Every Saturday, we ask our PC Gamer writers an important question about PC gaming (see the complete history of PCG Q&As here). This week: do you create yourself in character creators, or someone else? It got weird. We welcome your contributions in the comments, too. 

Tim Clark: Judges those who create themselves

Tim: I literally never make myself and I consider it a substantial character flaw in anyone who does so. Why in sweet Cthulhu's name would I want to look at my own face bobbing around on screen for any longer than strictly necessary? Or worse, my own ass bobbing. One ex-colleague* always painstakingly made himself, and when the rest of the team found out we reacted with borderline (read: actual) disgust. 

I tend to prefer ladies or robots in terms of character creation, largely because at some point designing any sort of buzzcut dudebro became eye-bleedingly boring. Essentially, if I'm going to spend 80+ hours with an avatar, I'd rather it be a cool lady or sassy robot. Oh, and I don't know if this is relevant to what you're asking, but I will always select an asymmetric bob haircut if available. Even on the robots.*Leon Hurley.

Andy Kelly: Tries to make someone interesting, then gives up

Andy: I always go in with the intention of making someone truly interesting. A unique character that will stand out from the crowd. But then, as I jockey the sliders back and forth, I get anxious about what I'm going to think of this person in twenty or thirty hours. Maybe I'll find them annoying and resent having them as my avatar. And so I relent, dragging the sliders back to the middle, making as generic and unremarkable a human as possible. Someone inoffensive and totally forgettable. A blank slate. As for making myself, I can't think of anything more illusion-shattering than seeing my own face peering back at me when I play a game.

Steven Messner: Shut up, Tim

Steven: Tim is rude and his opinions are mean because I, no matter what, will always make a version of myself in a character creator. This doesn't stem from some narcissistic need to see myself portrayed as the hero in games, but is actually more of an ongoing challenge to try and create as near a likeness to my face as possible. Sometimes I'll even look in a mirror to try and compare my creation with my own face. Making the two look similar is more challenging than you'd think, because character creators—despite all their sliders and eyebrow styles—often don't allow for a wide array of facial styles and nuance. I don't know why I do this, I just do. 

I guess if I'm being honest here, there's probably a little bit of wish fulfillment in recreating my appearance in a character creator too. As a man born without much facial hair, I'm comfortable enough with myself to admit that, yes, I do have some beard envy. I definitely never mess with the muscle sliders though. Nope. Never.

Chris Livingston: creates himself in The Sims so he can be rich

Chris: In something like The Sims I make myself, because I then use the money cheat to give myself a sweet-ass mansion and lots of dope schwag because it's nice that there's some version of myself that has a bunch of expensive shit. I might, like Steven, see how close I can get to making a face that looks like mine in other games, but it's just out of curiosity about how flexible the character creation tool is. In RPGs, I always build someone much different than myself, because as Tim says, I just don't want to stare at my own ass for 60 hours. Any chance to escape my disappointing real-life physique and appearance is most welcome.

Joe Donnelly: WTF

Joe: I'm with Tim. Why anyone would want to reimagine themselves as a slightly/considerably handsomer video game avatar is beyond me. 

Steven, you're such a narcissist. (See gallery above.) 

Tim: Samuel, we need to talk about Joe. 

Steven: Well, well. If my math is correct, I think that means the score is 1.5 for those who don't like their characters to resemble them, and 2.5 for those who do (Since Chris swings both ways I gave each team .5).

Samuel: Oh my god. I did not know this about Joe when we hired him. 

Samuel Roberts: Created himself for a while, then realised he had a boring head

Samuel: I used to create characters based on my own appearance for years and years, but in Mass Effect 2 this resulted in such a profoundly disappointing potato that I was pretty much done with my own face. I captured the chin and everything—Shepard looked like me in silhouette. But he looked so average. Since then, I've just been using the default characters, or creating random ones. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, I created a kind of high fantasy version of David Bowie, which is what I wish I looked like in real life. 

I created a female character in GTA Online who borrowed her look from Dante in the Devil May Cry series, but she ended up looking a bit MTV-presenter-circa-2002 so I tweaked the design. Here's a quick before and after—note that I couldn't be bothered to change the colour of her eyebrows:

Tyler Wilde: Agrees with Tim, unless it's for comedic purposes

Tyler: I am completely with Tim. Why would I want to see my ugly mug in a game (except for comedic purposes)? I like making old dudes with bushy grey beards, the present-day David Letterman look. Maybe that's the look I aspire to personally? Hm. If not an old dude, a black-haired lady who looks like a 2000s shoegazing garage rock singer—like an amalgamation of everyone in the Dum Dum Girls. You know, the more I analyze this the more uncomfortable it makes me. I don't like this question, Sam. 

Jarred Walton: Doesn't care that much

Jarred: I'm in the same vein as Sam: I used to try and model myself. The difference is I didn't stop because I look boring and average, but I stopped because most character editors (Tyler's NBA career notwithstanding) don't allow me to create anything even remotely similar to my handsome mug. Or maybe it's just that I lack the artistic talent to make it happen properly. More likely is that the Elder Scrolls Oblivion character editor gave so many options with such horrible results that I couldn't take it anymore. But I'm long since past even trying to make a character that looks even vaguely Jarred-esque. I'd rather play the game than play dress up (not that there's anything wrong with playing dress up).

Jody Macgregor: Used to make Garrett from Thief for a while

Jody: I make other people. For a while I tried to recreate Garrett out of Thief in every fantasy game, and then I went through a phase of treating it like I was making a character in a tabletop RPG complete with names chosen from those random tables you sometimes get in the rulebooks. My Commander Shephard was a severe middle-aged woman because I thought it made sense for someone in that role. 

The exception was The Sims 2, in which I made myself and my girlfriend pretty accurately. The thing is, The Sims 2 is the one that added Wants and Fears for characters, so at some point a thought balloon over my girlfriend's head popped up to explain that she had developed a new Fear, which was that I would die. I decided not to make myself in a game again after that.

James Davenport: Character creators are for experimentation 

James: No character creator can match these cheeks. 

But really, I don't like seeing images of myself so I'd rather not make my Stepford Self in a game, weird skin all stretched back and textures blurred. My latest experiment has been to try and make characters that look like my partner instead. If she walks by when I'm playing I'll take the opportunity to say, 'Hey, look, I made you!' which got me an Aww, that's sweet! once, but the returns have since diminished to Is that what you think I look like? Bad plan. Bad bad plan. I also tried to recreate my cat Charlie as a palico in Monster Hunter, but he just doesn't give a shit. Back to the aesthetic minefield of the randomize button. 

Dead Space, EA's 2008 game of weed-whacking in space, is really good, but the PC version is a little wonky, specifically with regard to the mouse control. Disabling vsync and futzing around with the sensitivity can dramatically improve things, but out of the box it often suffers mouse lag, weird sensitivity, and other issues that can make it feel anywhere from "off" to nigh-unplayable. Keep that in mind when you snag it from Origin, where it is currently yours for the taking, for free.

Developed by the sadly now defunct Visceral Games, Dead Space tells the tale of Isaac Clarke, a heavy-handed sci-fi reference and engineer aboard the USG Ishimura, a massive "Planet Cracker" spaceship that falls foul of the Marker, a mysterious relic of Unitology—basically the Scientology of the future. 

Trouble is that the Marker actually has power: It turns people into ravenous, hideously-deformed zombie-type creatures called Necromorphs, which of course doesn't keep the brainiacs in charge from bringing the thing aboard the sealed environment of the ship.   

Things go predictably sideways, and it falls to ol' IC—who by the way is also suffering from hallucinations and appears to be in the midst of a total psychological breakdown—to clean things up, with nothing more at his disposal than a futuristic Black and Decker set. 

It sounds silly, but it really is good stuff —and you can't beat the price right now. As with all of Origin's 'On the House' offerings, it will be free until it's not (it will eventually go back to $20 but EA doesn't say when On the House freebies expire) and if you grab it during the giveaway, it's your to keep forever.   

As the series hits its ten year anniversary, a look back at Bioware’s amazing first chapter.

