought through all 3 games is my sheps, it would be dumb to have a stock main character.

@theht: It's not about having a "rah rah humans!" story. It's about having fairly unique story tailored to the main character so he/she is actually a character instead of blank slate so generic changing his/her species wouldn't even matter.

That's what happenned in DA:O. Sure, the unique origin was cool and it felt meaningful when that origin weaved its way back into the narative but the rest of the time (80-90% of the game) your character was a bland nobody.

@nightriff: ME had a stock main character. The one that showed up in all the trailers. I much prefer that one compared to the generic looking dudes you could make in the editor.

@pyrodactyl: And I preferred my edited character that looked like Vin Diesel (not on purpose but maybe subconsiously). Never liked the default sheps. I would just be surprised if this is a character you couldn't make male/female, black/white, face tat or no face tat. Part of me also wants to be able to pick different races but if the point of the game is find a new home for humanity, that probably isn't going to happen.

It goes without saying there will be a character editor

I mean, obviously there will be a character creator. I don't think anyone would assume otherwise. Still, the Norwegian model male Shep looked a lot better than anything you could make with the character just from a fidelity standpoint. The default femshep they added in ME3 also looked better than the character creator females, though not being a face scan it wasn't quite as drastic.

Given how great the faces looked in the brief footage we saw today coupled with the high quality of the character creator in Dragon Age Inquisition (Bioware's first Frostbite game), I have a good feeling that the character creator will be much more capable of making good looking characters than the one from the trilogy.

As long as they let me make my own character.

@ll_exile_ll: I'm hitting myself trying to figure out how I missed this part of the game.

@colourful_hippie: Did you play the citadel DLC for ME3? It's chuckfull of scenes like this one.

@pyrodactyl: I did but I think I mainlined that DLC. I'm trying to rack my brain remembering when this happened. Was it a side mission?

I'm inclined to believe it is in fact the MC.

It takes place during the "party prep" portion of the DLC after the main missions. Each character has one or two scenes each that they email you about and this is Javik's. If you started the party too quickly after the missions you may have missed some of these scenes.

That's probably not the new main character. There was some leaked footage on NeoGaf where they showed you playing a character that was certainly male.

I can't tell if you're being serious...

In case you are, this is Bioware. You'll be able to play as a male or a female.

I really wish we could play as one of the other races in the ME universe. It would be a bit of extra work for them, but I think it would have been worth it. I'd love to play as Asari, Krogan or a Turian. The girl shown could be the default female model for the MC or she could be an important character in the story. Its hard to tell.

I'm not sure how you took my "rah rah humans!" comment about how the only narrative an alien main character would interfere with is one that props up human beings to suggest that they cannot tell a unique story tailored to the main character--and also have them not be a blank slate--if they do not make being human the only choice.

They already did it with Inquisition, and it'd frankly be easier to narratively pull off here, for reasons already stated. And again, there's nothing about the aliens that distinguishes them so greatly that the main character must be some blank slate for it work, nor is there anything about Mass Effect that would prevent a unique and tailored story from being applicable to many of the alien species.

You're really overestimating the differences between the humans and aliens in Mass Effect.

I hope its just the avatar and you can make your own character, hopefully not limited to human this time.

@theht: You know, I was trying to not bring up DA:I to not hurt my point because I tought the protagonist was bland in that too but tought you could only play as a human (I played a human). Turns out the protagonist was super bland partly because he was a blank slate you could fit any race onto. Oups

It's shitty that this is the best argument we can have about Andromeda only a few months out from its release.

6-8 months

Seems like EA figured out femshep is way superior to male shep.

@pyrodactyl: The Inquisitor was actually in line with Shepard. They occupy similar narrative roles, executed with similar degrees for player-driven characterization.

The basic premise of Andromeda is even more open-ended than uniting the galaxy against an ancient alien threat, or the world against an ancient darkspawn threat, or some other big world-ending nonsense. An alien main isn't some guarantee for being blank or bland (unless your definition of "blank" and "bland" ultimately amounts to having a multitude of characterization options to focus down on yourself).

I don't know about you guys but Dragon Age: Inquisition bored me to bits in many ways.

@theht They have to start over with the world building now, despite the pre-established fiction from previos Mass Effect instalments. I find that very exciting!

It's definitely not Shepard. If you remember last year they showed a video of Shep sending off the new generation in to space.

To be fair Dragon Age's non-human Inquisitors were fucking terrible. Qunari are my favourite race but playing one as the MC is the most immersion breaking thing I have ever seen, they didn't even remotely try and tailor the story to try and fit it so you essentially just played a human with horns which defeats the purpose of playing a different race if you can't actually roleplay as one.

