Back in February it was announced that Mass Effect Legendary Edition wasn’t going to be including everything in the trilogy, because the source code for a single piece of old DLC — Pinnacle Station, which we reviewed back in 2009 — had been lost.
At the time, game director Mac Walters told Game Informer that since the code had been lost, if BioWare were going to add the DLC to the game it would have taken them six months to rebuild it from scratch, an enormous expenditure for a tiny piece of DLC that they absolutely were not going to invest in.
“I wish we could do it”, he said. “Honestly, just because this is meant to be everything that the team ever created, brought together again – all the single-player content. And so, leaving it all on the cutting-room floor, it was heartbreaking.”
Making things even more heartbreaking is that BioWare actually reached out to Demiurge, the studio responsible for the DLC, and were told that some backups of the code existed, and that they’d send them right over. But “when the backups for the code sent over contained almost all corrupted data – even vital links were missing.”
Ah well! While the retail release of Legendary Edition was missing Pinnacle Station, you can now slide it right on there thanks to this mod, which doesn’t just drop the DLC back into the collection, but makes sure that it’s an updated version of the original content as well, with difficulty adjusted, extra music and sound effects added and some other 2009-era roughess smoothed out.
For a technical explanation of just how they managed to port the game over, this blog post goes into great detail on the processes and challenges involved. And if you want to grab the mod and try it out, you can download it here; to play it, fire up the galaxy map on the Normandy and head to the Argos Rho cluster, Phoenix system.
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