Look, for a moment, try to forget That Ending. Yes, it was disappointing, but if there’s a scene that truly marked the end of BioWare’s original space trilogy in suitably tear-jerk fashion, it’s the one that capped off its final DLC, Citadel. One last night of partying before the end. A moment of reflection before diving into oblivion. Commander Shepard, flanked by a team of misfits forged by fire into a family, stands for a moment by their ship to consider the future. “We’ve had a good ride,” the closest says.

“The best…” replies Shepard, taking one last chance to appreciate it.

There's a lot to appreciate.

Out of this world

Mass Effect remains arguably BioWare’s tightest and most successful series, and one that’s as much a departure from the company’s comfort zone as it was a natural continuation of its direction back in the mid-2000s. Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 was an attempt to make RPG combat especially look cinematic and exciting despite being overtly based on D&D rules and not afraid to drop terms like THAC0 in polite company, while Jade Empire attempted to both look like a Wuxia movie and combine arcade action with RPG stats and storytelling. Dragon Age: Origins would re-target the fans won over by Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights—at least for one game, before looking to a wider audience. Mass Effect meanwhile would start out by looking to the future and an AAA audience up for an epic adventure, but that didn’t want want to roll dice or juggle a million stats just to kick a little alien ass. It was still an RPG at heart, but a considerably faster paced one than most of the audience was used to.

The premise is a simple one. Humanity is very much the newcomer in the intergalactic community, and not particularly trusted—not least because our first contact with the avian Turian race led to what became known as the “First Contact War’. Ouch. Luckily, since then things have improved, and we’re bopping around the galaxy to explore and colonise with the help of a network of ancient relays and their hub, the Citadel. Now, we’re ready to make our next big step towards legitimacy with the appointment of our hero Commander Shepard as the first human Spectre—a space-cop with pretty much unlimited authority and autonomy, if not apparently a regular pay cheque. Good timing too, as a Lovecraftian threat from the darkest parts of space—the Reapers—is about to threaten the entire galaxy… and nobody believes they even exist.

Action stations

The first game was a big hit, but a distinctly flawed diamond. Many of its quirks would later become in-jokes, like the endless elevator rides used to poorly hide new areas loading in, or the fun-vacuum Mako rover that made exploring new planets about as much fun as getting a root canal on a Wurlitzer.

By far the biggest weakness though was combat. Much like KOTOR before it, it was caught between its RPG core and Hollywood longings, only this time with the RPG side buckling under the pressure. The result was a game where combat was something of a chore—not much fun, mechanically fiddly, and with enemies slightly dumber than toast. Later games would fix this by doubling-down, simplifying even further, and effectively becoming an all-out third-person shooter broken up with extended conversations and social zones. It made for some awkward lore moments, like guns that canonically had effectively unlimited ammo now conveniently needing pick-ups, but no matter.

Luckily, underneath all of this, the world that BioWare created immediately established itself as a place worth dealing with all this and more to experience. On a broad level, It’s every great SF trope mixed together, from the sexy all-female asari race to the central plot about wise precursors and enemies from beyond the stars. We’ve seen more of this before, in some form at least, with Mass Effect’s universe owing a particular debt to Babylon 5 in terms of both setting and aesthetic, and Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation sites for big plot.

Zoom in, though, and BioWare’s universe is stuffed with originality, with humour, with sharp writing, great characters, and relationships that aren’t just beautifully written, but take full advantage of the trilogy format to grow. Your initial team-mates, Kaidan and Ashley, aren’t perpetually locked in your shadow, and have their own military careers going on. By the time Shepard and his/her Turian BFF Garrus take time out to go target shooting in Mass Effect 3, you’ve been part of that relationship and emotionally invested in what happens next in their romance or friends for the best part of 60 hours and several years of actual game. Likewise, you’ve seen Tali’Zorah go from scared child on the run to military badass and potential saviour, Liara T’Soni from simple archeologist into the all-powerful Shadow Broker, Miranda from a cold human supremacist with a vacuum packed bottom into a defrosted ice-princess with a vacuum packed bottom, and Jacob Taylor… well, Jacob is there too. 

While not all of these plots start in the first game, it’s hard to look back on the first Mass Effect without factoring in what everything became. Rather than piling on new lore with each new instalment, BioWare instead chose to dig a bit deeper. You hear about the quarian fleet in the first game, for instance, but it’s not until the second that you get to pay it a visit. Likewise, the alien homeworlds are saved for the third game where their destruction can feel meaningful, for the same reason that the Star Trek reboot opted to blow up Vulcan rather than some random little world in the beta quadrant.

That’s not including some of the bigger decisions that don’t simply affect the fate of the galaxy, but some of your best friends. Where does loyalty to them end and the needs of the wider universe begin? Can you risk starting a galactic war in the name of ending one? Who do you pick when both sides have equal value to their claim, but a classic Star Trek diplomatic situation is off the table? At least in your current run through things.

Big decisions

While big decisions are part and parcel of many an RPG, few have done a better job of creating thought-provoking ones where there may be no ‘right’ answer, or a past decision may have shifted things dramatically between games. The two biggest in the original Mass Effect are whether or not to release an alien threat called the Rachni, which seems reasonable enough, and which of your starting crew members will die on the planet Vermire. There’s no getting around making that choice, and whichever you pick to make the sacrifice is gone for the rest of the series, along with hope of slipping in a quick romance.

While covering it properly means skipping ahead a little, the biggest example set up in the first game is the krogan genophage. Krogan are a species of incredibly fast, territorial, aggressive breeders that once threatened the galaxy simply by existing. To deal with this, another race created the genophage as a viral way to curtail their overexpansion—specifically by rendering most of them sterile. Unfortunately, that just means they're now dying off, and unsurprisingly pissed with the rest of the galaxy.

In Mass Effect 3, you have the chance to fix things… but will that just doom the galaxy down the line? Making things more interesting is that at this point in the series they can have one of two leaders, former party member and rough diamond with hidden depths Urdnot Wrex, or if he’s dead, his more aggressive cousin Wreav. Neither is exactly a dove, but Wreav is unquestionably the more hawkish and vengeful of the pair, and longs to harness krogan resentment to launch a war against their oppressors. The catch is that long before any of this, still in the first game, Wrex discovers that the villain, Saren, may have an outright cure and he’s willing to kill Shepard over it. How many other games introduce plot choices and dilemmas that take five years to finish finally playing out?

While inevitably the nature of the story means you don’t necessarily face the true consequences, the games do a fantastic job of both setting up the stakes for these beyond the pragmatic ‘get 25 War Assets’ change by showing every side of it in characters that you’ve hopefully come to respect and like. Whether galactic scale or personal, every quest matters deeply to someone, and usually characters you’ve known and hung out with for at least a couple of games by the point that their big quest starts. Everyone comes to the mission with baggage, and how you deal with it can be as important as any action bit.

My favourite Shepard

At the heart of the group though is always Commander Shepard, arguably one of BioWare’s greatest inventions since MDK 2 brought us atomic toast. Rarely has a character felt so much like a collaboration between player and developer, with Shepard coming across as a character with weight and presence in the universe as a hero, as a Spectre, and as a beacon of hope, while still leaving key decisions like origin, morality and romance and opinions to be driven by player choice. The female variant in particular immediately won hearts thanks to Jennifer Hale’s fantastic voice acting and instant control of any military situation, kept relatable and grounded with a dry sense of humour and human failings like romantic inexperience and exquisitely terrible dancing.

Her popularity really caught BioWare by surprise, especially as statistically most players went with the male Shepard. Despite BioWare’s history of being one of the better/more forward-thinking companies when it comes to sexual politics, Mass Effect 2 in particular is full of unfortunate animations that make it obvious that all the motion capture was done for a male character, from the way that Shepard sits while wearing a dress to the position and coding of characters snuggling in the romances. Likewise, when it came to the lack of homosexual relationships, BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka defended their absence by saying that Shepard was ‘a defined character with certain approaches and world views’, forgetting that in addition to the chance to sleep with several asari, the—ahem—booby prize for not getting into a real relationship is to have Shepard’s assistant Kelly do more than feed her fish. It took until Mass Effect 3 for the female Shepard to even get a custom face rather than just an editor default, which looked terrible next to the ‘standard’ Shepard, and to unlock the ability to play for both teams.

