Conspiracy Theory: Bioware's Sneaky Helmet Design

It's an AI video - free promotional material that mostly only hardcore fans will even watch. I don't see why they'd waste the resources to animate Liam's face for it. And yeah, the fact that fans have criticized the animations might be part of why they didn't bother and just slapped a helmet on him. The last thing they'd want is a bunch of people complaining about the quality of facial animations for a scene that won't even be in the game.

And as for earlier footage of the character being shown with full helmets? They simply weren't ready to show off designs that weren't finalized yet. Or maybe they were still tweaking the hair models (remember how it looked like everyone was bald under the helmets in the early trailers? And we know from dev tweets for example that Liam's hair was giving them a lot of issues) or skin shaders (having played around with ENB settings for Skyrim, getting skin to look just right is harder than you'd think). Also, facial animations and lip syncing is one of the very last steps in putting everything together. Think of the time they would waste if they did that before the cut scene was otherwise finalized? You'd be polishing animations for a scene where you're looking at the back of the character's head potentially in the final cut.

Not everything has to be 'evidence' of some conspiracy. Though I suppose we wouldn't be the BSN otherwise. 

This is not something that is important to my perception of mass effect.

My favourite part is this is actually, sort of, a plot-point. In the first cinematic trailer (and confirmed in the recent reviews), we learn that Ryder (and others?) falls from an extremely high altitude and ends up with a broken helmet. Guess which kind of helmet it is? One of the EVA type ones with the huge visor, which is probably forced on you on account of being the intro and not getting to customize armour yet (which means Bioware only has to create one broken helmet model).

That makes sense from a meta-perspective, but not necessarily in-universe. My Ryder would wear something more like Shepard's helmet, that is more structurally sound. You could argue that it might break too, but it would be a lot less likely and therefore is a little annoying that our characters are forced to do something "dumb" and consequently pay the price.

I want to be clear that it isn't a big issue, but it's something I thought about.

There are also things that barriers can't protect you against, like falling. Mass effect fields in general though, they could certainly help. Although, because of the above, unless Ryder's suit suffered a power failure, I suppose Bioware didn't think about that. Which, to be perfectly honest, does disappoint me. There are so many things you can do with the idea of mass effect, so many possibilities. Some use of truly mind-bending physics becomes possible, and I've written extensively on how it could be applied, but that's just scratching the surface. I just want the writers to think about them too, because otherwise it's a waste of a unique and interesting IP.

Again, that's if Ryder's suit is fully functional, so I'm not jumping the gun, just apprehensive.