One might say that BioWare learned their lesson from the BG novels at least, in terms of how poorly it works to try to nail down a character whose race, class, sex and general outlook gets to be decided by the player. When the time came for Mass Effect to follow suit, Commander Shepard was never directly featured or described.
Comments
*Spoiler*
And he romanced Jaheira, that ruined it for me.
I'm not entirely sure if Bioware was responsible for the novels. Might have just been WotC that wanted to capitalize with the success of the games.