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Great Moments in Advertising

BioWare Pledges to Totally Acknowledge Female Shepard in Mass Effect Marketing This Time

by Susana Polo | 4:15 pm, June 16th

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Okay, here’s the background on this one. Bioware has so far released two Mass Effect games. Both these games are action RPGs where the player takes on the role of one Commander Shepard. Shepard can be male or female, depending on the whim of the player, a choice that has effect on the pronouns used throughout the game, certain (but not all) romance choices, and the recorded dialogue, where Shepard is voiced by two actors, Mark Meer for ManShep (or BroShep), and Jennifer Hale for FemShep. But this is where the gender differences end: all dialogue choices are the same, and even Shepherd’s body language and movements are kept the same between models.

What fans of Mass Effect have found peculiarly in common is that at majority of the game’s player population overwhelmingly prefers to play Shepard as a woman, for a number of reasons, including what is considered to be a better voice acting performance from Jennifer Hale. In light of this, many people have wondered why Bioware’s marketing team doesn’t seem to understand what the fans have discovered.

As has been pointed out in the advertising of other games, if one only had the advertising images to go by, one might never find out that there was even an option to play as a woman. (More on why game advertisers need to start considering that women are interested in their games too here.) Bioware predominantly featured ManShep in the box art and other non-gameplay art leading up to the release of Mass Effect 2, and gamers clamored to see their Shepard represented as legitimate as any other.

Earlier this week, Bioware’s director of marketing David Silverman let everyone on Twitter know that FemShep will be getting her due in the publicity for Mass Effect 3:

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t come out for almost a year, so that leaves plenty of time for fans of FemShep to feed their Mass Effect jones with trailers and official art.

(GamePro via Tipster Hillary! Thanks!)

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  • Kath

    Last I checked, the rough percentage of female Shepards being chosen in Mass Effect 2 was 20%, which isn’t an overwhelming majority.

    As for why ManShep is used everywhere? Simple. He’s both the default and canonical version of Shepard, just as the canonical Revan (From KotOR) is male, although I believe the Jedi Exile from KotOR2 is canonically female.

  • http://twitter.com/relmneiko relmneiko

    Where does it say that MShep is canon? There’s certainly a default MShep and FShep, but neither is ever chosen as canon.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kristin-Frederickson/852880113 Kristin Frederickson

    What makes you say maleshep is canon? I don’t think being the default character automatically makes him the “true” Shepard.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kristin-Frederickson/852880113 Kristin Frederickson

    Thank-you Susana Polo. The fact that Shepard is always depicted as male, despite being a customizable character with no canon, always ticked me off.

    Now how much do you wanna bet that both marketing maleshep and marketing femshep turn out white?

  • http://twitter.com/katytron katytron

    It always really bothered me that the female Shephard was never seen in the ads for mass effect, so this is great news :)

  • Ceili

    Awesome, awesome news. I’m always irritated Bioware always seemed to only pay reference to the male versions of their characters. It bothered me in Dragon Age, too. Hopefully this also means more F x F romancing options for once, too, though I doubt it.

  • Ceili

    Awesome, awesome news. I’m always irritated Bioware always seemed to only pay reference to the male versions of their characters. It bothered me in Dragon Age, too. Hopefully this also means more F x F romancing options for once, too, though I doubt it.

  • Anonymous

    I’m really pleased about this – I always feel disappointed when games that actually give you quite a range of options for character customisation but the box art and trailer is the same old white male.

    Now let’s hope they put female nonhumans other than Asari and Quarians in the game too.  We know the female Krogan are all squirrelled away on Tuchanka trying to breed and female Salarians are all off being puppetmasters on their homeworlds, but where the heck are all the female Turians, BioWare?  Where the heck are the female Volus and Elcor and Drell?

  • JackieDee7

    This is very exciting! I love bioware and their games and I think it’s great that they pay attention to what their fans are saying! On a side note, like that you chose the Garrus romance scene for the picture; niiiiice.

  • Anonymous

    Is there actually a canon Shepard, though?  If so, Bioware’s gone out of their way to avoid drawing any attention to it.  To the point, in fact, that the comic book published between Mass Effect 1 and 2 scrupulously avoids using any pronouns for Shepard, and even makes a joke about his/her body being burned so far beyond recognition that you can’t tell whether it’s a man or a woman.

    P.S. Spoilers.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_7G4SWUX2MCWWXLMYNN347JMIZY Frodo Baggins

    I prefer SheepShep, where Shepard is a foxy even-toed ungulate. What? Don’t judge.

  • Anonymous

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  • Anonymous

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  • http://twitter.com/pixiaq Ashley C.

    Yay! This is awesome! Female Shepard is so ingrained in my brain as Commander Shepard that I once asked my boyfriend what game he was playing when he was playing as male Shepard. Whoops.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kimberly-Farley/6018811 Kimberly Farley

    “Mass Effect 2 doesn’t come out for almost a year, so that leaves plenty of time for fans of FemShep to feed their Mass Effect jones with trailers and official art.”

    Eeep, typo: Mass Effect *3* doesn’t come out for almost a year.

    So excited for FemShep. I had a similar feeling of “harumph” over Lady!Hawke in Dragon Age II — that is, she was such a badass chick with great voice acting and pretty character design, but she was never on any of the boxes or in any of the promo materials. I believe she got a single screenshot to herself, or something like that. I checked EA’s page and they still only have one of her prominently in their screenshots (that I saw, perhaps I overlooked another), which was at least a different shot than the pre-release shot of her face that I was thinking of.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/IJMRQUXPA2TBPWFDXPZXY7LRR4 MJB

    They’ve got roughly 33 days left. I hope they get a femshep trailer out soon.