It wasn’t the biggest of Mass Effect 3’s missteps, so you’d be forgiven for having forgotten all about it, but BioWare’s trilogy did us all dirty when it spent 2.9 games building up the mystery of what Tali the Quarian looked like only to reveal…she looked like stock art of a sexy human lady.
The fact Tali, the only Quarian we ever see without a mask on, was shown to be basically a human with white eyes (above) at the end of Mass Effect 3 was a crushing disappointment to fans, who had grown accustomed to being able to “romance” more alien aliens. It was also just weird…why would someone who wears a mask and helmet 99.99% of the time bother/tolerate growing long hair?
However with a chance to change things with the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remasters, Bioware have done just that, replacing the notorious stock art image with something a little less “Getty”.
Tali is still shown to be very human-like—which I’m sure will still upset some Mass Effect fans—but now has her mask on, and in general is looking a lot more like she is posing for a regular photo, and not a still from a country music video.
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(For what it’s worth I still really like this early idea from Matt Rhodes, one of the artists who worked on the original games).
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