Mass Effect: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Shepard
1. The Original Character Model For Shepard Was FemShep
Although the Mass Effect games allowed the player to choose between a Male Shepard and a Female Shepard, Bioware, until Mass Effect 3, heavily promoted the male version as the 'main' Shepard in their advertising and on the game's box art.
However, it's recently been revealed that in Bioware, during the initial planning phase of the game, Commander Shepard was a woman, not the male model used most commonly.
In a Tweet from Jonathan Cooper in 2015, who worked at Bioware on ME1 and 2 before moving to Naughty Dog, he said: "Ten years ago this month, my very first anim test for Mass Effect. Yup, Commander Shepard was originally a woman."
The tweet is accompanied by a video of wireframe model of Commander Shepard running, and it's quite clearly the female variant.
By the time Mass Effect 3 rolled around, Bioware listened to their fans who were clamouring for more FemShep, and allowed them to vote on and decide on a reversible cover of the game which featured the female protagonist instead.
Still, as we've already established, over 80% of players chose to play as Male Shepard. It would be interesting to see if Bioware had marketed the female version from the start, if more players would have chosen that version instead.
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Know any other interesting facts about Shepard we've missed out? Sound off down in the comments.