The Real Commander Shepard Is a Renegade

Mass Effect 2 may have been released just a few hours ago, but there are already plenty of people that have already finished the game. We're not talking about the fanatic ones that got the "private scene" release on Friday, but about the ones that had inside dealings with the game and had the privilege to fiddle with it early on.

Choices are a big part of Mass Effect, just as they were in the first title, but if freedom of choice steered you toward the good, Paragon side, then learn that this is not the path that the real Shepard would have walked. Mark Meer, the voice of male Commander Shepard of both Mass Effect 1 and 2, unveiled his Renegade inclinations and confessed that he played the game as an evil man. That's the first time around.

"I generally play evil on my first go-through, then switch to good for the second so I can feel like I'm redeeming myself and making amends to all those poor folks I screwed over for quick cash the first time around," Meer told RPG Site. And for him, both Mass Effects games, just as the third one will probably be too, was a unique experience that we won't have the chance to share, "because I was privy to so many details of the plot. I'd start a mission, and then suddenly recall all the possible outcomes." And that might be a good thing for us, because that's what we, in the industry, call a spoiler.

"In some ways it's more fun for me to play a game like Jade Empire or Dragon Age, where I can bump into myself as a random character, without such an in-depth knowledge of what's going to happen next," he explained, while also giving us a very pleasantly surprising detail of his past dealing with BioWare characters.

"I'm a few random townspeople, dwarves, and so on ... I'm the Athras, the Dalish elf who suspects his wife may be a werewolf, and I play several of the werewolves you can actually speak to – the one who takes you to see Swiftrunner and the Lady of the Forest near the end of the Nature of the Beast quest, and also the werewolf guarding the wounded elves after the battle (assuming you side with the lycanthropes)."