Mass Effect's Commander Shepard may be the savior of the galaxy, but how many people did she kill along the way? Reddit user mocha820 tallied up every kill in a standard run through all three games and assembled some neat stats on the series. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Mocha's numbers are pretty shocking, but not all that out of line for most action titles. According to this post, Mass Effect 1 had 1,251 kills and ME 3 had 2,284. Mass Effect 2 is the real shocker here with 307,065 casualties when you include the colony that Shepard destroys in the Arrival DLC.
If you're interested, definitely check out the full post which has some of the more specific break downs for each race, and what was and was not included in the count. All things considered the methodology is about as solid as you could reasonably get. Color me impressed. And also a little bit disturbed that Shepard's basically wiped out the population of Iceland.
You're reading Numbers, a blog on Kotaku that examines games and culture through the lens of math and statistics. To contact the author of this post, write to dancstarkey@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @dcstarkey.