Almost everyone knows by now, that the expansion pack for Mass Effect has been released on 29 July 2008.
Almost everyone, except me. I didn’t know about it till a couple of days back, when I thought I’d just pop by the Mass Effect website and have a look-see. When I saw that the expansion pack was ready for download, I was very excited and couldn’t wait for all 320MBs of it to complete the download so I can install it.
To play the expansion, all you need to do is load a savegame that allows you to access the galactic map, that’s it. That would be any savegame after the Council has granted you Spectre status in the game. Once in the galactic map screen on the Normandy, a new system will show up in the Utopia cluster (the same one where Eden Prime is).
Honestly, I was a little disappointed with this “expansion”. To me, as it is now, this “expansion” is little more than just “a new mission”. Although it was touted to give about 90 minutes more playtime, I completed the mission in about half that time, or at best, 1 hour. Ok granted I may not have taken all possible actions in this mission, but even if I did, I doubt it would take 90 minutes.
The mission is pretty straightforward actually. An asteroid is being driven into a planet, you need to stop it. You fight bad guys (the Batarians), you reach the main facility, and you meet the boss. You need to make a decision, and then you get a choice of reward at the end of the whole mission.
Personally I picked the armour over the other stuff, even though my Charm and Intimidate skills were high enough to get an Omni-Tool as a reward. At level 50+, the armour would be a series 10 Colossus armour, the best in my opinion, in the whole game.
This makes me wish that Mass Effect came with an editor, like in Neverwinter Nights. I could create my own missions! If the editor could be as powerful as the one in Armed Assault, you could even create cutscenes with advanced camera control via scripts.
(Yes in the past couple of days I have been spending time in the Armed Assault Editor making my own missions.)
Well I hope more “downloadable content” would appear soon for Mass Effect, even if they might be short 1 hour extensions of the playtime.
