The female Shepard might not everyone’s choice, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of people falling in love with her.
It may have taken three games to do it, but BioWare is finally featuring the female Shepard in Mass Effect marketing. The default Commander Shepard is male, but BioWare has acknowledged that the female version – often referred to as “FemShep” – has plenty of fans too, and will feature her in a new trailer.
BioWare laid the groundwork for this decision back in May, when marketing director David Silverman told his Twitter followers to speak up if they wanted the trailer. The very next day, Silverman said that he had woken up to hundreds of messages saying yes. Silverman confirmed that FemShep would appear on the collector’s edition box art on June 11th, and confirmed on June 14th that a trailer was in the works.
Interestingly, it seems that BioWare hasn’t decided what the default appearance for the female Shepard will be. It’s hard to believe that it will be all that different from the default female model from the first two games, but BioWare may surprise us yet.
Figures released by BioWare suggest that only around one fifth of Mass Effect players use FemShep, but clearly they’re a persuasive lot. BioWare does seem to be trying to be more inclusive with Mass Effect 3 though, as evidenced by the inclusion of homosexual romance options – something the studio has shied away from before with the Mass Effect games – and this could be another part of that effort. Of course it could also be a marketing ploy. Heck, it could be both.
Mass Effect 3 comes out for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on March 6th, 2012.
Source: GamePro
Published: Jun 16, 2011 05:27 pm