BioWare today broke the news that the promised Extended Cut DLC addressing community feedback on Mass Effect 3's ending will launch for free as a 1.9GB DLC package in only a few short days on June 26th for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (US Dates - still awaiting clarification on Australian specifics).
Accompanying this announcement, they also released a new developer interview conducted by Community Manager Jessica Merizan with the game's two primary scribes, Executive Producer Casey Hudson and Lead Writer Mac Walters.
The interview offers some great insight into the developer's reasoning and approach toward the augmented ending and a thorough explanation of what players can expect when they load up their save-games again and why it will make future complete playthroughs of the trilogy more desirable.
Unfortunately however, the interview is audio only, and we know plenty of you would rather just have a quick read that a 10 minute listen, so we've done the hard part and
transcribed it for your web-browsing pleasure.
Here's a few choice cuts, but the full article is absolutely recommended reading for eager Mass Effect 3 completionists:
...Now in each playthrough, you’re going to experience several minutes of additional content, depending on how your playthrough ends up -- sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less -- but it’s drawing on a much larger set of content that we’ve built, because it’s now quite variable. And it was actually a challenge for us to fit it in, in the two gig download limit for the Xbox.
...I think that’s going to be the interest with this, is not just reloading your save and seeing what the extended cut does with the one save-game that you might have, but actually playing through, or going back; making different choices; trying entire different playthroughs. Because that’s the only way you’re going to actually see or explore all the content that we’ve built for the extended cut.
...I remember when Mass Effect 3 launched, the team was incredibly proud of what they had delivered. And even though we were getting incredible reviews, there was some really tough criticism coming in that was pretty hard on us.
What happened over and over though, in those days, was that people throughout the team would come into my office with ideas, for what they could do for players to address the feedback they were hearing.
So the thing is, we love this Universe as much as the fans do. We’ve been putting our hearts and souls into this for over eight years. And when it all over, we wanted to take a little time to say goodbye to it -- we wanted that as much as fans did.
Read on for the full interview
Posted 05:38pm 23/6/12
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There isn't one that's worth talking about?