Mass-effect – receiving a “cannot determine custom face code” error when importing the character

The answer is it makes no difference if you change class. When you land on Mars you start with a clean ability slate and can spend your imported ability points on whichever skills your want.

After looking around a lot I finally, finally found the answer to my problem:

In BioWare\Save I had a folder character. However, when I started looking around on the web, I saw people were having names like character_10_Soldier_123456. After searching some more I found out what this extra data stands for, and it is the following:

• First number = origin (1 = from space, 2 = colonist, 3 = earthborn)
• Second number = your back story ( 1 = sole survivor, 2 = War Hero, 3 = ruthless soldier
• Name in between = your class (Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel or Vanguard)
• Last 6 digits = creation time. So for example 100211 would be "10 february 2011"

I do not know if these values have to be exactly correct for the import to work (the data is also in your savegame) but I filled them out as correctly as possible anyway. You can use Gibbed's save editor for retrieving the data. After changing my folder name to something like this everything works. Most likely this is some legacy issue from my original ME1 savegame.

One last thing, I also changed GamerSettings.ini in BioWare\Mass Effect 3\BIOGame\Config to add something like:

[SaveGames]
Location=E:\BioWare\Mass Effect 2\Save

I do not think this actually helped my problem, but I mention it here because it seemed to help for some other people. Another solution I encountered frequently is to copy your BioWare\Mass Effect 2 folder to the documents folder of your admin account if that's a separate one (for some reasons ME3 looks there).