Mass Effect 3 – what we want to see

We don’t know much about Mass Effect 3. But we do know what we want to see before our personalized Commander Shepard saves the universe in the final chapter of the trilogy. Match your wish list against ours and let us know what you think.

Kill a Commander Shepard clone

Every hero needs to confront his dark side. Luke did it in The Empire Strikes Back, Cecil did it in Final Fantasy IV, and Shepard should do it in Mass Effect 3. If you remember, your Shepard in Mass Effect 2 was actually brought back from the dead by the Ceberus organization. So if they can do that, it’s not inconceivable that there could be a rogue clone of the original Shepard up to no good somewhere out there in space.

We’d love to see a side mission that finds you hunting down an imposter Shepard who’s ruining your good (or bad name), perhaps giving you a glimpse at the kind of commander you might have been had you made different decisions during the first two games.

Above: Good Ash meets bad Ash in Army of Darkness. It should be like that, only not as funny 

A solution for SDTV owners

Maybe in the near future, everyone will be playing games on fat HDTV’s in 720p or 1080p. But we’re not quite there yet. Players rocking an old school standard-definition TV had trouble reading through the text in Mass Effect, and that’s just a shame. Scrolling through your party members’ stats and your inventory list is one of the finer pleasures of the RPG connoisseur. But players with a standard-definition set also missed out on a lot of the great Mass Effect lore BioWare loaded into its in-game encyclopedia, the Codex.

Mass Effect isn’t the only game with text that’s difficult to read on some standard definition TVs, but it’d be nice to see some kind of solution that will allow fans who don’t have an HD TV to read all the extra awesome lore that didn’t get a voiceover in Mass Effect 3.

Above: Everyone should be able to read about everything from FTL drive technology to the history of the Asari race, regardless of whether or not they own a nice HD TV 

Speaking to The Escapist, BioWare released an official statement about the difficult-to-read text in Mass Effect 2, which provides some hope for bleary eyed fans who tried to read the text in the original:

“After investigating potential solutions, we have determined that while this issue does affect a small portion of SDTV owners, we are unable to resolve it for Mass Effect 2 through a title update. However, we have taken note of this issue and will take it into consideration as we plan future games in the Mass Effect franchise.”

Tali should be kind of ugly

The Quarian mechanist was one of the most popular members of Shepard’s crew, but even though you got to romance her in Mass Effect 2, you never got to see her face. That’s why we’re betting that you you’ll get to see what she really looks like in Mass Effect 3.

We just hope that when you finally lift the veil from her face, she doesn’t turn out to be too pretty. Here’s the thing. Tali is smart, she’s funny, and she’s kind of geek when it comes to ship technology. So she’s pretty much the perfect in-game soul mate for anyone who’s been following an RPG trilogy for about five years. If you’re like us, your love for Tali is more pure than an un-played NES in mint condition; it just transcends simple physical attraction. So making her gorgeous in a traditional sense would just ruin everything, because you’ve already grown to like her without having a clue as to what she really looks like.

At the very least, Tali needs some kind of horrible skin condition and perhaps a disturbing lip scar, something weird enough to make her shy about unmasking, but not so hideous that you’ll wind up racing through your radial menus for the option to back out of the conversation.

Above: Tali is the best. If you didn’t do her loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, something is seriously wrong with you 

Above: Here’s some fan art, which was tweeted by a BioWare artist earlier this year Some facial circuitry will work well, too. But we think this Tali still looks too good