While in retrospect this might seem ‘typical BioWare’ it’s worth remembering that Mass Effect had its share of controversy back in the day. These were ridiculous at the time, never mind now, but back in 2008 pundits were coming up with lines like—this is 100% real—“And because of the digital chip age in which we live—"Mass Effect" can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes.” 

The fact that the most you got to see was one short sex scene featuring a little side-boob or a blue bottom moving up and down for a couple of seconds was immaterial, mostly because the critics subsequently admitted to not having actually seen the game before railing about it. Fox News guest Cooper Lawrence was unamused when gamers took to Amazon to give her latest book the same treatment, commenting "In hindsight, I would have liked to have had the opportunity to play this game before appearing." What an intriguing idea!

You know you’re onto a loser when even anti-gaming activist Jack Thompson rolls his eyes and calls it a contrived conspiracy. However, as it would continue to do with Dragon Age 2 and 3, BioWare pushed back rather than folding under the pressure, greatly helping to normalise adult content in games intended for adults, paving the way for more ambitious mature content in games like The Witcher 2/3 (both of which were a far cry from the original game and its tacky sex cards) and Dragon Age Inquisition. Still, even Mass Effect 3 had characters chastely taking showers in their underwear. Just in case.

All around the universe

Awkward bathing aside, the Mass Effect series is arguably most notable for BioWare’s willingness to go outside its comfort zone and explore new ideas. The first game, for instance, is functionally the same design as its previous RPGs—four worlds, each with a lost Thing on it. Mass Effect 2 goes more non-linear with most of the game being about assembling a team in bite-sized, punchy missions designed to showcase each in turn and then earn their loyalty. Mass Effect 3 wraps the individual missions up into a meta game called ‘Galaxy At War’, trying to make it feel like a concerted campaign against an unstoppable enemy that demands the feuding races finally start to work together towards an escalating common goal. After all, in the first game, it only takes one Reaper by the name of Sovereign to almost bring the galaxy to its knees. In the third, you’re surrounded by them and their Inception Horns Of Doom, without ever crossing the Voyager Borg threshold where they cease being scary. 

Indeed, the more you play, the more it becomes clear that their true power is their ability to cloud and control minds—Indoctrination—versus firepower. There’s even a fan theory that Shepard ultimately loses the battle—that what we see as an intentionally bland series of final battles and a Final Choice that boils down to little more than picking between red, green and blue tinted finales, is actually just their mind breaking under the psychological pressure. It’s not completely impossible (though the more accepted reason for the bad ending is that it was rewritten at the last minute) but it is the kind of stretch that normally requires a Stretch Armstrong doll and a few minutes in the oven.

Crappy as those five minutes in some sixty hours are though, obsessing over them does Mass Effect a huge disservice. The rest of that time is pretty much non-stop action, ideas, refinements and cinematics that continually reinvents itself and tries to push the state of the art.

Did all these ideas work? No. Galaxy at War in particular was much criticised prior to release for seemingly demanding solo players jump into multiplayer to get high enough scores for a good ending (not true). Most of the DLC was distinctly disposable, with the exception of Lair of Shadow Broker and Citadel, and perhaps Leviathan. The less said about the assassin Kai Leng, the better, though we hope he finds his way back to his home anime dimension as soon as possible. Etc. etc.

But to think back on Mass Effect shouldn’t be to focus on its flaws, but rather the warmth of its characters, the excitement of its set-pieces, the scale of its universe, and the sheer passion with which BioWare brought it to our screens and kept the momentum going for years. It’s a truly magnificent trilogy, a highpoint for interactive SF, and even though it started on slightly wobbly foundations, there's no arguing that it's not a hell of a ride.

Yesterday was November 7—N7 Day, in the parlance of Mass Effect fans, an occasion to celebrate all things about BioWare's hit sci-fi series. To mark the special day, BioWare released a "Ten Years of Mass Effect" video looking back on the history of the series and the things that made it special—and, despite the failure of Mass Effect: Andromeda to meet expectations, expressing hope for the future. 

The video features a number of BioWare mainstays, including the Shepard and Ryder voice actors, reminiscing on the making of the series, and the impact it's had on them personally and professionally. There are the requisite bits of trivia, like how the Vorcha voices were made and why the "SSV" designation for the Normandy was rejected. But while much of it feels like a eulogy, it's a line at the end that fans will want to hold onto.

"The future of Mass Effect, I think, is really bright. People just want to know more about this place, these characters," the narrator says. And then someone else takes over: "I think people keep coming back because it feels like home."   

It's an interesting way to wrap up, because it's an implicit rejection of the entire premise of Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was all about finding a new home. That attitude is evident throughout the video, in fact, in the way it very clearly focuses on the original trilogy despite coming in the same year as Andromeda's release. But the promise of a bright future, vague though it is, is encouraging. Andromeda may have flopped, but Mass Effect? Yeah, that's good stuff. 

Welcome back to the PC Gamer Q&A! Every week we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about games. This week: which game character do you hate? Okay, 'hate' is a strong word, but we all get annoyed by characters in games, for a variety of reasons—bad dialogue, voice acting, or whatever else. Here we've simply spotlighted the characters (and one car) that we can't stand. We'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments, too.

Wes Fenlon: Basically every character in Final Fantasy 8

I feel slightly guilty for writing this, because I know our editor Sam Roberts likes this game (even I won't defend a man with a ponytail wearing a cowboy hat, though, Wes—Sam), but I can't stand pretty much anyone who opens their mouth in Final Fantasy 8. It's been so long since I played it, I'm struggling to articulate the depth of my loathing. But it definitely started with Squall, the poster boy for aloof, emo JRPG protagonists. Aka bad protagonists. At least Cloud had the decency to have a total mental breakdown, turn out to be a total fraud, and find time to say totally out of character dialogue like "Let's mosey." (Thanks, bad translation).

But Squall? He was a boring stick in the mud from the first cutscene, and maybe he had some character growth by the end of the game but I was too busy rolling my eyes and going "UGH" to notice. Then the whole amnesia thing—the worst plot twist of all time outside a Shyamalan movie—made me write off most of the rest of the gang. I do still have a soft spot for Laguna, who was basically Squall's missing personality, and I always kinda liked Zell, who I believe is the character most Final Fantasy 8 fans actually hate, themselves. Looking back, my reason for liking him seems pretty clear—he annoyed the shit out of everybody else, and that made him the true hero.

Philippa Warr: Warren from Life is Strange

The thing about Warren was that his character seemed tangled up in something the developers were leaning towards. I remember a feeling that no matter how many times I, as Max, tried to just be Warren's friend and keep my boundaries set to "we are just friends and that is all we will ever be" the game would then show cutscenes with him sitting close and hugging Max and so on. The sense of a character you get with a game like Life is Strange is built out of how those cutscenes and the actual interactive sections play out and so, for the way I was playing Max, that led to this idea of Warren as a guy who doesn't really understand boundaries and isn't taking hints. 

I think there are elements of that in the game deliberately—Warren clearly likes Max as more than a friend and there are resultant awkward encounters and cringeworthy texts and so on—but I'm not sure whether Dontnod actually wanted people to see him as a creep. I see him as a creep. I hated being around him in the game and the more the game didn't give me the freedom to be really clear about where he stood the more claustrophobic and upsetting I found him. Maybe that's the point? It's certainly a horribly faithful part of the teen experience. Anyway. Warren is the WORST.

Jody Macgregor: Ego from The 7th Guest

Henry Stauf is the villain of The 7th Guest. He's the guy who murders someone for 20 bucks, makes toys that kill children, fills his mansion with malicious puzzles. But I don't hate Henry Stauf. I hate the protagonist of The 7th Guest, the disembodied amnesiac spirit trapped in his mansion named Ego, because he will not shut up.

Sometimes while you're solving Stauf's puzzles the old man taunts you with his spooky-dooky voice, all "I wonder if he will get the point of this!" as you solve another dumb puzzle. But it's Ego's narration, which is supposed to be helpful, that's far more galling. "Which way should I go now?" he says, as you move another queen across a chessboard. "That tune seems familiar!" he says as you try to recollect an 18-note sequence on the piano. "Is there a pattern to this?" And every time he talks, the cursor vanishes and you have to wait for him to finish. I've never finished The 7th Guest, always leaving Ego trapped in Stauf's mansion forever, and I'm glad. I hope he rots.

