Mass Effect’s Legendary Edition is a brilliant remaster of BioWare’s sci-fi original trilogy, perfect in almost every way.
But for hardcore fans, a few niggles remain. There’s the unfortunate loss of Mass Effect 1’s Pinnacle Station DLC – sadly gone forever, as its original development code became corrupted – and also the lack of Mass Effect 2’s Cerberus Daily News.
For the uninitiated, Cerberus Daily News snippets originally appeared on Mass Effect 2’s main menu screen as short in-universe news reports, fleshing out the game’s wider galaxy with ongoing stories and further detail.
Access to the ongoing Cerberus Daily News stories, as well as various pieces of ME2 DLC, was part of the game’s $10 Online Pass (remember those?) which EA included with new copies of the game at the time in a bid to keep people playing, and dissuade second-hand sales.
Now, a fan mod has collated and edited these reports into in-game emails which Shepard can read at their computer, with new reports sent between priority missions (thanks, PC Gamer). It’s a neat way of getting the best of these storylines in-game, without the faff of scrolling through the Mass Effect 2 main menu.
My favourite Cerberus Daily News storyline involved the introduction of the raloi, an unseen avian race new to the galactic scene. News updates chronicled how intrigued shuttles first visited the raloi’s homeworld, while a subsequent update detailed a raloi delegation’s tentative first arrival on the galaxy’s Citadel.
As a Mass Effect fan, I loved hearing about another new race – especially at their own moment of first contact, something unique for the original trilogy.
(In Mass Effect 3, a Spectre report notes that the raloi subsequently deserted the Citadel to return home and destroy all their high-tech equipment in orbit in a bid at self-preservation, hoping the Reapers would see them as too primative to yet destroy.)
As for that other niggle? Fans have created a mod which brings back a version of the game’s Pinnacle Station DLC, too.
