jack3auer wrote...
so does it effect everyone?
It affects one group of players but not the other:
a)
Long-time fans of the series, which supported it from day one,
are affected, since their ME1 Shepard is lost unless they can recreate him / her or extract the facecode (see OP). But still then there is the chance that Shep will look different in ME3 due to engine-changes.
The target audience of the game is
not affected. These players started maybe with ME2 or just now with ME3. Those are the "arcade" players, who buy games when they see them without the need to be attached to a series for years. It's probably the bigger group of the two and the one Bioware / EA hopes to get the most sales from.
So, from a strict business point of view, BiowEAre did everything right.