During a recent panel, executive producer Casey Hudson revealed that Tali was nearly kept out of Mass Effect 3 as a playable character. The popular Quarian mechanic was eventually inserted due to internal pressure (and anticipated external pressure).
“We talked about not putting Tali in as a full squadmate and passionate people on the team were like ‘oh, you gotta put Tali in. Tali’s got to be there!’ So thank Patrick Weekes and some of our writers for that,” said Hudson according to Eurogamer. “We figured if he was passionate about it then there were other people passionate about it, so we put her in there.”
BioWare also released some telling statistics for the game as well. Despite having an army of supporters on the Internet for the female version of Shepard, stats complied by the company shows that only 18 per cent of players chose to play as a woman.
Other statistics showed that 64.5 percent of players played towards the Paragon end of the moral spectrum and roughly 44 percent of players chose “Soldier” as their character class. Additionally, over 10.7 billion enemies have been killed in multiplayer, 64 percent of players did not meet Wrex during Mass Effect 3 and Liara was voted the most popular of the squad-mates.
