Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard may be the saviour of the galaxy, but how many people did she kill along the way? Reddit user mocha820 tallied up every kill in a standard run through all three games and assembled some neat stats on the series. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Mocha’s numbers are pretty shocking, but not all that out of line for most action titles. According to this post, Mass Effect 1 had 1,251 kills and ME 3 had 2,284. Mass Effect 2 is the real shocker here with 307,065 casualties when you include the colony that Shepard destroys in the Arrival DLC.
If you’re interested, definitely check out the full post which has some of the more specific break downs for each race, and what was and was not included in the count. All things considered the methodology is about as solid as you could reasonably get. Colour me impressed. And also a little bit disturbed that Shepard’s basically wiped out the population of Iceland.
You’re reading Numbers, a blog on Kotaku that examines games and culture through the lens of maths and statistics. To contact the author of this post, write to dancstarkey@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @dcstarkey.
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16 responses to “Commander Shepard Killed More Than 300,000 People”
Pfrt. Anyone who’s played Plague Inc knows that Greenland’s what you need to target
Fucking Greenland. All my diseases start there because FUCK Greenland and their sensible and effective quarantine measures.
I’ve taken to removing any and all symptoms until every person is infected to remain undetected and then hit everyone at once with 10-15 different symptoms. No one let me near a germ warfare laboratory
That really is the only way to win consistently, at least with bacterial. The other types can be difficult to keep symptom-free from memory, but the principal is the same. There needs to be a very steep curve on the X/Y axis for the deadliness of the disease, such that the cure cannot possibly be discovered before the population destroyed.
I couldn’t stop laughing when I read this.
Greenland (and Iceland) are always a touch one. Close the ports and its all over!
This study didn’t include Niftu Cal, the biotic god, that you could ‘encourage’ to his death. May not have died by Shepard’s hand but by God the blood of that Volus is on Shepard’s conscience (at least in one of my playthroughs).
I lie awake at night, unable to sleep thinking about that choice……and how I laughed my arse off!
I don’t remember if I ever came across that one. Which game and or dlc was that in if you don’t mind my asking?
ME2, mission to recruit Samara where you go through the Eclipse drug den.
Thanks!
Huh, I didn’t know there was a default gender to Commander Sheppard. I thought the player could choose whatever gender they wanted to be.
A single pronoun. Just it let it go.
There is only one Commander Shepard, and she is a woman. The box art and promo trailers are all simply wrong. Everyone knows this. (Except the 85% of players who chose differently. I genuinely, no joking, do not understand this statistic. Femmeshep was so much better!)
Jennifer Hale told me I was awesome because I got her to sign the Femshep side of my steelbook ME3 collector’s edition *blushes*
So jelly! I’m pretty glad they did that, though. I think both sheps did a great job, but Hale will always be Commander Shepard to me. Even if she’s playing a Jedi or a spartan.
It’s a nitpick but Flash Gordon will always be the saviour of the universe to me. Even Queen sang about it. Once it’s been immortalized in falsetto, anyone else is just a latecomer to the title.