As promised, the parts of my Dragon Age 2 interview regarding female characters.
Eurogamer: BioWares Producer Jesse Houston recently said on Twitter that he thinks male Hawke is just as iconic as Male Shepard from Mass Effect and, although Female Shepard was the fan favorite, marketing prefers to use the male versions. Why is that?
Fernando Melo: Well, it's kind of one of those things that... there's definitely a lot of research that goes into this stuff. And one thing for sure that we notice is, the more imagery you use, especially if you're talking about such a personal story of a character, the more confusing it gets. People don't necessarily learn to associate an image because the character could look like anyone and you end up loosing a little bit of that. It stops being an iconic character. The reason it's iconic is that you have to go with one.
In terms of the question of why male versus female: Again, there's a lot of research that goes into testing out different looks both for the male and for the female character, the default characters. You can of course customize them however you want, but we do a lot of differnt testing and ultimately we go with the one that is chosen as kind of the most iconic version. And in both cases it tends to be the male character. I'm not a psychologist or a sociologist, so i couldn't explain to you the reasons for it, but it's not just because we feel the male character is stronger or anything like that. Otherwise we probably wouldn't do a female character.
We feel both are equally strong in terms of their unique sides of the story, but it's just something we have to put a lot of research into how we present the game. And we have to go with those decisions that tend to always work for us and that is by listening to that kind of research.
Eurogamer: Do you prefer male of female? Or both?
Fernando Melo: I play both and the really interesing part is that in Dragon Age 2 the character now has a voice as well. Again, there are no massive changes with Dragon Age 2, it's very subtle improvements. The nice thing is that actually the male and female actors have different strenghts. So for example with the male character my preference is that i sort of play male Hawke as a very aggressive character and with that actor i really like the way he acts out drama, it's really really good and i really really enjoy playing that. Whereas the female character is much more... for me i prefer this sort of sarcastic and humorous route and she's very good for that.
Other people in the office prefer to play different ways, but i think that's gonna be one of the nice subtle things that people can experience. Now we have the conversation wheel as in Mass Effect for example, but we introduced the icons that tell you the tone that you're going to speak. And Hawke begins to respond like that over time, even in battle and there's situations where for example Hawke may have just one line in between a conversation. We don't stop the conversation just so that you can say 'Ok, doesn't make sense.' But the way that Hawke responds with that line will start to become the way you've been playing him, wether it's aggressive, sarcastic, friendly or whatever the case is. And it makes the character that much more recognisable.
Eurogamer: I've read from a lot of people (and female players) in forums that they only started playing a game like Mass Effect because they knew they could play as a female, but that it wasn't made that known by marketing for example. Do you think that the fact that you can also play as a female is made clear enough overall, especially in respect of the female audience?
Fernando Melo: Again, this is one of those cases like which image do you go with on the front of the box. There's definitely a lot of research that goes into it. I think the one thing to keep in mind is that we have very different audiences. Our players that live on the forums or that are into reading up on the forums will dig for information. And you could say they are well educated on the title. We never have any doubt that if the information is there, they will be able to find it. And that's not what we're concerned about, being able to get confused about what you can do in the game.
But it's very important for us that we continuously try to attract new players as well so that we can continue making the games that we make. So in doing that, we have to try to look at this research and figure out what is it that is going to attract these new players. And that's what all these decisions are about, is it male, is it female etc. And even the look, like the beard. You wouldn't believe how many times we had to do different beards to try that and so on. Even just subtle things like that can make an actual, a very big difference for someone that has never played a BioWare game, what their impression is and wether they are more inclined to play the game or not.
Eurogamer: Does female Hawke have different animations or a different body language? Afaik this was present in Mass Effect 1, but not so much in ME2.
Fernando Melo: I'm not as familiar with the Mass Effect side and what they did there. Certainly, in Origins all of the animations shared the same skeleton, so it meant that female players in particular had very rough walks and runs and stuff. For Dragon Age 2 you could say that we have a much more elegant skeleton and animations for the female form. So it does actually feel a lot more natural. I hope that people see that, when they see and play a female character, it will feel a lot more natural, a lot more attractive that way as well.
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hahha couldnt stop laughin for a few mins 
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