Andy Kelly: Tali from Mass Effect

Look, I know Tali has a devoted fanbase. When she died in his playthrough, former PC Gamer writer Rich McCormick replayed 15 hours to save her. But man, whenever she's on the screen my eyes glaze over. The quarians are an interesting race with a cool backstory, but I wish they had a better representative in my party. I find Tali's overly earnest manner exceptionally dull. And her awkwardness, while probably written to be cute and endearing, just annoys me. In a game stuffed with interesting characters, she's by far the most boring, and I spend as little time with her as possible when I play through the Mass Effect trilogy.

Joe Donnelly: J'Zargo from Skyrim

J'Zargo was the first Khajiit NPC I met in Skyrim. He came with cool fire scrolls and reminded me a little of Tygra from the Thundercats. I was totally into it. Stat-wise he was a beast, and was one of the game's few NPCs without a level cap. Destruction and Restoration spells were his forte which made him best suited to close-quarters combat support. Moreover, after hitting level 50 he maxed out his One-handed and Heavy Armour skills—both of which made him an absolute tank. 

But, my god, he was such a pain in the arse. As if constantly referring to himself in the third person wasn't infuriating enough, he was full of irritating self-aggrandising quips—to the point where I preferred fighting flocks of Legendary Dragons on my own, if it meant getting shot of him.

"Oh, but you are wrong. The only reason you could disagree is because you are losing so badly you cannot see it." This was the straw the broke the camel's back. I led J'Zargo deep into a cave full of Draugr and stood back. He died in battle. I resurrected him as a faceless zombie cat. He sauntered off a cliff. I didn't mourn him. Good riddance, J'Zargo.

Samuel Roberts: The DeLorean from Rocket League

I almost picked Winston from Overwatch for this. Not because I have any particular problem with the character's personality or anything, but more the 'wacky' thinking behind the design, that's about as generically 'hero shooter' as it gets. Every game in this genre has at least one novelty character like this—Paladins has a walking tree and Battleborn has (had) a large, armed mushroom, for example. What if a gorilla did science? Woah! What will they think of next? 

I like most of the other character designs in Overwatch, but man, it's not too hard to come up with an idea for an animal or plant-related one, or indeed anything that can talk that doesn't in real life. What if a talking mongoose was a political strategist and a support hero? What if a Dutch fox was a taxidermist and was deeply ironic about his profession, but also had a grenade launcher? Hot damn, we've got us a hero shooter! Let's get this baby into Early Access. Pre-order the founder's package now to get the David Schwimmer announcer pack. 

I guess Winston is just Beast from the X-Men, really. Anyway, I'm over it.

Instead, I'll pick this DLC car. Back in 2015 when I was deep into Rocket League, I remember being irritated by the seemingly tens of thousands of people who'd bought the DeLorean in Rocket League around the time of the merchandising tat nightmare known as Back to the Future Day. As well as marking a new low for the kind of event you could stick the word 'day' onto in order to sell toys to adults, this car started popping up all over the game, and its '88MPH' acceleration noise seemed to be the only thing I could hear in matches for months afterwards.

I know it's just people trying to have fun in a game they enjoy, by marrying car football with one of the best movies of the '80s. Who could resent that, really? Well, me, apparently. 

Phil Savage: You, when you pick sniper

To my mind, snipers are the most irritating class in any multiplayer shooter—and I main Scout in TF2, so I know a lot about what's irritating. Yes, there's some skill in knowing a map's sightlines, and not standing in areas where a sniper might pick me off. But being instantly killed from halfway across the map is, for me, the least interesting interaction I can have in a shooter. In a team-focused, objective-based FPS, snipers seem only to reduce the possibility space in which I can be doing cool things. And for what, so you can squat in a bush, clicking on heads?

As for snipers who aren't killing me—the ones on my team—you're not much better. The requirements of sniping are often antithetical to the objective at hand, and, even in deathmatch, snipers are rarely mobile enough to top the leaderboards. Sniper is a bad class for bad people, and my feelings on this matter have nothing to do with my inability to accurately aim a crosshair. Sniping is for jerks, no exceptions. Except Battlefield: Bad Company 2, where they were actually pretty good.

Tim Clark: Anduin Wrynn in Hearthstone

 "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" complained King Henry II, shortly before some knight bros took this as an invitation to go ham on Thomas Beckett, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. And grim though the Wikipedia entry marked 'assassination' might be, let me also assure you that that fate would be far too good for Anduin Wrynn, Hearthstone's priest hero. Anyone who mains Priest in Hearthstone, unless they use the Tyrande Whisperwind portrait or run a dragon deck, is a despicable degenerate. Combo and control Priest is for the kind of fedora-wearing player for whom it isn’t enough just to win, they have to do it using your cards, over the course of what feels like an ice age. Don’t even get me started on the emotes. One more “Wow!” and I’m sending in the knights. 

Jackknife is the second and longest level of Mirror's Edge, and is a chapter that Lorna Reid spoke fondly of last year. The following video isn't the best way to revisit its twists and turns—but it is a world record-breaking speedrun that was two years in the making, covering the entire game in just 22 minutes and 40 seconds. 

Beating the previous record by almost six minutes, the following is 'segmented' wherein 11 players contributed specific sections of the run. A description below the video states it has "been a project of the Mirror's Edge community for the last two years", and that "while the possibilities in Mirror's Edge are almost endless, this is as close as we have ever (and potentially, will ever) come to presenting a run which truly bleeds the game dry."

Onto the run itself:

The video description continues, suggesting the above is the result of nine years worth of practice without mods, hacks or external aids. "Everything that you see in this run is done by exploiting in-game mechanics," it continues, "and can be performed by anyone with a copy of Mirror's Edge [on] PC."

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off for a lie down. 

Thanks, Polygon. 

Two big bits of news were announced on the BioWare Blog today: First, that general manager Aaryn Flynn is leaving the company after 17 years. And second, that Casey Hudson, who left in 2014, is "coming home" to assume the role. 

It sounds like Hudson's return was in the cards prior to Flynn's final decision to leave, and actually helped him settle on it. "I have been contemplating changes in my own life for some time, but when I heard that Casey had confirmed he was up for the task, I realized the opportunities before us," Flynn wrote in a blog post announcing his departure. "I will be working with him over the next couple of weeks to help catch him up and do my part to set him up for success to be the best GM he can be."

"Let me thank our players for everything they’ve given us over these many  years, and to say from the bottom of my heart how important you are to  me and the rest of BioWare. I have gone to work every day knowing that I  am fortunate to have all of the opportunities I have had at BioWare  because of you," he concluded. "Doing whatever I could to help our developers create  some of the best games in the industry for you all has been the most humbling experience of my life."

As for Hudson, he said in his own message that his years away from BioWare has been "transformative for me, from having time to reflect on what I most want to do, to working with new technologies at platform scale." 

"I’d also like to wish my good friend Aaryn Flynn the very best in the future. Aaryn and I have worked together from the earliest days of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, to setting the foundation for Anthem. We’ve been through a lot together, and we’re all going to miss his presence at the studio." 

Hudson's BioWare credits include Baldur's Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and KOTOR, but Mass Effect was his Big One: He served as project director on the entire original trilogy. Flynn's record goes back just as far as is possibly even more extensive; he took over as BioWare GM in 2009, right around the release of Dragon Age: Origins. 

When I played Ultima IV as a kid, there was an element of mystery to it, by which I mean my friends and I had no clue what was going on. We took turns being in control and arguing over how best to live up to the eight virtues of honesty—compassion, justice, sacrifice, spirituality, valor, humility, and honor—necessary to adopt the mantle of the Avatar. That's a hell of a thing to ask a group of 12-year-olds. 

When a vision told us it was compassionate to "Kill not the non-evil beasts of the land" we figured snakes aren't inherently evil, right? But if we ran away from snakes, would that count against our valor? The only way to check our progress in the eight virtues was to travel all the way back to Castle Britannia and speak to Hawkwind the Seer, so we were never sure in the moment whether we were doing the right thing. If someone asks you whether you're brave do you say "yes" to be honest, or "no" to be humble? It's a goddamn quandary. 

