Mass Effect 3 - Other Gamers' Underpants

There's an excellent piece at Rock, Paper, Shotgun with Richard Cobbett discussing his lack of connection with Shepard after he couldn't import his ME2 saves and instead used BioWare's defaults. Along the way there are some good observations about choices in games and ceating characters. On the latter:

It’s notable that of the last few major single-player RPGs, only Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur: Chinny Reckoning have embraced the idea of creating your own character. Fable 3 gives you moral choices, but is essentially locked down unless you want to put on silly trousers and fart around the kingdom instead of saving it. The Witcher 2 was built around Geralt and his existing story. Mass Effect has a very specific canonical Shepard, even if he is the wrong gender. Dragon Age 2 picked up on this with Hawke, which also subtly pushed players towards the character Bioware wanted them to play as by offering a higher-fidelity look than you can create by playing with the sliders, as well as heavily pushing a consistent vibe in marketing and advertising.

This part is increasingly important. Characters are, at least, one of the most important parts of any narrative driven IP. They’re the face of the game, and typically the most instantly recognisable thing about it – even if they’re not the specific hero. Bioshock for instance has a cool city and premise, but it’s the Big Daddies and Little Sisters rather than Jack and Ryan who provide its most iconic elements. In Crysis 2, the character isn’t the guy you play, Alcatraz, but the Nanosuit he wears. Still, the same rules apply, even with an inhuman face.

This is a lot of both creative control and marketing power for any company to give up, even discounting the additional effort it takes to offer character creation tools and heavy customisation. Without a big license or established lore, it’s easier to sell an experience as “This could be you!” than “You could meet this guy!”, as well as dodging issues of why you’re not playing as whoever it was who drew you to the franchise in the first place.