One dies automatically in ME1. The other is a default character in the intro and for Mars, after which point they're immediately removed from your control. You can see them on the Citadel but you can also completely miss/ignore them from that part on, and you can eventually shoot them (or someone else with you will shoot them). If you ignore their hospital scenes, it's pretty much inevitable that they're going to die in that scene. And then, even if they DO survive, you can tell them you don't want them on the Normandy, and send them to Hackett for some war asset points. And if you DO recruit them, you've still spent most of the first half of the game not having them around to give you their perspective on things.
In other words, the developers can't rely on the idea that Kaiden/Ashley will ever rejoin your crew or voice opinions to you. Introducing James as a new character to fill that role means they don't have to have the same lines recorded by three separate voice actors.
Unbridled9 posted...
Also even having him be a newcomer doesn't mean he, somehow, has to be a blank slate meathead.
That's subjective taste, though.
Like I said, I feel like they made him that way to counter-balance the rest of the crew (if you save Kaiden over Ashley, you don't really have any grunt-type teammates - most of them lean more into tech, biotics, and precision sniping over brute force... and if you let Garrus die in ME2, you don't even have the sniper). Unless you're playing Shepard as a Soldier (or maybe a Vanguard), your team is usually going to be a bit lightweight. In the same way ME1 deliberately had one representative of each "class", and ME2 tried to span the whole spectrum (which comes into play during the final mission), ME3 needed a Soldier-type.
I feel like he's also there to counter-balance Traynor to some degree - she's the non-combat nerd girl, he's the marine. They're a deliberate inversion of the Kaiden/Ashley dichotomy in the first game. ---
"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family