One of the big selling points of the Legendary Edition is that it will contain over 40 DLC packs - basically all of them, save one. BioWare has revealed that the ‘Pinnacle Station’ DLC for the first game won’t be appearing in the release - as well as the reason why. Pinnacle Station was the second and final DLC pack for the first Mass Effect, and switched lanes from being a mainly narrative driven experience like the main story and the first DLC, ‘Bring Down The Sky’ to a more gameplay focused arena shootery experience. Commander Shepard was contacted by Admiral Tadius Ahern and asked to visit Pinnacle Station, a military training facility. Here, Shepard took part in a series of potentially lethal training simulations modeled around the First Contact War on a bet with Ahern - if Shepard completes the simulation, Ahern transfers ownership of his apartment to the first human Spectre. If Shepard fails - meaning death - it will be logged as user error. There’s a reason why the DLC was markedly different from other content in the game - another studio developed it. This content pack was outsourced to Demiurge Studios, and even back when the DLC was released something was amiss. The original source code of Pinnacle Station became so corrupted that releasing it for PlayStation 3 was impossible, thus only PC and Xbox 360 players could experience it. Unfortunately, this data corruption problem also prevented BioWare from remastering it for the Legendary Edition. When they approached Demiurge for the source code, the full extent of the degradation became clear. Since Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is such a passion project for the developers, who have a keen desire to bring the full single player experience into the current gen, this hit pretty hard as game director Mac Walters describes it. The team working on Legendary Edition knows how sacrosanct the original games and their content is for the fans. The scope of the remaster project was tailored accordingly, with initial ideas of changing some plot points and character interactions deliberately abandoned, thus maintaining faithfulness to the source material. Having to cut an entire DLC must have been a tough decision for the team, but the developers estimate that recreating Pinnacle Station from scratch would have taken 6 months minimum, with the whole team working on it. Granted, Pinnacle Station is pretty self contained and didn’t really affect the story of the trilogy, but it did provide some more backstory on the First Contact War. Plus Shepard’s apartment was really slick. We’re definitely going to miss the apartment. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition launches on May 14, 2021.