We didn't manage to finish Ultima IV. Not many people did. Even during playtesting, only its designer Richard Garriott was able to get to the end, as he admitted in an interview in 1986. Replaying it again today I go straight to the FAQs. It's disappointing to learn that the secret behind those big questions we grappled with as kids is just a set of eight numbers going up or down. There are even people who have calculated how easy it is to rob Lord British of all his money, then go shopping and give a blind shopkeeper the right amount of cash to undo that crime. (Everyone who sells spell ingredients in Britannia is blind to make each shopping trip a test of honesty. Do you pay her the right amount or rip her off? They say justice is blind—in Ultima IV so is everyone who sells garlic.)

Even though the numbers underneath Ultima IV's decisions are simplistic, being faced with those big moral questions was novel, even revolutionary, at the time. What's disappointing is that in the 22 years since Ultima IV, the math governing most morality systems in games has gotten more complicated, but it's still math. And it's still there. When our behavior is tied to an equation we've been trained to understand over the past two decades of gaming, the exciting nuance that should lie at the heart of moral decisions tends to disappear.

Behavior by the numbers

The games with moral choices that followed soon after Ultima IV tended to make it immediately obvious when you were being rewarded for good deeds or punished for bad. Quest for Glory II kept its Paladin Points secret but had an Honor stat right there on your character sheet that went up when you did nice things, like being polite during tea. The Adventures of Robin Hood and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream both explored morality, but rewarded you for 'good' behavior with a meter going up and punished you if it ever went down.

The next wave of games with morality were less focused on being nice. They made allowances for naughtiness as a valid playstyle (though admittedly Quest for Glory II did the same if you played the Thief class). Games like Jedi Knight, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate tracked your deeds and assigned a reputation, having characters react differently or showing different versions of cutscenes based on whether you seemed like the kind of player who would like to arbitrarily murder NPCs.

Knights of the Old Republic made an important step forward by melding the two, with a plot that made a dark-side playthrough possible as well as a meter that went up or down depending on whether you earned light side points or dark. Its sequel kept those meters, but is one of the few examples of a game from the past decade taking advantage of them. KotOR 2 offers probably the most nuanced deconstruction of the Force across all of Star Wars media, questioning the meaning of light and dark, and subverting the distinction between good and bad whenever possible. But a number, your 'alignment points,' still determined what Force powers you'd ultimately be able to use.

Mass Effect tried to be more nuanced by replacing good and evil with Paragon and Renegade, which many players read as new names for the light side and the dark. But in Mass Effect you're really always good, it's just that sometimes you're lawful and sometimes chaotic. Paragon means "by the book" and Renegade means "fuck the rules, I'm right." Admittedly in the first game Renegade was also a synonym for "quite xenophobic" which was odd, but they tried.

Once again there was a simple number underneath, and that number determined which conversation options were available to you. If the number wasn't right sometimes an option would be grayed-out, which encourages gaming the system by going all-out on one or the other paths, rather than judging each situation on its own merits and actually thinking through those dilemmas. Playing the middle ground may have felt more genuine, but the equation discouraged it.

It's true that we like to see numbers going up, whether it's a high score or character level, but reducing morality to another a number simplifies things a little too much. In Fallout: New Vegas, you earn karma by killing feral ghouls or Powder Gangers, because those are some bad dudes. That means if you're playing a villain and you get jumped by other bad guys, self-defence makes you a hero again. It's hard to keep a low karma score in New Vegas. It keeps going up when you're not looking because you accidentally made the world a better place.

Mega Man Legends 2 (which actually came to PC, though not in the West) is an extreme example of morality reduced to brute math. There's a black market where you can buy sweet gear, but only nasty people can shop there. Mega Man has to go around arbitrarily kicking pigs—that's literal, it's not a joke—to become more evil, as signified by his blue armor turning dark. Once he's punted enough pigs he goes shopping in the black market, then afterward makes a donation to the church to get back on the nice list and turn blue again.

In the late Middle Ages the Catholic Church sold indulgences, which lessened the amount of punishment you'd receive in the afterlife for your sins. If you wanted to be allowed to break the stricture against using butter during Lent you could pay for that, and Rouen Cathedral in France earned so much money from the practice they used it to pay for a whole new edifice that is still called Butter Tower to this day.

That's the level morality systems are at in most videogames.

Morality tomorrow

Most games, but not all of them. The Witcher 3, for instance, doesn't have a morality meter. As monster hunter Geralt of Rivia you're given options to turn down quest rewards or haggle the payment upwards, but there's no reputation score rising or falling in response. If you want Geralt's rough exterior to conceal a heart of gold you play him that way. If you want him to be rough to the core that's fine too. And there will be consequences for your choices.

Early in the game you meet Lena, a woman who has been seriously injured by the griffin you're hunting. Left in the care of the local herbalist, she'll probably die. You've got a potion that could help her, but it's made for witchers like you rather than normal humans and it might have serious side effects. It may even kill her, and she'll die in even greater pain.

Do you interfere or let things take their course? You're not related to this woman, you're not her primary caregiver. Maybe the potion will save her, but do you have the right to muscle in and jam poison down her throat because of a maybe? I did, and it saved her life. But then, after another 50 hours of Witchering about, I met her boyfriend.

He was stationed in an army camp on the edge of the map, which I only stumbled into because there was a noticeboard there and I wanted to find some more sidequests. He told me Lena had never fully recovered, that she couldn't speak and didn't seem to recognize anyone she knew. She'd been permanently brain damaged by my potion, and he didn't know whether to thank me for saving her or curse me for reducing her to this. Geralt's response was, "Trust me—choice I had to make was harder."

Not every sidequest in The Witcher 3 is as effective as that, and plenty of them boil down to following your witcher senses to the next marker then fighting a monster, but that just makes it unexpected when some of them throw their consequences back in your face—an element of mystery more effective than having to visit a seer in Ultima IV. I made a choice and that choice had an effect. No number went up or down, but a person confronted me and questioned what I'd done.

Bioware has said that Mass Effect: Andromeda won't have Renegade or Paragon points. Hopefully instead we get more repercussions directly resulting from actions—something the series has already dabbled in, to give it credit. In the first Mass Effect I met the Rachni Queen, last broodmother of her kind, whose children had been taken from her, driven mad and turned deadly. Though sparing her meant it could happen again, it also netted me some sweet Paragon Points.

When she turned up again in Mass Effect 3, once again shackled and her children forced to kill, it was a far more effective follow-through than the change in my score. I took a risk and had to deal with the fallout. 

Every now and then games nail that sense of a chain reaction, of inevitable but unforeseen things happening because of how you chose to deal with mad Ekkill in The Banner Saga or who you let through the checkpoint in Papers, Please. In Telltale's games you know immediately that a choice will have an aftermath, because the pop-up tells you that someone is going to "remember that." That's how I want to feel about every choice without being told, or seeing a meter go up—that when I least expect it, the waves I set in motion will roll back to shore and wash up something dreadful at my feet.

Resident Evil 4’s influence has become immeasurable since its release in 2005. Games like Gears of War and Uncharted owe much to the game that revolutionized third-person action controls. However, one popular sci-fi horror game would look a lot like an entirely different sci-fi horror game if not for Capcom’s reinvention of its seminal series. I got the opportunity to sit down with Dead Space designers Ben Wanat and Wright Bagwell to talk about the early days of development and how Resident Evil 4 helped them shape their own horror series out of another.

"When Resident Evil 4 came out, we were just awestruck by it," Wanat told me. "We were all playing it and we were like, 'Holy shit, this is a really awesome game. They're actually trying to tell a story; they've got some cool cinematics; the gameplay systems are fixing a lot of problems, bringing it into this action realm but keeping this intense horror feel to it. It was this amazing combination and—oh, the enemies were so freakin' cool."

Wanat didn't shy away from admitting that Resident Evil 4 is one of his favourite games of all time. And it's clear looking at Dead Space that he wasn't alone at EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games).

"It's pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, 'Yeah, it's almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,' which is exactly what we were doing."

