Regarding the Facebook voting for the new default femshep: I think it’s nice to see Bioware upgrading her default look. Sheploo has a very high quality model compared to his female counterpart, who was just made with the character creator. I think the move is less likely to garner additional profits than it is goodwill amongst pre-existing ME fans.

I find it rather sad, though, that people are calling the BlondeShep the “stereotypical” or “racist” or “teenage boy” option. There was a thread on the Bioware forums a little while back in which people were posting pictures of actresses they thought would make a good model for the new FemShep, and the vast majority of the actresses were of vague ethnicity, but generally with dark hair and amazing cheekbones. What is it about Shepard’s character that makes people (or at least the vocal forumgoers) think she can’t be blonde? Are blondes somehow less badass than brunettes or redheads? (I myself am blonde so I might be a little bit biased. A little.)

1) The more interesting question, IMO, is how many gamers would choose the male Shepherd if the female Shepherd was the default model? Personally, I tend to play plot-centric games the way I imagine the designers intended the game to be played. In games like Fallout or WoW, the game is 99% the same no matter what you do, so I go for aesthetics. In Dragon Age though, I went for aesthetics (picking a female character) and ended up in the strikingly bizarre position of seducing a man only to have to later convince him to get another party member pregnant. Had I just picked a generic dude, I could have cut out the middleman and got her pregnant myself, making the event far less creepy and much more emotional.

I know nothing about the plot of Mass Effect, but I do know you can have sex with aliens. Ergo, I will choose the male Shepherd on my first playthrough.

Seriously though, that Dragon Age experience probably messed me up. Just remembering the frustration in navigating Alistair’s romance dialog while shouting “I would have had me at ‘hello!’” paled in comparison to the horror of what I realized I was doing when he shirtlessly faded-to-black… with my female dwarf.

2) Even if only 18% of gamers chose the FemShep, the question should not be “is it worth money to record all that dialog/etc?” The question should be “how expensive is it going to be versus the chance that any of that 18% choose not to pick up the game as a result?” If Bioware comes out ahead profit-wise as long as 5% of gamers choose one particular model, it is worth including that model by definition (up to a point, obviously). There is also the psychological benefit of having choices, even if you pick the same thing every time.

For myself, even though I tend to play a mixture, I don’t think I’d pick up a game that restricted some classes to one sex. Maybe if there was a really, really good lore reason and there were both female only and male only classes. Maybe.

But if they did that, the message to all players is that you can play any class you like if you choose a male but your female characters have fewer options just because of their sex. In any game where players can choose male or female characters, offering anything less than perfect symmetry sends a strong message about how the developers consider gender equality.

Also, the female Worgen numbers may be low because Blizzard didn’t get the model to look right, so people don’t want to play them as much.