A Public Service Announcement

There's another complaint I've come across frequently regarding Mass Effect 3, and this one I find to be completely justified - the broken face importer. Interestingly, the only people I've heard talk about this are the ones complaining about how their FemShep was ruined. I guess not too many dude Shepards are quite as into the facial customization. Which is fair - DudeShep is pretty smoking.

When I started the first game as a female character I looked at the default face and pronounced "This will not do". She was your basic brown-haired, brown-eyed average-looking chick. I would have maybe given her a 7. So I had to customize, and obviously over the course of two games I got very attached to my custom face. It was all part of my vision of the character, and I'm sure that is true for everyone else who customized the character.

My import into ME3 looked terrible. She had jowls. Her skin was the wrong color. I think the only thing that was remotely similar was the hair. I've heard people say they tried to "fix" the character and always ended up with something either fugly or just not-quite-right, and eventually gave up in frustration. I managed to sidestep that particular infuriating circumstance so I thought I would share my process.

In the first game, I cycled through the preset faces until I found a structure that was most like what I visualized. Then I tweaked a couple of the sliders and changed the hair, eyes, and complexion to what I wanted and I was done. In the third game I tried to start with my imported face at first, but soon gave up. The thing had changed her bone structure so thoroughly it was going to be impossible to fix. So I turned back to my method from the first game and went through the presets. Luckily, I don't think the Bioware team changed much about those stock faces throughout the series - makes sense, there are more important things to worry about. And so I managed to find a face that was almost exactly like the one I'd started out with in ME1. All I had to do was repeat the process and I got a FemShep that was so close to the one I'd created before I honestly didn't notice any differences during play. And I'd just finished replaying ME2 right before I started 3. I suppose this wouldn't work so much of one had not started out with a template, or changed it too much before proceeding, but the principle still works. Find a preset that is close, and go from there. Oh, and don't pay attention to the hair or skin color or anything. The structure is the important part, everything else can be changed easily. The template I started with was a completely different race from what I ended with.