A shock to the system

But it wasn't always that way. Early on in its development, before Resident Evil 4 had even been released, Dead Space was a completely different game. Rumours have circled around the sci-fi horror game's early days, reinforced by similarities found within Dead Space. During our discussions, Wanat confirmed them to me. 

"Originally, we were pushing around this idea of maybe we could make System Shock 3. And you can look at the Dead Space blueprint and be like, 'Oh, this is kind of like System Shock,'" Wanat said, smiling. 

"To do a System Shock 3, you're really tackling a monumental task, to make people happy with a sequel that wasn't made by the same team as the original," he explained. And while the game didn't make it out the door and live on as the third System Shock, Wanat said that a new entry in that series was the goal they shot for early on.

"It was like, 'Everybody, get your System Shock 2 copy, play it start to finish, and let's figure out what we're going to do,'" Wanat said, recalling the early days of development. "Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'"

However, Redwood Shores couldn’t just change the name of its project and work on something completely new. 

"It was at a time at EA when there was no appetite for original IP. It seemed like everybody else was doing it except for us," Wanat lamented. While Redwood Shores created games based on James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and The Godfather, Wanat said the desire to make something original was fervent within the studio. And Resident Evil 4 was the catapult they needed.

"We were so hyped about Resident Evil 4 and we got obsessed with improving the mechanics," Wanat said. The team truly wanted to develop a first-rate survival-horror game. However, convincing EA to bet on an original idea wasn't going to be easy, and it was something that co-director Glen Schofield, now the GM of Sledgehammer Games, would work on for a long time. Schofield would break the ice on the idea, show some promising progress, and over time, slowly build the confidence EA needed to give the project a thumbs up.

"Eventually everybody accepted it, they saw how cool the things coming out of it were. That confidence continued to grow," Wanat told me. "Having that group there from the get-go and building this stuff without a greenlight was a little weird, but it's probably what got that whole thing working because we could all put our expertise into a pool and make something tangible. 

"And once people saw that it was a real thing, they got it much easier than if you were trying to say, 'I want to make this totally scary-ass thing,' to which they'd look at their portfolio and say 'Nope, scary-ass thing is not in our language.'"

The executives weren't the only people impressed by the Dead Space demos. Wright Bagwell, who was working on another game at the time, played through one of these demo levels and was so enamoured with the experience that he absolutely had to work on the game.

"One of the level designers came over and said 'Hey Wright, we're testing this out. I want you to come into this dark room, I'm going to turn the lights off and turn the sound up really loud.' And we played through this demo level, and I remember feeling like I was going to shit my pants," Bagwell said, laughing."I was working on another game that got cancelled, and EA was trying to get me to work on something I didn't want to work on, and I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'"

So Bagwell joined the Dead Space team, and at this point, it was starting to come together. Controlling Isaac was becoming a smooth experience, thanks to some of the big improvements to Resident Evil’s formula that the team was working on. Wanat specifically pointed out the ability to move while shooting. Despite the relatively simple-sounding nature of this change, it wasn't as straightforward as flipping a switch and letting someone walk around.

"I love in Resident Evil 4, the tension of not being able to move. But it caused a lot of problems for us to put movement in because we were making a new game," Wanat explained. "The enemies couldn't follow the same formula. It breaks a lot of the mechanics. We didn't know it was going to happen until we did it and were like, 'Oh, I think we broke something fundamental about the tension,' so we had to get it in other ways.

"It was like, 'It's a game changer. Let's embrace it and make this the best, polished survival shooter. Let's try to be the gold standard.'"

Space to grow

The move from System Shock 3's first-person view to the over-the-shoulder perspective that we know from Dead Space was something else that Wanat was increasingly happy about, as it allowed players to more easily care about Isaac.

"Even though Isaac didn't have a voice in the first game, seeing him and seeing him get grappled and eviscerated, I felt like there was a better chance to make a connection with the character. And that kinda gives the player a sense of who he is and the place he's in that we could have missed out on if we went the first-person shooter route and—man, we ripped off so much stuff from Resident Evil 4," Wanat stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing.

"But in a way, the modifications we made to the formula gave it its own style. Things like the outer space setting gave us a way to include new mechanics that weren't really available for the time and setting that Resident Evil took place in."

Dismemberment by way of plasma cutter, perhaps Dead Space's defining feature, was one such mechanic that joined the movement system to set itself apart from its Earth-based counterpart.

"It was very interesting to get those two things together and see that something special was taking shape," Wanat said. "But we do owe tremendously to Resident Evil 4. We were really big fans. We had so many of those water-cooler moments after that game came out."

Dead Space released in October of 2008 and was met with an overwhelmingly positive critical reception, in addition to sales of over two million copies. When Dead Space 2 was announced less than two years later, it was no surprise that EA wanted to push the series into a more action-focused direction to appeal to a wider audience. Bagwell moved into the creative director's chair, charged with a delicate balancing act of making sure there were moments of adrenaline-surging panic, but also time for the player to relax among the nameless horrors and dismembered limbs.

Despite its obvious inspirations, Dead Space had become its own thing. The studio was no longer praying at the altar of Resident Evil 4, but Wanat says there were some leftover influences that didn't make it into the first game.

"We didn't really have the ability to do any elaborate cutscenes," he explained. "I mean, we looked at Resident Evil 4, and we thought those were elaborate at the time. I love the intro. They're in the jeep, a guy goes to pee in the bushes, it's this really cool moment. And we couldn't really do those things, but we all wished we could. So in Dead Space 2, you get a lot more character moments and those over-the-top moments."

Like its predecessor, Dead Space 2 garnered high praise from critics and, according to EA, sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release. However, that success wouldn't carry over to the third game. With less positive reviews and significantly less sales, Wanat, the creative director of Dead Space 3, expressed disappointment with how it closed out the series.

"I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it, but it was a deliberate decision in each of those instalments to make it faster, more relevant to a broader audience," he said. "It's a hard thing to do, to make a horror game have mass appeal. They're two diametrically opposed things."

Wanat and Bagwell went on to co-found Outpost Games, a developer that's currently working on a multiplayer survival game. Not much is known about their upcoming game, but the two designers wouldn't be surprised if Dead Space fans found some pieces of the sci-fi horror series woven throughout it. However, speaking to Wanat, it sounds like he's not quite done with survival-horror.

"Personally, I've got so much of that stuff in my system, that one way or another I will make another survival-horror game because I can't stay away from that kind of creative expression. That's just part of my DNA now." 

A week ago I dropped my Ultimate Ranking of Mass Effect Companions into the PC Gamer Slack channel and destroyed productivity for an hour. This tends to happen whenever we talk about Mass Effect: any conversation around the best games in the series, best missions, and most definitely the best characters. It says something about Mass Effect, that we still feel so strongly about its stories nearly a decade after entering that universe for the first time. We're just as passionate about the characters we love as we are about the ones we hate.

Bioware built on the template it established with Knights of the Old Republic throughout the Mass Effect series. First they're fun diversions, filling out the world with lore. Then they become romance partners, and your interactions with them influence how they grow and change and even affect the world around them. In Mass Effect 2 those character arcs essentially become the story instead of secondary concerns, and wrapping up those trilogy-long arcs in Mass Effect 3 after five years is something we'd never really experienced before in gaming.

So these companions mean a lot to us. I knew publishing my list would be a bloodbath, so we decided on a compromise: let democracy decide (but seriously Jack is the worst, no matter what this list may say). The PC Gamer team voted on the companions, ranking them from 1-20 to create this: the truly definitive list of the best Mass Effect sidekicks to have kinky alien sex go space adventuring with.

20. Jacob Taylor

It's a heavy risk, being the boring male starter companion in a BioWare RPG. Of the three men to fulfill this role in the Mass Effect series, Jacob struggles most. James Vega is enjoyably portrayed by Freddie Prinze Jr., and has a fun role in the Citadel DLC. Kaidan Alenko has personality-enhancing migraines and you're allowed to abandon him on an alien world with a nuclear bomb. But Jacob? Jacob's destiny is to promise you a beer that he'll never buy you and his most earnest wish is to give up a life of space adventure and start a family. 

