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Assuming Direct Control

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends: The Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut Will Be Here On June 26

by Becky Chambers | 4:17 pm, June 22nd, 2012


Imagine that you have an ex that you’re still pretty smitten kitten over. They screwed up, and you know you’ve done the right thing by trying to move on, but you still go all weak in the knees when that song you shared comes on. A few months along, just as you’re feeling like life can be okay without them, they call you, out of the blue. They want to meet. Right now. They’re going to make it up to you, they say. Things are going to be different from here on out.

Now you know how I felt twenty minutes ago when I saw the announcement that the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut will be released on June 26 in North America, and July 4 in Europe.

So here’s what we know: the Extended Cut is totally free, can be downloaded through Xbox LIVE, Origin, and the PlayStation Network, and…okay, that’s all anybody knows at this point. As for the content, the official announcement has this to say:

The Extended Cut expands on the endings of Mass Effect 3 through additional scenes and epilogue sequences. It provides more of the answers and closure that players have been asking for. It gives a sense of what the future holds as a result of the decisions made throughout the series. And it shows greater detail in the successes or failures based on how players achieved their endings.

In other words, nobody outside of BioWare knows yet. However, the announcement also has an audio interview with executive producer Casey Hudson and lead writer Mac Walters, in which they mention that their understanding of the ending did not involve all your friends and allies starving to death and dying alone, so hopefully at least that will be cleared up (they also made a few interesting, positive comments about how important fan feedback is to their creative process). Oh, and whatever the Extended Cut holds, making it involved a really big chart.

 

The announcement also states that in order to “experience” the extended cut, the player needs to load a saved game from before the attack on the Cerberus base. If you’re like me, you are now asking, “But what about my Effective Military Strength score?! I haven’t played multiplayer in months!” BioWare Community Coordinator Chris Priestly has you covered.

The original experience of the game was meant to reward players who did extra work (multiplayer, importing a save, playing the iOS games, etc) with greater levels of success in the end, which is appropriate to a story about a war that needs every possible advantage in order to win. But now that we are moving to a post-launch period and have additional content for the endings, we wanted to make it easier for all players to experience even the best-cast endings. Playing multiplayer is just one component is a sea of variables that can affect your ending. If you don’t play MP, you have to find other ways raise to raise your EMS before attempting to retake Earth, including a comprehensive single player play through. Likewise if you suffered some blows to your EMS prior to assaulting Earth, MP is a great way to raise your score high enough for the final assault.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds an awful lot like multiplayer is no longer necessary for getting the magical EMS score of 5000 needed to unlock all possible endings. I left no quest unfinished in my original playthrough, but I may still put in a few hours of multiplayer this weekend, just to be on the safe side.

Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. She blogs over at Other Scribbles.

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  • Anonymous

    “They’re going to make it up to you, they say. Things are going to be different from here on out.”

    Except they’ve been telling us from the get-go, during all the controversy, that they *weren’t* going to make it different.  That instead, they’d stay true to their “artistic vision” and provide us with a lengthier *explanation* of why what happened, happened.  So I remain skeptical of this ex, even though I’m still carrying a bit of a torch.

  • Anonymous

    Cheerfully anticipating this DLC. But I really can’t say I’ve felt betrayed or hurt by Mass Effects ending. It was a great trilogy and the journey to the end was fantastic! 

    That being said, some clarification on the state of the crew is the only real thing I’m looking for

  • Anonymous

    “the player needs to load a saved game from before (redacted for spoilers)”.

    Hm, I didn’t make as many incremental saves as I did in the other two games.

    If I don’t have a game save from that far back, I may lose my temper a bit.

    I played no multiplyer at all.  I used the IOS game to get my galactic scores up in the 60s, and that, combined with hitting every quest gave me the 5,000 and then some.

    I don’t know what the ending’s going to include, but I’ll tell you this – it won’t be enough in a lot of eyes, and too little too late in others.

    Sometimes, making it up afterwards isn’t enough for some people.

  • Gregory Allen

    Yeah, as a Bioware player for years, I’ve gotten used to some crap endings, but I am also used to awesome characters. If I had one wish, it would be to party and fight across the galaxy with Garrus, Tali, and Joker, then land on Tuchanka and get in a ryncol-induced bro-fight with Wrex. The only problem I had with the ending was that I just wanted to see what happened to my buddies beyond a 3 second clip. 

  • http://twitter.com/muensonate muenso

    Post-game saves start from right before the (spoiler redacted) mission if I remember correctly. So as long as you have a save from a completed game it should be fine.

  • Anonymous

    There’s exactly one thing that would make everybody happy.

    The Hot Coffee Cut.

    You’re Welcome.

  • http://otherscribbles.com Becky Chambers

    I believe in Mass Effect terms, that’d be called “Vaenia.”

  • Anonymous

    Larry Niven called it “Rishathra”, Phil Foglio and Nick Polotta called it “Fizzlorp”.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=660478160 Chelsea Lura

    “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds an awful lot like multiplayer
    is no longer necessary for getting the magical EMS score of 5000 needed
    to unlock all possible endings”

    Actually Multiplayer was never necessary in the first place to reach that score. A point which Bioware made a HUGE deal of when they first debuted Multiplayer, which at the time was not as well received as it is now.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kristin-Frederickson/852880113 Kristin Frederickson

    I’m going to turn my critical thinking off just this once and let myself just happily anticipate this DLC.

  • Jamie Jeans

    Right, yeah, lets just see how good or bad this will be… >_<

    Because if there was anything I just loved about that original ending, it was being told that no matter the choice I made at the end, all other choices before and the sacrifices of some of my good friends amounted to absolute jack. Shit.

  • Zharre

    I don’t believe anyone ever achieved enough without multiplayer. There were many, many, MANY posts on the forums of people testing and datamining and finding out that you absolutely cannot get enough, and no one posting proof that they had achieved it. (Several people said that they had, and then came back with ‘oops it was Total War Assets, not Effective Military Strength.)  The only posts from BioWare state, roughly, that ‘it will be investigated’. I never saw anything further.

  • http://twitter.com/Riviare Riviera

    I’m one of the few that, while I may wish for a better ending, I still love the game to bits.

    There’s a ton of stuff in that game that has continued to thrill me to bits, and I have and had a ton of fun playing it regardless. I’m looking forward to the FREE DLC.

  • Anonymous

    I am both excited and scared so…I will rejoice if I love it and if I don’t, I shall keep on furiously headcanoning an ending where Garrus and Shepard found each other and the effing Starchild doesn’t exist or was a Reaper all along.

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