It seems like most Mass Effect players would rather be a Paragon than a Renegade, at least according to John Ebenger. The EA Cinematic Designer weighed in on how fans of Bioware’s iconic sci-fi role-playing series would choose to be a conventional hero over a chaotic rogue on social media earlier this week, noting that players selected the Paragon options over the Renegade ones more often than not.
In the Mass Effect series, players could fully customize many aspects of protagonist Commander Shepard, including his/her personality in the form of dialogue options and moral choices throughout the three-game-storyline. While the overall end goal of the Mass Effect series, to save the Milky Way Galaxy from the threat of the Reapers, remained the same regardless, the exact details of how Shepard went about doing so depended on players selecting from two color-coded options most of the time. Blue-colored “Paragon” choices valued peace, diplomacy and putting the needs of Shepard’s different Mass Effect squadmates before their own, while the red-colored “Renegade” options allowed players to wreak wanton havoc on enemies, punch out reporters for questioning Shepard’s motives, and generally be the biggest jerk in the galaxy. These choices carried over throughout the games, with Shepard ending the series either as a noble example of the human race at its best or a brutish thug only slightly better than the threats they fight against.
As John Ebenger pointed out on his Twitter page earlier this week, the majority of Mass Effect players chose the former, with 92% running a Paragon playthrough. This was in response to webcomic writer David Michael Kinne humorously noting that even in a game that allowed players to be the bad guy, they would still choose to “spare and forgive enemies, refuse to steal, and select the friendliest dialogue options.” Ebenger playfully agreed, while lamenting the work that he and the team at Bioware put into the Renegade choices and story pathways, which often led to Shepard doing rude or terrible things in Mass Effect. Check out the tweet below:
The original Mass Effect series earned countless amounts of praise from players and critics for its narrative choices, which created a sense of ownership in the tale of Commander Shepard and encouraged multiple playthroughs of the game’s story, even after new installments were released. Also, while many preferred the Paragon options, fans often found the more outlandish Renegade scenarios to be entertaining as well, with Shepard lobbing humorous insults at characters and accusing store owners of discriminating against the poor - although like quite a few cringe-inducing moments in the Mass Effect series, some can admittedly be tough to watch.
Still, in a way, it’s heartwarming to see that even in a video game players will still make the more moral choices, and it speaks to how attached fans were to the characters and world of Mass Effect in its heyday. For many, Commander Shepard was not just a playable character in a beloved game, but an idea that even in the darkness of war one can rise to do the right thing and lead others to be their best selves, and their choices while playing reflected that. Still, it can be fun to be bad once in a while, and with rumors of a remaster of the trilogy circulating the internet, it would be interesting to see if players continued down the path of virtue in Mass Effect or maybe try to take a walk on the dark side that they rejected before.
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Source: John Ebenger/Twitter
