A team of modders has recently resurrected a DLC from the original Mass Effect, not only getting the long-lost expansion running on the PC version of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition but polishing the overall experience as well.
The modders at ME3Tweaks detailed the process of restoring the Pinnacle Station DLC in a blog post while announcing its release on Nov. 7 (N7 Day). Calling it "The most ambitious modding project I've ever taken on before," modder Mgamerz noted how everything from designing new custom classes, coding "a very complex porting pipeline," updating asset-finding tools and inventing "new debugging tools" were only some of the many design aspects the team touched on.
Pinnacle Station, released as DLC for Mass Effect in 2009, introduced a combat simulator mode as well as Commander Shephard's apartment and a small home base as unlockable rewards. Yet, with the source code lost after Pinnacle Station's original release, the DLC was never ported to the PlayStation 3 and Legendary Edition versions of Mass Effect. Thanks to mods, however, Pinnacle Station is now both a playable and improved experience for the PC version of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Not only has the difficulty scaling in Volcano Hunt's Insanity mode been more fairly scaled by giving the player a slightly longer timeframe to kill the required enemies, but foes in Survival mode will now charge the player after 25 seconds, making the previously simple AI more difficult to exploit.
Music has also been added to the previously silent combat sections, with each map receiving a track appropriate to its theme. Moreover, the modding team brought various improvements to a number of visual components such as reducing texture pop-ins, fixing lighting effects and patching dialogue wheel glitches and bugged character models. The modders even attempted to include a large amount of cut, potentially story-heavy content they discovered. Faced with an incomplete script, the modders were only able to restore several Turian bomber ships that fly over Ahern's map, noting the lack of audio feedback may be improved in future updates.
Along with fans, developer BioWare also celebrated 2021's N7 Day, sharing a strange poster teasing the next game in the Mass Effect series. Though little is known about the franchise's upcoming fifth entry, the game is believed to follow on from the original trilogy rather than the controversial Mass Effect: Andromeda based on the return of fan-favorite character Liara T'Soni. BioWare addressed the next Mass Effect game in an N7 Day blog post, writing, "We are, of course, hard at work on the next adventure in the Mass Effect universe. Until then, please accept our most humble thanks to you for accompanying us on this journey. We know we couldn’t do it without you — on N7 Day, or any other day."
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