Modders have saved the lost DLC of Mass Effect

Modders have managed to restore Mass Effect’s lost DLC pack, Pinnacle Station, and add it to the PC version of Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

Released on November 7 (Day N7), the DLC was restored by the ME3Tweaks group, a team of modders who have worked on Mass Effect mods for years. Discussing the project in a blog post, modder Mgamerz noted that “This has been the most ambitious modding project I have ever undertaken, as it touches almost every aspect of design. We had to design multiple new custom classes, code a very complex portability pipeline, improve our tools to find assets more easily, invent new debugging tools, and more. “

Pinnacle Station was originally released for the first Mass Effect game in 2009, and it’s a fairly simple combat simulator mode. Success in the simulator will unlock Shepard’s Apartment, a small base of operations. It was developed by Demiurge, who also ported Mass Effect to PC. Since then, the Pinnacle Station source code has been lost, so the PS3 and Legendary Edition versions of Mass Effect 1 do not include it. But the ME3Tweaks group has been able to use their tools to port the DLC from the original version of Mass Effect for PC to the Legendary Edition.

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In addition to just making the DLC run on Legendary Edition, the modding group has also put in significant effort to make the DLC a better experience. Pinnacle Station originally had very little audio, with no music during combat, so modders have chosen tracks from the score that feel appropriate for each map. A lot of work has also been done to escalate the difficulties, as the original Volcano Hunt Madness mode was too punishing due to how quickly time was running out, and the Survival mode could be easily removed simply by not facing enemies. . Volcano Hunt Insanity has now been toned down by reducing the decay time granted per kill, providing a bit of additional time to kill required enemies before time runs out. Survival now forces enemies that haven’t died after 25 seconds to charge at you, making for a more interesting challenge.

A variety of other fixes have been made, including reduced texture appearance, fixed lighting, dialogue wheel glitches, and buggy character models. The team also discovered a great deal of cut content, suggesting that Pinnacle Station was originally intended to be a piece of DLC with more storylines than it eventually became. While much of that content cannot be restored because the full script is impossible to view, the team has been able to restore some severed Turian bombers that were supposed to fly over the Ahern map. The team notes that there is no audio comment on these bombers, but they will try to improve this in future updates.

To learn more about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, check out our reviews of the first, second, and third games and how their remastering treatments fare, as well as the news that sales were “way above” expectations. If it’s the future of Mass Effect you’re interested in, take a look at the poster showing the future of the series.

Matt Purslow is the UK news and entertainment writer for IGN.