BioWare: No pre-game choices in Mass Effect 2 - even if you don't have ME1 saves

Misplace your Mass Effect 1 saves? Recently rob a bank or murder a few people and decide that your goody-two-shoes Shepard's actually a boring old stick in the mud? Well, that's too bad, because - according to BioWare's Chris Priestly - Mass Effect 2 comes with a "pre-disposed assumption" of how Shepard acted in Mass Effect 1.

"This morning Tycho posted a quote I gave him from a discussion we were having about Mass Effect 2," said Priestly in a post on Penny Arcade. "Unfortunately, the information I gave him was not correct. I had told him that when creating a new character, you could go down a list of key decisions and set them manually."

"Unfortunately I was working from a test build used by our internal testing department. While there are choice made by the player, new games of ME2 will have a certain pre-disposed assumption of what happened to your new character in ME1."

Sorry, save misplacers/bank robbers/murderers. Them's the breaks.