They Changed Jun Aslan's Face, and That's the Cheap Part of Listening

There's a specific quiet that happens in a comment thread when a reveal trailer drops. Not outrage, exactly. More like a room full of people leaning forward at the same time and then, in unison, sitting back.

That's what reportedly happened with Exodus — the sci-fi RPG that's spent a couple of years walking around wearing Mass Effect's coat — when the male version of its lead, Jun Aslan, got shown. The response was bad. Now, per Pure Xbox, the studio is changing his appearance. "We've been listening, and we take that feedback seriously."

I've read the article. I haven't seen the new face. I've seen the old one in the sense that everybody's seen the old one — the frame that got screenshotted, cropped, reposted, captioned. I don't know what the replacement looks like. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Here's my position, plainly: changing a face is the cheapest form of listening there is. That doesn't make it wrong. It makes it easy — and easy is exactly why it happens first.

Think about what "fixing" a character's appearance actually costs. A modeler opens a file. Noses move. Jawlines move. Cheekbones get… whatever cheekbones get. Weeks, maybe, and most of it is art direction meetings. Compare that to fixing what people actually complain about in these games, which is that the character is a wet paper bag with a gun and a destiny. That takes a rewrite. That takes a year. That takes admitting the premise was thin.

So yes: they'll change the face. They always change the face. And then a year after launch we'll argue about whether the game was good, and not one person will bring up the jaw.

Which is the part nobody tells you about character design. You don't remember faces. You remember choices.

Ask yourself what Commander Shepard looks like. Not the default — the one you actually played. You can probably see the hair. The armor. The scar you gave them. Now ask what they sound like saying "I should go." Both answers have the same shape, which is that neither is a face. It's a presence.

I built and rebuilt characters in Dragon Age's creator for hours. Hours. Six versions of Hawke, sliding a chin-width meter two pixels to the left and thinking, yes, this is the one. Then I'd play forty hours and never look at the chin again. What stuck was the moment Hawke said something I would have said, and I felt that small click of being understood by a thing I'd made.

To be fair to Exodus, it's listening at all. Plenty of studios don't. Plenty of studios hear "the lead looks boring" and ship it anyway, out of stubbornness dressed up as artistic vision. There's a version of that stubbornness I respect and a version I don't, and I've never fully worked out the difference.

My rule of thumb: defend a decision you made on purpose; change a decision you didn't notice making. If that face was a deliberate statement, stand there and take the arrows. If it was a Tuesday render that never got second eyes on it, fix it and don't make it weird.

There's also an option that costs the least and gives the most, and I'd be surprised if they don't take it: let us build the face. Ship the male and female versions of Jun Aslan, then hand over a fairly deep creator. Players who care sculpt what they want; players who don't hit default. Nobody has ever complained about making too many decisions about their own cheekbones.

All of this, though, is surface. Surface is what gets fixed before launch, because surface is what's screenshottable. The question nobody at that studio can answer yet is whether Jun Aslan has a voice worth putting behind the face — a point of view, an appetite, a way of saying no to people. Mass Effect didn't earn its place on its renders. It earned it in the moment Wrex said something and you had to decide what kind of person you were.

So they're changing the face. Fine. Good. I hope it's a better one.

I'll be watching for what happens when a character says a line of dialogue in a room, and I have to sit in my chair and decide whether I believe them.