Unmasking Tali'Zorah Vas Normandy

Bosh'tet.

This was pretty much the general consensus and reaction of Mass Effect 3 players who have opted to romance the Quarian engineer, Tali, in the game. Why? Because Bioware didn't bother creating a proper unmasking for her. The above image is the scene witnessed by Tali-romancing players nearing the ending parts of ME3. So what's the big deal? Read about it after the jump.


With so much fuss about Tali wearing a mask since the very beginning of the game -charming many players with her dialogue and actions (and well proportioned character polygons), it was a considered to one of ME3's biggest reveals to finally show what Tali looks like under the mask.

Words cannot describe how much we love this fanart.

Since the very first Mass Effect game, plenty of gamers have been wondering what Tali would look like underneath. This was a massive cause of inspiration for many artists, who created varying artwork depicting what Tali may look like under the mask. Our personal favorite is this one (above), which popped up a long time ago on the Bioware Social forums (sadly, we can't find the link to the original).

Now, to be clear, no one is saying what Tali should really look like. But the least that a massive company like EA/Bioware could have done was to not grab some stock photo from Getty images and just Photoshop it lightly.


Above is the original photo of Hammasa Kohistani, a British model and former winner of the Miss England pageant. As one can see, the issue is not the choice of model, but rather, the method by which the developers chose to unmask Tali -they did not even hire Ms. Kohistani directly (to shoot a photo made for Mass Effect), instead, they just acquired one from a stock image site.

Seriously, if Bioware was lacking funds to do so, they could have opted to ask Tali's voice actress, Ash Sroka, to serve as a basis for the character. Here's a photo of her by the way:

See Bioware? You've had options.