Is Shepard more relatable than Ryder?

No, No, Yes, Unfortunately 

Nop. With Shepard I felt obligated to always choose Paragon in order to keep people safe, their loyalties etc. Game would often than not punish you for being Renegade. It was too polar extreme opposite dialogues also, either I'm super nice or total evil. Shepard is also already an experienced soldier with lots of story you didn't experience. I see people are not happy there's not enough renegadeish options in this game (there's still a couple), but I remember pretty well the stats showing barely anyone played renegade in the OT.

With Ryder this is their first big mission, I'm with them on their first big event. Heck, I even physically see their parents. I decide if he is going to be a caring character with emotional, logical or professional to sticking serious to the mission or being casual about certain moments when it seems fitting. I'm not punished about this decisions whatsoever, but they still define my character overall, as Lexi gives her thoughts on how you defined your character. Since these stats of what you picked most are there, they could integrate those stats to further develop the character based on that in a sequel, where inevtiably Ryder will be a much more mature character.

Lol its like comparing Battleship with gunship.... I mean really why is this even a question xd. We all know Ryder is 1/4 of Shepard at its peak.... da facts *bum tss*.

Shepard may be more popular and may even be more fun to play as (subjective) but I don't see how for most people Shepard is more relatable unless you are a delta force elite soldier.

This was one of my issues with Ryder.  Sara Ryder never fit the story.  She had been places, seen things, seen combat.  She would never have been this green.  Pathfinder team members to me, considering what they had to do, what they may have to face, would have been chosen from the best fo the best, or had been trained to be the best of the best.  

Ryder's story was more of you were just family brought along to this new world with your father who was a Pathfinder, but you hadn't had extensive training.  And THEN you were tossed into all of this.  

Everyone on the pathfinder team would have been trained to some degree to be Pathfinder so that they could step in if called upon given the high risk of a Pathfinder dying. 


Ryder, with the background you were given just never fit what they were trying to do to me. 

I've always had trouble relating to Shepard personally.

Ryder has too much auto-dialogue and the limited character creator doesn't help. Too me, Ryder feels more like BW's character than Shepard, more fleshed out, more concrete like Geralt, but not as interesting. Sara Ryder should have been a role player's dream and there are some great moments in the game, but they are few and far between. I once said that Sara Ryder was he best character in the game and that was part of the problem. She feels like another character. Shepard felt like MY Shepard (until ME3). Even though she had this background, I could mold her from there and really role play her. A lot of that was due to superior writing of both Shep and her crew. Shepard was also an anomaly for BW, a character who started out as a hero. Most BW characters were like Ryder, farmboy (or farmgirl) nobody who rose to be a hero. The Warden in DA:O was sort of like that and I had no problem relating to her. Hawke was fun, but felt stymied by the story. The Inquisitor was so pigeonholed by her title, that there was little room to really role play. I think Ryder could be totally relatable if she had just been better written, but that goes for most of Andromeda.

I don't find either of them particularly relatable because I can't warp dark energy with my mind or have wrist-mounted flame throwers, nor do I have 30% cybernetic parts(yet) or an AI in my head.

That doesn't mean I don't find them both to be compelling. I don't mind the auto-dialogue so much. I don't need a character to be a blank slate that I can project myself onto. I don't mind characters who have a certain amount of definition to their personality. I actually grew to like Shepard more the more the story progressed and the more defined they became.

Why? in previous game you had in fact 3 options...full paragon, full renegade or a MIX between the both...
I got all the paragon points i needed and for example i killed the guy that try to blackmailed me...
In fact with this system i could shape Shepard personality a lot better.
Ryder? its empty.

Yes there was a middle option but it was pretty unrewarding at times. Example: I had to get a good amount of paragon points in order to get both Tali and Legion to live during their exchange in ME3. Also had to get a good amount to redeem Saren, etc. I don't like the notion that I had to earn points in order to get a dialogue options available. It just made it feel wrong to ever go against Paragon before those events.

Ash's situation was quite different. She was trying to be in the very same military structure that her family had been in. And what he did was well known to all. We have no specific knowledge of how well known Alec's choice to work with AI was. It might very well have been relatively contained (which I believe it was) and only impacted his kids if they wanted to be part of N7 or the alliance. How involved is earth's military with such things? Would they hold that against his kids there too? That's seems unrealistic. He could be a criminal but that doesn't make his kids criminals too. Ash was able to be in the military despite her Grandfather and she did rise if you didn't kill her. Same would be true for Alec's kids.

If the story of the character is not giving me anything reasonable to work with, I have to head canon it. Pre head canon it looks like Alec was a nepotistic jackass who despite his kids having absolutely no real skills that would enable them to be a solid pathfinder he handed over the title to them anyway for ... reasons.  He did it out of selfish guilty reasons even when he saw the clusterfuck that was Habitat 7. But they just showed us that he was good at what he did. They went to some degree to do that on Hyperion and on Habitat 7. We know guilt was a motivating factor but he still had some solid sense in his head when he wanted to be sure of what was going on with Habitat 7. The scenes where we first meet him and struggle on the ground against the kett compared to the history we get are so diametrically opposed that he seems personality disordered. For a guy who was good at his job as N7 and seemed to know what was a stake upon arrival, if his kids did not have some skills that could at least make them somewhat reasonable as pathfinder, his character just deteriorated into absurdity.

Those kids ideally needed to be older than 22, and they needed to have a whiff of experience to be able to pull it off otherwise it's not just bad writing, it's barely believable. That is why shepard was so much better. You could see him doing what he did. It was believable. And here you are some 22 year old kid with no real skills beyond bodyguard for a mass relay and assistant at a prothean dig site and we are expected to believe that them with their barely skilled vagabond team can somehow stop the kett and make multiple planets viable along with forge a solid relationship with another species? That is the stuff of absurd comedy. There is nothing in that concept that even comes of as remotely believable or possible.

And at 22 they should have at least had some kind of experience. That is four to five years after high school. So college or military would make sense. But apparently BW forgot to bother with that. Or they didn't even consider it seriously. So my Ryder did nothing but flounder for all those post high school years? Accepting their poor fate of being the kids of a father who wanted to use AI? But yet upon arrival into what looks to be a record level nightmare for the Andromeda Initiative Alec decides in all his infinite wisdom and experience to hand over the title of pathfinder to his kid without considering the ramifications? Sorry, I can't even roll with that. Not even under the guise of him feeling guilty or wanting to make sure they discover that final memory that was tied into their success as a pathfinder (which ironically if this setup had any grounding in reality, would likely never come). If he had one whiff of responsibility (which he is made out to have far more than that), he would have made the tough choice and never put it in his kid's hand unless he knew they had some reasonable level of qualification for it. BW did not give us any level of qualification for whatever reason. Perhaps they are so detached from the real world that they believe what they wrote is qualification enough? Perhaps they wanted and believe we would fill in the blanks as I did (quite likely they decided to go this route and make them a semi blank state rather than a 'this is all you are' with those credentials that are more like someone fresh out of high school than someone half a decade after). It's clear that they are on that team because they are his kids, but again what qualifications do they have? Ryder call himself a recon specialist. I believe female ryder did as well. That leads me to believe they have had some military experience during those five years which we are not told about. Or are they just giving out guns and recon specialist titles to anyone that is part of the AI? I don't think it's a leap to believe they had military experience prior to joining AI. It would explain some of the holes in decisions made by BW, at least to me.