Jennifer Hale has appeared in a great many more games than you probably realise. The person behind the voice of the female Shepard in all three Mass Effect games is also responsible for Metal Gear’s Naomi Hunter, SOCOM’s HQ, and even the grunts and groans of Metroid Prime’s Samus. And of course her spookily good British accent as KotOR’s Bastilla. Amongst literally hundreds of others, in gaming, TV and film. We caught up with Jennifer as she drove through LA, to ask how she came to provide so many of gaming’s iconic voices, the combination of anonymity and fame, and which of the Commander Shepards she’s voting for to appear on Mass Effect’s cover.>

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Oh dear, there appears to have been some kind of mistake here. Bioware, as part of their long-awaited marketing acknowledgement of the female version of Mass Effect hero Shepard, have offered fans the option to vote for which of six new versions of FemShep (I really dislike that portmanteau for reasons I can’t entirely pinpoint, but it seems rather too late to resist it now) will be added to the character creator options in Mass Effect 3. However, none of them look like the FemShep I know, and thus presumably you know. Mysterious! Someone must have uploaded some fan-art by mistake, right?
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As if I needed any further proof that other people are wrong, BioWare have revealed to VG247 that only 18% of Mass Effect players pick the lady Shepard. With the obviously better choice finally getting recognised by the game’s marketing, that less than a fifth of gamers pick the Jennifer Hale-voiced heroine genuinely surprises me. Because, well, girls are best.

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We don’t tend to do too much in the way of ‘person x changes job’ stories here, which is primarily because the knowledge that disgusting organic creatures are responsible for our beautiful, clean, matter-free digital worlds is a horrifying truth we can’t accept, but also because… well, people do change jobs. This one stood out to me, however, due to both source and destination. The lead gameplay designer on Mass Effect 2 and 3, Christina Norman, has left Bioware – but to go where? Oh, that’s right, it says it in the headline. Yeah, League of Legends dev Riot Games.

So, from a console-straddling mainstream RPG/action developer that’s bigger than it’s ever been to the young home of devoutly hardcore multiplayer PC games.
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Despite admitting that they’ve yet to figure out any kind of useful multiplayer for Mass Effect, Bioware’s Casey Hudson has said that the idea of an MMO in the universe “makes sense”. Speaking to world-bestriding super-magazine Game Informer, he said: “Part of what you’re trying to do is save the universe so you can live in it. That’s part of the promise, I think, for any great IP. It has to be a world worth saving… I think Mass Effect has that quality to it. If you get rid of the Reapers and win that, wouldn’t it be amazing to just live on the Citadel or just take a ship to Omega? That makes sense.”

I feel like any genuine space-life MMO would be pretty amazing, and perhaps Eve Online will manage that in the coming years. Or maybe Bioware will make a space MMO of some kind. Hmm. Thanks, VG247.

Spoilers! Get yer spoilers ‘ere! Only three quid a dozen! Howzabout that then ma’am, a punnet full of Mass Effect 3 details, yours for just a paaaaarnd.

Actually, I’m guessing these are not especially meaty ME3 spoilers, as rather than spoiling late-game plot stuff they document the status quo for Shepard and chums at the start of Bioware’s next galactic opus – but if you really do want to go in totally blind you should look away now.
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I’m regularly taken aback by how quietly enormous> Mass Effect is. While common conception is that EA’s getting its mega-corp bottom kicked by Activision, it’s got a breadth of franchises that it’s CoD’n'WoW-dependent rival does not – and Bioware’s sweeping space opera universe is one of the foremost of those. It’s really doing the Star Wars thing, I guess, as there was perhaps a vast sci-fi fandom void waiting to be filled in the wake of Lucas’ long-running exploitation/ruination of its galaxy far, far away.

So it makes perfect sense that Mass Effect would turn to other mediums – specifically, movies. Well, anime movies.
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