He manages to have the strangest daddy issues of any Mass Effect 2 character, and that is a competitive field, but it's not enough to raise him above the parapets of mediocrity. His defining moment is this line, delivered at the culmination of his romance arc. It is the worst moment in Mass Effect. Sorry, Jacob. You are the worst companion. The prize was not worth it. — Chris Thursten 

19. Kaidan Alenko

There's only one thing that elevates Kaidan Alenko over Jacob Tyler as a boring male starter companion: you can kill him. — Wes 

18. Zaeed Massani

I still hold a grudge against Mr. Tough Guy Combat Veteran for letting me down in Mass Effect 2's suicide mission finale. If he's so seasoned, why did he utterly fail me as a commander, getting one of my squadmembers killed? Thanks for nothing, Zaeed. And that scar doesn't make you look as cool as you think it does.

I saw through the thin veneer of Zaeed's character to what he really was: a less interesting retread of KotOR's Mandalorian Canderous Ordo. None of Zaeed's war stories could possibly compare to Ordo describing an atmospheric entry at the head of an army of invading Mandalorians. — Wes

17. Morinth

Morinth's best-case scenario, as a squad member, is that she replaces Samara in your crew—but she just masquerades as Samara, and the trade never really amounts to much. And that's the extent of her role. She's a poor replacement for the more interesting and conflicted justicar. As an antagonist, though, she's great—I remember the cat-and-mouse game of catching Morinth as one of Mass Effect 2's most exciting moments, knowing the wrong dialogue decision could lead to death or failure. — Wes

16. Javik

There's probably something good to say about Javik, the dethawed prothean who joins your crew in Mass Effect 3 if you paid $10 for the day-one From Ashes DLC. But as it turns out, most of our staff didn't have Javik in their crew, earning him the indifferent shrug of 16th place. While he may not have been essential to Mass Effect 3's plot, I think it reflects poorly on Bioware that the one character who could offer significant insight into the protheans wasn't part of the base game. In an alternate timeline, Javik could've been pivotal to the story and ranked much higher in our collective memories. — Wes

15. James Vega

When picking a member of your crew to romance, I think most of us share a general rule: humans are boring and we mainly want to bang weird aliens. Vega isn’t really an exception to the rule: he’s just a normal human dude, nothing to really get excited about. I’ve grown a bit foggy on the details of his story, but the more I talked to him, the more I wound up liking him, especially watching him awkwardly hit on me, his commanding officer. But, yeah. Ultimately, he’s just a human dude and thus not much of a draw.  — Chris Livingston

14. Kasumi Goto

Kasumi's Stolen Memory is probably my favourite DLC across the Mass Effect trilogy—it lets Shepard play at being James Bond by infiltrating a party at a mansion, and Kasumi's introduction as a slick, invisible thief (as well as something of a loner) makes her seem very different to the rest of the Normandy's crew. 

Her back story with Keiji, her former partner in crime, is explored in a powerful, heartfelt way in her Stealing Memory loyalty mission. It becomes clear to Shepard how badly she's been wounded by his death, and you get to help her exact revenge on Donovan Hock, his killer. You're rewarded with a total gut punch of an ending that perfectly completes her arc. 

In battle, Kasumi's Shadow Strike ability means she's one of the game's more visually interesting party members, too, vanishing and then popping up behind an enemy to damage them. I'm aware you can find Kasumi in Mass Effect 3 and its Citadel DLC, although sadly I didn't for some reason, even though I kept her alive in Mass Effect 2. 

She's not many people's favourite character, clearly, but I'm just relieved she beat Kaidan and James Vega in this list. — Samuel

13. Ashley Williams

Look, I'm very sorry everybody, but 13th place is a travesty. I voted Ashley for 3rd place, behind Garrus and Mordin. This isn't the most disappointed I've been by democracy in 2016, but it's in the top five. Earlier in the year I wrote a long defense of Ash Williams for Official Xbox Magazine, which appeared on our sister site GamesRadar+ in November. But I'll give you the short version: Ash is one of the most substantially well-rounded characters in the series and one of the few that doesn't need Shepard to step in and fix her life.

She's among the few characters to seriously question Shepard's decisions, particularly when it comes to Cerberus, and she's willing to challenge you—at gunpoint, if necessary—when she feels that you're in the wrong. She's more than a sidekick and you get the impression that she could have been the main character had she not been wrenched away from the Prothean beacon at the start of the first game. She deserves better than 13th place and the 'space racist' meme. If you left her on Virmire, we cannot be friends. — Chris Thursten

12. Samara

She's Judge Dredd with a serial killer daughter. However you play Samara across ME2 and ME3, Shakespearean death follows, making her one of Mass Effect's most tragic characters. On her loyalty mission, you have to make the decision between Samara dying or killing Morinth, her deadly fugitive offspring. Apart from ME2's actual suicide mission, she's one of three companions (Tali and Legion being the others) who can commit suicide in the game—in Samara's case, out of failure to fulfill her oath and execute her only living daughter, who's forbidden from leaving a monastery. Phew.

Samara's rigid, implacable adherence to the Justicar Code means that she's the only character in the series with zero moral grey area. It's a powerful premise in a game that's all about tough decisions, where you have to weigh the benefits of a brutal-but-effective party member against the occasional summary execution their capital-L Lawful alignment might inspire them to perform. Having an extremist around makes Mass Effect more interesting. —Evan Lahti

11. Grunt

Grunt has a lot going for him. For one thing, his name's Grunt. For another, he's voiced by Steve Blum, whose growls have been in approximately one billion games and anime series, but most famously as Cowboy Bebop's Spike Spiegel, a character dear to my heart. His craggy headscales look awesome. His suit kind of makes him look like Iron Man, if Iron Man skipped leg day for 40 years and bench-pressed an elephant every day.

He doesn't have much to him as a character beyond punching things and talking about fighting, but that can be a refreshing change from the philosophizing and soul-searching of the rest of the crew. — Wes 

10. EDI

Honestly I'm still grossed out that Bioware chose to give the Normandy's AI a sexy robot body, and then wrote in a plot thread about Joker wanting to have sex with her. We all know that beneath the space opera Mass Effect is really about sexing up the galaxy's sexiest aliens, but you didn't have to be so on the nose about it, Bioware. EDI might have had some fine dialogue and ruminations on what it means to be human, but let's be honest: Legion covers that territory just fine, making EDI's humanoid form feel mostly gratuitous.

Also, I'm almost positive EDI was on Earth during my Mass Effect 3 finale, and somehow popped out of the Normandy with Joker at the end, blissfully alive. Talk about ruining my immersion. — Wes

9. Jack

My Shepard was damaged goods. He had a traumatic childhood, exposed to war and poverty from day one—it’s no surprise he was a huge Korn fan in my headcanon. So when Jack came into the picture, of course I saw a lot of my imaginary space person in her. She also had a terrible childhood, orphaned at an early age and subjected to torturous experimentation under Cerberus. Jack is a character molded by forces entirely out of her control, rendered a literal psychopath by the powers that be, with little recourse beyond using her potent biotic powers to kill the jerks. They deserve it.

She gets criticized for filling out the edgy archetype, a would-be villain with a deeply vulnerable side, and it’s true. But who’s to say there’s no substance to such an archetype? Edginess is an adolescent rejection of the status quo, and having grown up knowing only pain and isolation, Jack has earned the right to be as edgy and emotional as she likes. If she survives Mass Effect 2, she goes on to channel her trauma into activism, training young biotics as the Grissom Academy. She finds a new sense of purpose, and because my Shepherd had yet to sort out his own trauma, helping Jack move past hers was cathartic for him. Subject Zero in the lore, but Subject One in our hearts. — James

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Yeah, sorry, but still nope. Jack would have been bad in a mid-'90s THQ game. — Tim

8. Miranda Lawson

Miranda was my Shepard's romantic partner in Mass Effects 2 and 3, which I guess is a fairly safe choice in a series where you have the option to romance various aliens. There's a lot going on with that character: her initial closeness to the Illusive Man and Cerberus suggests she's not to be trusted, and in the opening hours of the second game, she doubts Shepard and comes into conflict with him. Slowly, you win her round, and at a key point, you're forced to choose sides between her and Jack during an argument on the Normandy. That then relationship develops into a convincing romance where you realise you're on the same page about the mission at hand. 

