I’ve missed you, Shepard.

More than I knew, as it turns out.

I fired up Mass Effect 2 last night, and intend to fire it up again once this blog post is live, and was somewhat unprepared by the immediate effect it would have on me. Now, I enjoyed the original Mass Effect, but I did so despite disliking a lot of it. Combat, for example, was really clumsy. Inventory management was a chore. Heck, just changing the members of your active party was a chore. Exploration was relaxing, but also fairly tedious.

It was the story, cast and setting that held me so close when I played the game back in 2007. This is kind of strange, in retrospect, because Mass Effect is neither the type of game nor story I typically enjoy. And though I have spent these last two years praising the writing in the original, I didn’t actually remember much of it. That is, I remembered the feel of the setting more than I did any of the actual game events.

So going into Mass Effect 2 I could not have told you who Pressley was, or the names of half of Shepard’s crew, or who the Reapers were or why they were dangerous. By the time I was through the intro, though, I remembered. It was like all that information was already lurking there, ready to seep forth and be loved again.

My experience with the first three hours of Mass Effect 2 has therefore been various shades of “Cool! I remember this!” and “Cool! I remember loving this!” And that ain’t nothin’.

Now let’s talk about Shepard a bit.

The white dude on the Mass Effect box is not Shepard. I don’t know who that joker is. Captain Genericspacemarine, maybe. The Shepard I know and love is a badass Asian woman with red eyes and an eternal scowl. (And her first name is Penelope, which I had forgotten until booting up Mass Effect 2.) Her eyes are a little redder in the sequel, and her hair was scorched off in re-entry, and her skin is a shade darker, but it’s still her.

Not that they could put her on the box either, because she isn’t your Shepard. Or Bill’s down the road. We each have our own Shepard, modeled by us in some well-formed image of what a good Shepard should be, honed and refined through our choices and experiences with the original game. Male or female, black or white, paragon or renegade, Shepard is at once a complete cipher and a fully-formed, well-realized character with an established personality and backstory.

I’ve played a lot of games with the “create your own character!” tagline: Morrowind and Oblivion, Fallout 3, a half-dozen MMOs. And I enjoyed those games! But I never had a sense that the character was anything more than a mute, animated statue. I had fun running my dark elf archer all over Cyrodiil, amassing riches and conquering guilds, but I don’t really have any sense of who she is or what her motives are. I spent years behind the knee-high eyeballs of my gnome warlock in World of Warcraft, a game which actively rejects any semblance of role-playing you try to add. I wanted my character to have a personality, but I had to do it on the side. I know who Crystalis is, and you do too if you’ve been reading my blog, but World of Warcraft doesn’t — and that’s where she spent most of her time.

The point I’m coming around to is that BioWare must have sorcerers working on their writing staff. They allowed me to build a character up from zero and then developed that character so convincingly in the game world that I had forgotten she had been created by me in the first place.

I think it would be fun to speculate on and discuss some of the tricks that were used to get the character to work so wonderfully, but this post is already long and rambling enough. And besides, I have more playing to get to.