Answering a question on the official Mass Effect Bioware forums, lead designer on Mass Effect 2, Preston Watamaniuk, has casually revealed that you won’t be able to play through Mass Effect 2 for a second time using your character from the first play through, rather being forced to restart the game from zero.

From the forum post, and answering the question, “After finishing ME2 can I take my character and restart a new playthrough preserving that character’s gear and abilities,” Watamaniuk said:

“The short answer is no.

“The reason is progression. We have been working very hard to make sure we design the abilities system to offer smooth progression into ME3 from ME2. Allowing double progression on characters makes that almost impossible.

“We have to have reasonable knowledge about where a character could end up finishing all content on a playthrough. We also want to offer choice of character build within specific classes.

“We replaced that feature with playing after you were done because it preserves progression and allows for smoother downloading of PRC.”

I guess we’ll just have to ‘man up’ if we want to play through the second entry to the Mass Effect RPG space opera for a second time.