I kinda don't believe that this character is the default new protagonist. No slight to whatever real life model they based it on, but that is one ugly, uncanny 3D Bioware face. And their standard ones for Shepard were better looking than their regular ugly mugs. I'd expect a new default to look better than that.(But also whatever, I'm gonna customize my own Shepard just as usual)

It doesn't matter for the story at all(I was a dwarf and I don't believe it ever came up), but I like having different models to choose from. It's no Dragon's Dogma character creator, but at least you get to choose if you want to be a huge bulky person or a really short one. So even if you can only play as a human, I hope they keep that aspect of customization. But also, like someone said above: If the speculation is to be believed, then everyone in this game are gonna be refugees that all warped together through a portal into a new galaxy, so presumably everyone would kinda have the same origin anyway.

I think Bioware employees have said that Mass Effect generally will have a single more defined protagonist like Shepard, while DA games will be more traditional in how you can select race at the start. DA2 was an aberration in that regard i think.

It seems like the new main character, or at least, one of its possible looks.

I think she looks decent, and if Bioware is willing to use her as the default option I am going to use her too. It was weird in the last ME having my own Shepard and then seeing all the promotional material showcasing another guy.

Whatever it is, can't contain the feels!

Post of the... well, the entirety of E3.

I see what you did there.

Yes, you could. But to be fair, gender within a species is hell of a lot less of a demarcator than being different species of animal from different world (are e.g. turians even animals? Or some other type of life form?). Having men and women behave and be treated almost exactly the same save for a few situations may not be entirely realistic, but you can say that it's the future and gender is a social construct anyway. Having the main character be of a different species would lead to quite a few narrative considerations, if you want it to be done well.

There's also another reason why I'll give it a pass in Dragon Age. The different races in Dragon Age (like in, say, the Witcher) are more or less stand-ins for different human cultures and ethnicities, ones that have existed in the world of humans, alongside humans (which you could argue are a stand-in for white people and white men in particular) and playing on the tensions between them is a commentary on racism and other bigotry. You can make a similar argument for scifi, I suppose, but they go to certain lengths in Mass Effect to make the species, or at least some of them, feel completely alien, both socially and biologically, so as to give you the feeling of exploring new worlds. There's probably some clever critique of colonialism somewhere in there, but even if that's the case, telling that story from the perspective of a human explorer into a new, strange and alien world would probably serve Andromeda's narrative framing better than having the opportunity to water it down by having the player be able to choose any species as the main character.

Now, that said, I'd be all for a Mass Effect story told from the point of view of an alien species, maybe even having to deal with human explorers/invaders. But that's an entirely different story to begin with, and not one that could easily be shoehorned into what Andromeda seems to be shaping into (which is a soft reboot of the Mass Effect universe). Adding the opportunity to play as turian or asari would just lead to the Dragon Age syndrome, except with how Mass Effect frames its story, it would make a lot less sense.

That said, I'm sure they're so desperate to please people, i.e. sell copies of the game, that if you just harass them on Twitter about it, they'll probably let you play as a god damn hanari.

@blackout62 said:

@rafaelfc said:

looks a bit like Ashley Birch.

She's good! <3 Chloe

That seems like a terribly wonderful idea, having the protagonist be voiced by the Burches.

Sure if you find here voice delightful then it probably is a wonderful idea. For me that would just be a terrible idea.

As long as i can make John Shepard i don't care :)

Yeah, that's the problem with writing scifi. We don't want other worlds, we want mirrors, as Lem said, I believe. I do think they made some of the more obscure species truly non-human, but it's a mainstream video game after all, so they made the concession of a lot of the companion characters be a bit too human. On the other hand, you could argue that it was Shepard and the player who was anthropomorphizing them, and actually playing from their perspective, you'd have to be intimately aware of their culture and biology, not just the outsider's perspective that Shepard had. If done well, it would require quite a different story to be told well (see my previous post for further comments). But alas, people probably would be content with the Dragon Age approach, i.e. that the difference in species doesn't actually matter that much, it's just flavor (which is not bad in itself, just different from how I've seen Mass Effect).

I wouldn't actually mind if they hit some Manifest Destiny notes, if they handled it well. It's not like racism has disappeared from the world, it's still a fine enough theme to tackle in 2017 (or 2018, or whatever). I just hope that they do it differently enough from how Dragon Age, Witcher, and other fantasy handles it. And that they do it well, in any event. I wouldn't want Mass Effect to just be Avatar.

@jonny_anonymous: @rahf: I suppose it's obvious at this point that I didn't feel the same way about Inquisition. Yet, again, in the case of Mass Effect Andromeda, narratively it would much more easily fall in line than an outsider Inquisitor, as all the species are settlers from the Milky Way. If it's just humanity moving galaxies, that's likely to raise more questions than simply playing an Asari would.

