Mass Effect mod returns lost DLC to Legendary Edition

Mass Effect 1's combat-focused Pinnacle Station - the only piece of extra content left out of this year's bumper Legendary Edition - has been added back into the game by fans.

Prior to the Legendary Edition's release, BioWare let fans know that Pinnacle Station would sadly not be present as its original source code was lost, and a backup had corrupted. Without this, BioWare said, the DLC would take months of work to restore.

Well, six months later, a team of fans has now done it - fixing some original bugs and discovering a long lost Easter egg in the process.

In a fascinating and detailed blog post at ME3Tweaks, Mgamerz explains the technical challenges faced in bringing Pinnacle Station to Legendary Edition, 11 years later (thanks, Kotaku).

The project began with the idea of simply adding Shepard's Pinnacle Station apartment to the Legendary Edition - but slowly grew to encompass the entire DLC.

Audio and lighting seemed relatively straightforward, though the team realised the DLC's material shader system would need to be rebuilt. Still, the team was aided by the fact the Legendary Edition code for ME1 is still similar to that of the original game.

In the end, the team created several fixes and improvements to the original Pinnacle Station code while reworking it back into Legendary Edition - lowering the difficulty of the Volcano Hunt map, tweaking health regeneration in Survival mode to ensure matches don't last forever, and sorting some cosmetic and lighting bugs.

An extremely obscure Easter egg was also found - dialogue lines from Admiral Ahern that play sometimes when you shot a specific window. "Very good, Shepard. You've bested the window in combat," Ahern will say, among other things. "Try the enemies now."

Cut plans to add turian bombers to Ahern's map have also been restored.

Fancy adding Pinnacle Station back into Mass Effect Legendary Edition? Nab the Pinnacle Station DLC from Nexus Mods.

Or, for a look at the future of Mass Effect, here's our detailed analysis of the latest Mass Effect 5 teaser image released this week for N7 Day.

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