Mass Effect 3: First Thoughts

Primarily a response to Kayl's post.
Right, so the game I'm most looking forward to this year is, naturally, Mass Effect 3. I played through the demo a few times the day it came out, I've seen a few trailers, and I've checked up on some of the features and such. I loved the first two games; I'm a huge RPG fan and space travel/aliens has always been an interest of mine, so this series has been one of my favourites.
I failed at keeping this short. [Be warned of minor spoilers.]

First Thoughts::
The new character creation doesn't seem much different than ME2's PC on high settings to me, though they did add a new female hairstyle that looks so much better than all the others that I will probably unfortunately be using it on all my female characters. My only minor problem is that you can't use eyeshadow as dark as the default female Shepard and there is still no way to make an attractive male Shepard without using the default. FemShep looks alright most of the time pretty easily.

The aiming feels so much better, based on playing the demo, that I may actually decide to use the soldier class... However, it has been changed so that all classes can use any weapon, but the amount of weapons you carry increases the cooldown time on your abilities. In the demo you could see that if you're carrying only one weapon, you can spam your abilities like crazy, yet carrying three made the cooldown incredibly long. I like this change, as it makes the ability-oriented classes a lot more fun.

I am not happy to see the two new squadmates are both human, as I think having more alien squadmates would have been more interesting. I am even more unhappy to see that the new female human is voiced by Jessica Chobot, who is pretty much the epitome of fake-annoying-wannabenerd-female, and while I'm probably being harsh, it's disappointing to see that type of person at all, let alone see that BioWare is letting one voice a character simply to get through to her "fans". This video may show a bit of why I dislike her. [She didn't impress during the interview about Mass Effect 3, either.]

I am saddened that the original voice actor for Mordin Solus is not returning. I am also saddened that Cerberus has turned out to be messed up more, but I'm hoping there is some slight redemption for the Illusive Man at some point; he's a fantastic character, despite his methods.

I've heard good things about the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, though apparently the adept class is overpowered due to their stasis ability working on all enemies. I haven't had the chance to play it due to a router issue that is plaguing a small amount of people. Hopefully BioWare fixes the problem.

BioWare claimed that they were focusing a lot on relationships with crew members, even more than usual, and since I like the stories so much this should be a positive thing for me. [They also added a story-esque mode for people who want to breeze through the combat to see the cutscenes, that may prove useful when replaying it to see different conversation choices at a later time.] You can also make a male Shepard gay now, which is appreciated since the previous two games allowed for lesbian relationships but not male/male. Equality is good.

I've had a look at the list of everything that affects the outcome of the final battle, and I was pleased to see that actions from previous games have an effect, even if it's a minor one, as before this list was released it appeared like a lot of actions weren't changing anything at all. [They don't really change anything plot-wise, which kinda sucks since this is the last game in the series and they could have made things change wildly based on previous actions.] Difficult to say much else on this topic before the game comes out, though.

Anyway, I'm still really looking forward to this game. Hopefully won't be disappointing. The biggest problem with the game so far is that I have to use EA's Origin to run it. Steam is much better. I will have to run Origin THROUGH Steam and then launch Mass Effect 3 to be able to take screenshots.  [Pretty lame.]
Some things I'm really hoping for::
-Illusive Man redemption in some manner
-A lot of dialogue with Legion + more on the non-heretic geth
-Awesome romance subplots [the list of possible romances was released already]
-Taunting the Turian council member who dismissed the reaper claims
-Joker + EDI relationship