Kaidan and Ashley are the butts of many jokes in the Mass Effect fanbase. In the first game, they serve the purpose of keeping things grounded as we're introduced to a ton of alien races. But by the time you've played through once, you know the lore well enough that their role is pretty redundant. Human companions in later games would have to be slightly more interesting than "duty-driven soldier" to stand out from the crowd.
However, for all of our talk, it turns out we actually love the plain Jane-duo a lot more than we let on. New player data from EA shows that Ashley and Kaidan are actually the two most popular squadmates in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, beating fan favourites like Tali and Garrus.
This ranking is a little hard to believe. Admittedly, you get more opportunities to use Kaidan and Ashley, as they are the first two companions you get access to (sorry Jenkins) – but it still seems like a bit of a stretch. The only plausible explanation is that this data includes people who played for about ten minutes and then put the game down forever, never meeting the rest of the OG Normandy gang.
Well, read it and weep. Here's the official ranking.
- Kaidan
- Ashley
- Garrus
- Tali
- Wrex
- Liara
This does add to the theory of players who didn't stick with the game very long skewing the numbers, since this is pretty much the order you get the companions in. The only exception is Wrex and Tali, but that can be explained by the fact that Wrex isn't mandatory, and can meet an unpleasant end on Virmire.
This would track with our previous coverage on the most popular squadmates, which shows that fans who stuck with the game are much more inclined to bring Tali and Garrus along. Bringing a crewmate on at least five missions will give you an achievement, and through that metric Tali and Garrus are in the lead. As expected, the human duo was in last place.
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