Miranda's experience of genetic enhancements links back to her complicated relationship with her father, which is more closely and brutally examined in Mass Effect 3. This personal crisis makes her one of the series' more complex characters, in my opinion, offering some clear motivations for why she is the way she is. 

I suppose I should also fess up to the fact I was watching a lot of the TV series Chuck in 2010, and the option to romance a BioWare character played by that show's cast member, Yvonne Strahovski, seemed like the correct thing to do. I was 21. — Samuel

7. Legion

Despite a bunch of humdrum sci-fi cliches—robots having an uprising, a collective hive-mind, and questioning whether or not they have a soul (barf)—Legion manages to remain an interesting character. The fact that he crudely patched himself up with a piece of dead Shepard-Commander’s armor is not just cool, but the first sign that Legion is more than just a simple geth automation capable of independent thought and perhaps even sentimentality.

While Legion doesn’t really have a sense of humor, per-se, he is often funny in that way robots have of flatly presenting data, such as the likelihood of someone being punched in the face by the volatile Jack (whom Legion also suggests be deactivated and shipped as cargo). I found Legion much more appealing as a companion than a particular Quarian I won’t name, and I was sadder to see him go than just about anyone else in the series. Cool robot. — Chris Livingston 

6. Tali-Zorah nar Rayya

Mass Effect isn't the first bit of sci-fi to blend machinery and religion, but the entire concept of a migrant fleet as home and a pilgrimage as rite of passage is still a cool setup, and Tali's stories were a great bit of universe building in that first adventure. Tali may not have been quite so memorable without the mystery of her face, preserved across all three games (I'm pretending that bad Photoshop job from Mass Effect 3 never existed). Even so, she may be the only companion with a story arc that spans across the entire trilogy.

Early in Mass Effect Tali provides insight into the quarian relationship with the Geth, which plays a bigger picture in Mass Effect 2. Her personal conflict with Legion is a genuinely tense balancing act, and Tali's loyalty mission deepens your understanding of the geth/quarian conflict and the quarian customs.

The conclusion of Tali's story in Mass Effect 3 was the most heart wrenching moment of the series for me. Here was a character I'd known for years. I liked her voice and curiosity, defended the galaxy with her, and cleared her name. But thanks to Mass Effect's binary good/bad morality system, I didn't have quite the paragon or renegade points to resolve the final showdown between Tali and Legion peacefully. One of them had to die, and it would mean the eradication of a species. There's no perfectly happy ending here. And there really shouldn't be. 

Mass Effect too often gives you that satisfying videogame outcome of 'solving' a storyline to get the good ending, but that's not the case with Tali. Her final step into adulthood ends with a heartbreak that Mass Effect was building to for five years. I still feel the sting of it. — Wes 

5. Thane Krios

Thane is a coldblooded killer with a conscience that struggles against his own profession. Doomed with a disease that’s slowly killing him, he signs on with Shepard’s suicide mission against the Collectors in ME2 because he has nothing left to lose. That internal conflict is what makes Thane such a compelling sidekick—he’s basically the personification of Shepard’s own Paragon and Renegade choices, and is the literal representation of their team marching slowly toward almost certain death. Plus, who can resist that gravelly voice? — Tom Marks

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Let's be honest. He's up here because he's a hot killer insect boy. My Shepard banged him, FYI. — Phil

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Nice. — Wes

4. Liara T'Soni

Oh, Liara. My sweet blue 106 year-old summer child. The easy mistake is to think that the asari scientist in only on the Normandy to serve as some sort of proxy conscience for the player. Yes, Liara does provide counterbalancing compassion to Shepard’s necessary cynicism, but there’s more to her than simply just being “the nice one”.

In practical terms, her academic insight into the Protheans makes her, literally, the smart pick for just about any mission. She’s certainly more likely to serve up nuggets of relevant info than almost anyone on this list. And as an all-in biotic character, Liara also has one of the handiest toolkits when it comes to combat. But the thing I like most is that she gives the game heart, without it having to be constantly bleeding. 

Liara is conflicted. By her mummy issues, by her lack of romantic experience, and by her inability to lie—but those doubts are offset by the sense of wonder and hope she brings to proceedings. As such she makes a fascinating alternate lens through which to view the Mass Effect universe. Unlike much of the cast, Liara is rarely sure about her answers (check out her doubts about the Krogan cure in the third game, for instance), which makes for a consistently interesting travel companion.

She’s also got a killer story arc. If your Shepherd falls for Liara, then she gives the best grief after your “death” in Mass Effect 2, which also perfectly sets up the hardening of her character, leading to her eventually becoming the Shadow Broker at the end of what is of course the best DLC story add-on. Liara, it was always you. — Tim

3. Urdnot Wrex

I played the Mass Effect series with a single rule: no going back to an earlier save to revise decisions I made. What happened, happened, no matter the consequences. I broke this rule only once, in the first game, when an argument led to—shockingly, and I thought, unfairly—Wrex being shot dead in a cutscene. I couldn’t live with that. No way. Wrex was way too cool to die. That’s the only time I undid one of Mass Effect’s events.

Wrex is cool (and my personal pick for best companion) because not only is he a tough-as-nails, battle-hardened veteran, he’s also a deep thinker, disagreeing with most other Krogans (including his father) about going to war after the genophage. Plus, he’s big and bulky and has a really deep voice and cool scars and he’s just the best.

There was no bigger disappointment than discovering Wrex couldn’t be my companion in Mass Effect 2, having been replaced with the lesser (but still decent) Krogan, Grunt. But that’s what a true badass does: accepts new responsibilities in place of galavanting around the galaxy. — Chris Livingston 

2. Mordin Solus

I love Mordin because he shows that you don't need stubble, a gravelly voice and a thousand yard stare to be an anti-hero. Mordin's quick-fire speech at first feels like a manufactured quirk, something to help you pick him apart from your small army of companions. However, it soon becomes clear that his upbeat demeanour hides a cold, calculating mind that has spent years dealing with the most difficult decisions in the solar system—decisions that Shepard is drawn into over the course of the second and third games. That machine-gun delivery is a product of a mind overflowing with thoughts, at once demonstrating his scientific brilliance and his anxiety. It's a symptom of the battle between logic and compassion that lies at the heart of his character.

He's such a chipper fellow that it comes as quite a shock to learn that he's the gateway to Mass Effect's genocide subplot. As you bond with him, he opens, and you see him dissect the terrible problems he's faced with an analytical mindset. He has done the moral mathematics—he will kill a million to save ten million—but his genophage is a slow, painful deathblow for the Krogan. As he travels with Shepard, he is forced to watch that species sputter out. None of your companions have faced a dilemma on this scale, but somehow this genius Salarian is able to bear the burden, and still find the optimism to sing a fine bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. —Tom Senior

1. Garrus Vakarian

Garrus has an advantage when it comes to a Mass Effect popularity contest: he's awesome. Also, he has a substantial role in all three games—the only other character you can say that about is Tali. That's not exactly a fair fight. Tali's great, of course, but she struggles to rise above the quirky-little-sister companion archetype that CRPGs would do well to be rid off. Garrus is something else. He's your best pal, first and foremost, somebody whose objectives and attitude align with your own and who will always, always have your back. The journey from that first meeting between a frustrated CSEC officer and a novice Spectre during the Saren investigation to that last charge against the Reapers as a pair of war heroes is one of the best friendship stories in gaming. And if you decided to get all up in his insect-bird-man business, it's a lovely romance as well.

Yet that's not all Garrus represents. The idea that Garrus is both dependent on Shepard and overshadowed by Shepard is one of the most nuanced bits of character writing in the series. Heading out alone after Shepard's 'death', Garrus makes a mess of hero life: when Shepard finds him and relieves him of the Arkangel moniker, it's a relief. He wasn't cut out to be Batman: he was born to be Robin. But that's a sad thing to recognise, and—laudably—it's not something that Shepard is allowed to fully resolve. There's no paragon-interrupting your way out of it. It's simply a thorn in your friendship, a blemish that makes their relationship all the more believable.

The kindest thing you can do, when it comes down to it, is let Garrus win that one last shooting contest on the Citadel. Give the guy his moment. He deserves it. — Chris Thursten