Mass Effect 3 - 3.5M Shipped Worldwide and More

EA has announced Mass Effect 3 has shipped 3.5M units worldwide, according to VG247:

EA’s announced, following today’s European release, that Mass Effect 3 has shipped 3.5 million units worldwide.

Dr Ray is, quite naturally, happy at the news, as well as paying tribute to series executive producer Casey Hudson.

“We have been truly humbled by the amazing response from fans and critics for Mass Effect 3,” said BioWare GM Muzyka.

Apparently sales were 900k on the first day.

Meanwhile, Chris Priestly has responded about the face import issue on their forums, offering a fan-made tool as a temporary solution:

Hi everyone

We are aware that some players are having issues importing the faces of characters from Mass Effect 1 or Mass Effect 2 into Mass Effect 3. The issue is likely in how faces were detected when imported from Mass Effect 1 into Mass Effect 2, and we’re working on the best way to correct it for affected players.

As our teams work hard to address the importing of face codes we would like to call out a fan made tool that may be able to help PC users in the short term:
Mass Effect Tools

And detailed instruction from a fan on how to use them here.

Edit: Update: Hi Everyone.

We want to keep everyone up to date on this issue as we know how strongly many you feel about this. I will continue to update this thread as we have more information.

We have determined that faces importing incorrectly is an error with how codes were detected when transferred from Mass Effect 1 into Mass Effect 2 and then on into Mass Effect 3 or importing a Mass Effect 2 saved game with New Game +. The Mass Effect team continues to investigate fixes for these issues and they are top priority concerns for
everyone here.

Again, when we have more news, we will let everyone know. Thanks again for your patience. 

Lastly, Gamasutra talks with BioWare's cinematic lead Jonathon Perry to talk about "contrastive juxtaposition", which is apparently the key to their stories:

The first central element of contrastive juxtaposition is polarity, Perry explained. "I like to think of contrast in terms of polarity. We have positive and negative polarities that we're all familiar with--good vs. evil, light vs. dark. But they don't have to be good and evil--up and down, for example," Perry said. "Polarity lets us see how a character is changing over the course of a story, shifting in polarities over time. As players in a game, we like to be the one that's driving that change." Mass Effect 2's Paragon/Renegade system is perhaps the most obvious example.