BioWare: Gamers Prefer a Manly Shepard

BioWare has released a few more “Fun Facts About Mass Effect 2” including the percentage of people who created a female Shepard, who the most popular squad member was and how many players let that guy out of the thing.

Back in September, BioWare revealed that it had collected a big pile of data about people’s Mass Effect 2 playing habits. They discovered, for instance, that the soldier class was more popular than all other classes combined and that people generally paid attention to the in-game conversations, which had a skip rate of only 15 percent. But that apparently was just the tip of the iceberg, as BioWare recently slipped a whole bunch of new statistics to Destructoid.

Character customization was a highly-touted feature of the game and a whopping 83 percent of players created their own faces for Commander Shepard, but only 18 percent elected to play as a female. That’s not terribly surprising given the heavily male-dominated videogame market, but what I do find shocking is that only 50 percent of Mass Effect 2 players had fully upgraded their ship by the time the game was over.

It’s likely that the figures are skewed by multiple playthroughs, as gamers experiment with their ship and crew to see how it affects the endgame, but it still suggests that a fairly large number of people are overlooking some big parts of the game. That, of course, was the whole point of collecting this stuff; as executive producer Casey Hudson said in September, having access to this kind of data allows BioWare to design even more appealing games in the future.

Other interesting bits of information: Ten percent of players left the Krogan where they found him, an average of 14 percent of the squad dies in the suicide mission, Archangel was one of the most popular squad members for side missions and 36 percent of players made the Renegade choice during the big finish.

As for me, I fully upgraded my ship, the whole crew loved me (even the surly one in the basement), we all came out of the Big Thrilla in one piece and let’s just say I’m probably not on the Illusive Man’s Christmas card list anymore. How did you do?