Update: Cooper later added this comment:
For those asking, I repurposed mocap from Jade Empire. Shepard was always planned to be both male & female after JE's pre-set characters.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 9, 2015
Original Story: Mass Effect allows players to choose a male or female version of protagonist Commander Shepard, but it seems the first human Spectre was originally a woman.
Jonathan Cooper, an animator at Naughty Dog who previously worked on the Assassin's Creed series at Ubisoft and, before that, Mass Effect at BioWare, tweeted:
Ten years ago this month, my very first anim test for Mass Effect. Yup, Commander Shepard was originally a woman: pic.twitter.com/FhC2E0FSrA
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 9, 2015
It's not known if BioWare always planned to give people a choice, or the studio simply decided to animate the female character first. Even so, Shepard's origins are interesting considering the focus on male Shepard in almost all marketing materials related to the Mass Effect trilogy.
Only with Mass Effect 3 did FemShep get her own promotion, and copies of the game included a reversible cover allowing players to choose whether to feature the male or female version of the commander on the outside of the box.
Mass Effect isn't the only game where BioWare has changed the options for the player character during development; Dragon Age: Inquisition originally would have only allowed players to choose a human character but the developer then added playable elves, dwarves, and qunari. In contrast to Mass Effect, Inquisition's box art features a gender neutral protagonist.
