Mass Effect 3 character face bug ruins UK gamers' weekend

UK gamers sitting down to Mass Effect 3, the most exciting release of the year so far, were crushingly disappointed on Friday night when a bug meant they couldn't import their existing characters properly.

The bug means some characters created in the original Mass Effect fail to import their beautiful custom faces. The choices you made in the first two games are unaffected, but gamers particularly attached to their Commander Shepards are up in arms.

"We have determined that faces importing incorrectly is an error with how codes were detected when transferred from Mass Effect 1 into Mass Effect 2 and then on into Mass Effect 3," BioWare's Chris Priestly wrote on the game's community forum. "The Mass Effect team continues to investigate fixes for these issues and they are top priority concerns for everyone here."

There are workarounds available: the codes Priestly refers to is a long series of letters and numbers that represent the specific values of your character's face -- what colour their hair is, what shape their ears are. If you copy your code from ME2, you can painstakingly enter it into the ME3 character import tool.

If you're playing on a PC you can use this fan-made tool to do the job. On Xbox, it'll involve finding the identity code at the top of your character screen in ME2, copying it with pen and paper and putting it in ME3 on the console's unutterably tedious onscreen keyboard. It doesn't seem to be a problem on the PS3 because the original game never came out for it, so all characters were created in ME2.

It's particularly annoying because much of the appeal of the ME series is that you carry your character through the games. Your Shep's your Shep. I'm very attached to both my Sheps, and having to recreate them imperfectly by guessing how they should look is depressing. It's like watching a botched recasting of your favourite character from a much-loved sci-fi TV series.

Most fans commenting on Priestly's thread seemed happy that a fix was being worked on, although one reasonably asked, "How did this not come up as a problem before you shipped the game?"

My concern is that the fix will only work for characters being freshly imported into the game, so if you've bodged together a new Shep and played a few hours into the new story you'll be faced (ahem) with losing your progress, or continuing with a recast hero or heroine. But fingers crossed.

Despite the bug, Mass Effect 3 has notched up virtually unanimous praise from the games press, with a metascore of 94 per cent putting it eighth in the all-time list on Xbox.

Have you managed to import your Shep correctly? Or did you go outside and enjoy the sunshine this weekend? Let me know in the comments, or over on the Citadel of inter-species understanding that is our Facebook page.