It's been a week now and the fires of fan outrage are, if anything, burning hotter than ever in the case of Mass Effect 3. For what it's worth, we liked it, but you lot don't seem to care too much about that, do you?
In any case, the above video seemed like the final nail in Bioware's coffin—evil corporation EA had snaked its tendrils down throughout a once respectable organization, and the developer was officially a lost cause. Or at least that seemed to be the general consensus.
Bioware and EA have both made statements, though, that seem to explain why Javik is on the disc. This is Bioware's lengthy explanation:
"ME3 was a labour of love for the dev team. To finish a game like ME3, it literally takes months of intense bug fixing and certification. At this point, our goal is to polish the game to an extremely high quality – not to add extra content. You hopefully see a lot of that polish in ME3.
"During that certification time, we had a small team of developers begin to craft the ‘From Ashes’ content, with the intent to finish production on it long after ME3 was out of our hands as a dev team.
"However, because the plot of ME3 is so richly interwoven with the character interactions and moments, you simply cannot use a DLC module to ‘insert’ a new character. As we’ve mentioned before, that character has to be planned and the framework has to be established ahead of time for us to build off of with the DLC module. You may have seen a similar framework developed in ME2 for the Zaeed and Kasumi characters. We wanted Javik to be a fully featured squad member, with deep dialogue throughout the game – and we needed him to be accessible via the character selection GUI (which you cannot simply ‘overwrite’ with DLC). Thus, certain elements of the Javik appearance and some of the VO needed to be included on the disc. That is a fact. But that doesn’t mean the content was created, and then removed. It is a necessity of adding a rich character presence in our game.
"That, however, is the extent of it. As mentioned above, the DLC is over 600 mb. The DLC data holds the mission itself, the cinematic flashback moments, the cinematic dialogue interactions with Javik, his weapon, the appearances for squad members… everything that makes the adventure a cohesive experience. ‘From Ashes’ is not Javik’s character model. It is the story of finding the last remaining Prothean, and how his tale interweaves with Commander Shepard’s as he struggles to destroy the Reaper threat."
EA adds:
"From Ashes is a 600 MB+ download with all new content, including the mission on Eden Prime, new dialogue options and conversations with Javik, new cinematics, the Prothean weapon, and new appearances for all squad members. All of the above content was completed while the main game was in certification and are not available on the disc.
“As stated previously, in order to seamlessly integrate Javik into the core campaign, certain framework elements and character models needed to be put on disc. We did something similar with Zaeed and Kasumi in Mass Effect 2."
Well so there. That doesn't change the fact that it was released on day one, or that seemingly everyone hates the ending. Are you hoping for a patch to add new endings, or were you fine with it the way it is? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.
[via Forbes]