Because they're starting over with the world-building, but clearly aren't leaving established alien species behind, they're apt to utilize those species in a way that they couldn't before by making them player-character options. Andromeda would be new for them as well, and having that history behind them, there wouldn't be much need to delve into their species' history. Personality-wise, the aliens have all exhibited characteristics in-line with a human's; characteristics that nothing about past BioWare games would suggest you couldn't exhibit with your own main character, alien or not.

Whether you feel BioWare could pull it off I suppose is another thing, but having it wouldn't mean the player-character's story couldn't be unique, or that their characterization (or options for characterization rather) would be blank or bland. Focusing only on humans would be in line with a rebooted trilogy, but because this isn't really a hard reboot, and they are in-fact using elements of past games, it'd be disappointing if at this point in the series they didn't expand on character options.

I wouldn't expect you to be able to play as a Hanar or an Elcor (as fun as that would be), purely because they actually are pretty different in a few respects, especially physically. I also wouldn't put too much weight on Shepard's influencing of companions. The aliens themselves already had a united council (that later expanded to include humanity). The same common ground in being between the species is what made them relatable, and change in understandable ways. Liara the information broker, Garrus the vigilante, Wrex the leader. They were already cultures with people who, at their core, are individuals. The difference in species already doesn't matter much, just like it doesn't in Dragon Age. The games are almost always about reaching out to others and finding a common footing (if you choose to play them that way anyways).

Because of that common footing, and the easily understandable sort of paths we've seen past alien characters go down, an alien story doesn't actually have to be very different to one also applicable to a human; certainly not one when the crux of it is ostensibly focused on exploring and settling in a new galaxy. I say ostensibly because there's probably gonna be some big threat to everyone lurking behind the unknown, which is just as important to--and as easily carried by--an alien main character all the same.

If they handled it well I guess is the biggest caveat of everything. Alien player-character options could be great if handled "well," as exploring Manifest Destiny could also be if handled "well." I'm sure at some point they'll address the right of beings from the Milky Way to expand into another galaxy, but if their explanation boils down to "colonizing because we da best," it'll be a bummer. I've got a bit more faith in their storytellers than to expect that, but the marketing so far as been pretty "woo, wild frontier."

@theht: Maybe you're right, maybe there never was much difference between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. But it did feel different to me. Maybe it's just the way the story was told in Mass Effect, then, rather than any specific quality of the companion characters that made them unfit for a point-of-view character. I guess I personally kinda liked that part of it, much as I liked looking at things from a certain perspective with Geralt in the Witcher. A lot of the same themes are present, but I feel it allows a writer much more freedom to actually write in depth when you focus on something like that. Everything's possible, I guess. You're right that "done well" is the biggest caveat. But it's a lot easier to do something well when you have a more or less set perspective to write from, even if you allow for variance in flavor. Similarly, I think with a set perspective, it'd be easier to tackle colonialism and the frontier etc. than it would with a main character that isn't set.

But again, of course, I'll be content with anything that's done well.

And by antropomorphizing his/her companions, I didn't mean that Shepard actually influenced them (although I think he/she did). I meant that Shepard interpreted their behavior in the context of human behavior, much like we do with animals of other species. Of course, the situation in Mass Effect is a bit different since all the species are at least the level of human intelligence, if not more intelligent. Nevertheless, you could make the argument that the player saw the other species as human because that's what humans inherently do, we don't necessarily have the tools to think and feel beyond that context. But of course, that's just a reading, and likely not what the developers of ME were thinking. Not that that really matters.

@ihmishylje: Fair enough, but a set perspective could very easily become incongruous with the range of characterization options modern BioWare games have consistently strived for.

I think Geralt and The Witcher series is an almost wholly better-written game series, not necessarily because of a somewhat more focused protagonist, but because of the ability of the writers behind the scenes, which just speaks to the whole "if done well" thing. As great as BioWare is, I'd say CD Projekt Red is just a higher quality developer. The former already focused down their narrative perspective some in Dragon Age 2, and while I really enjoyed what they did with it, a lot of people fuckin hated it. Point being that at some point the problems and concerns people seem to have may just lie with BioWare, and some particular design choice won't automatically lead to better writing for them.

I love that they are using the female "shep" for promotion, and I really like the design. As long as the story and choices are deeper and more diverse than in MS3, I'm in.

@theht: No argument there, regarding the different abilities of the writers.

Qunari were poorly implemented, but the other races were handled much better. Elves in particular actually had a lot of unique dialogue.