Thursday afternoon, EA held their annual summer showcase, to highlight upcoming games, dlc, etc..

The big Mass Effect news is the first single player DLC for Mass Effect 3! Leviathan!

Assuming direct control…..of the boat?

BioWare’s blurb about Leviathan says:

Something lurks in the dark corners of space, something powerful enough to kill a Reaper. Shepard must discover the most closely guarded secret in the galaxy before the Reapers silence it forever. Discover more about the origins of the Reapers as you race across the galaxy to find the Leviathan. Unravel the dark history of the Reaper Race before it is too late. Coming later this summer there is no war, only the harvest.

As part of Leviathan, we’ll apparently be underwater, get a couple of new weapons, and learn some more of the Reaper story.  I’m glad we’re finally getting a single player DLC, after having received multiple DLCs for Multi-player.  I’m disappointed that the multi-player DLCs have been free…and the single player one is going to cost $10.  I think if you’re offering free DLC for multi-player, the single player DLC should be free as well.

August 7th, will bring us a weapons pack DLC for the single player game as well ($2) which features “two powerful weapons, and five bonus weapons”…

EA also showed off some of ME3 on the WiiU:

New Control Scheme!

To me.. this looks clunky, but maybe it plays better than it looks.

This weekend brings us another N7 challenge weekend for Mass Effect Multiplayer!  The good new is, even though it’s not listed in the original blog post from BioWare about it.. PS3 users can participate this weekend too!

Here’s the goal:

Allied Goal: Kill 1,000,000 Cerberus Phantoms
Squad Goal: Survive until extraction on any map and any enemy on Gold difficulty.

Successful completion of the Allied Goal will grant all players a Victory Pack.
Successful completion of the squad goal awards a Commendation Pack to all squadmates.

Operation Exorcist will run from 6:00PM PST, Friday April 27th until 5:00AM PST, Monday April 30th. Exorcist will be available on PC and Xbox 360 only. Please remember to set “Upload Gameplay Feedback” to “on” in the online options to be able to participate in Operation Exorcist.

The weekend MP ‘challenge’ a few weeks ago, was “Operation Raptor” the goal of which was for people to promote two of their MP characters into ‘war assets’.  As a whole, everyone exceeded the goal (If I remember the announcement correctly, the player base promoted twice as many characters as the ‘team’ goal was).  On an individual level, if you promoted two characters, you were supposed to receive a commendation pack.

When BioWare initially awarded the Commendation (individual goal) and Victory (team goal) packs…they pulled them before everyone could claim them.  The reason for the pulling, was due to people exploiting the store, and redeeming multiple packs.  Here’s where it all went downhill in my opinion.

I have no problem with BioWare pulling the packs to prevent exploitation.. however, there was practically no communication from BioWare over the two weeks the packs were unavailable..Their CS staff had no updates, the community folks manning Twitter and Facebook ignored questions regarding the packs…and the community folks on the BSN (BioWare Social Network)…also seemed to ignore questions regarding the ETA.

Yesterday, there was a post on BSN saying the packs were being given again:

Hi all,

Commendation Pack from Operation Raptor was granted this morning. Now we will investigate and act on all users that took advantage of the exploit (got more than 4 packs using the exploit).

This, is still not fixing it..They cut legitimate players off from their packs for 2 weeks.. and are still letting people who exploited have no repercussions?!?!?  ”Oh it’s ok for person X.. they only exploited a little.. but person Y exploited more…so we’ll action them.”

If BioWare is serious about taking action against people that exploit in Multi-Player.. it needs to be for ANY level of exploit… In this case, I’d say if anyone redeemed the commendation pack more then twice..they were knowingly exploiting (I can see someone honestly clicking redeem the second time, thinking it didn’t ‘take’ the first time.)

At this point BioWare has also not provided an ETA (that I can find, I suppose it could be buried in a non-stickied post on the BSN) for the awarding of the Victory packs for Operation Raptor.

Here’s hoping the awards for this past weekend’s Operation: Resurgence go smoother.

Sorry about the extended absence from updates.  Mass Effect happened ;)

I have beaten the game now, and unlike “the internet” I am not filled with rage and hate about the ending (more on that in a bit).

As a review of the game itself.. The squad mate AI is much improved over ME2, textures have been improved (BioWare, please note, those of us on the PC would like the option to have even better graphics), excellent voice over work, good conversation choice… you know.. pretty much what we expect from a BioWare game.

More…including possible spoilers, after the jump.

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Last night people in the US got their midnight releases of Mass Effect 3!

What's all the fuss about?

BioWare had launch parties going in several cities, complete with livestream, interviews with some of the actors, producers, etc, and swag!  (BioWare has archived the stream here). From the stuff I saw on Twitter.. great fun was had by all at the events.

Living in Denver..our midnight launch events normally consist of walking into the store, picking up your copy, and going home to install.. not much excitement there.  So, imagine my surprise when BioWare let us know that TreeHouse Brand Stores (Bioware’s partner for their online store)… is a) located here in town! and b) going to be participating in launch night festivities at one of our local Gamestop stores!

Party Time in Denver!

So, even though my copy was en route from Amazon (yay release day shipping!), I headed on over to Game stop to hang out and see what was going on.

The folks from Treehouse that showed up were super nice…They ran some trivia contests, gave away a lot of swag (I tried, but failed to get one of the shiny N7 Hoodies they were giving away).

So, this is my official Thank You post to TreeHouse for giving us Denver folks a taste of what the cities closer to the developers get with game launches!

Today we got a pleasant surprise from BioWare… they released a FemShep version of the Official Launch Trailer!

At the moment, it doesn’t appear to be available anywhere except via EW.com so head on over there and watch it.  Hopefully, BW will release it onto youtube in HD soon.

It’s here… there are 4 days before it’s time to take back the earth.. and BioWare has given us the official launch trailer!

As should be expected of a trailer, there are a few minor spoilers, so if you’re trying to remain totally spoiler free…don’t watch it yet. and, you might also want to stay off the internet for the next few weeks.

Today is the day, and as of now… pretty much everyone except for PS3 users.. can go download the demo (origin for PC users)..  I’ve played it for a little while today and OMG!

Sooooo good…  definitely looking forward to it come March 6th.  In case the Demo itself isn’t enough to get you even more worked up for this..During the episode of the Walking Dead on the 19th (This coming Sunday).. BioWare will have a 90 second CGI trailer for ME3.. here’s a teaser of the trailer..

Casey Hudson announced last night via twitter… that Mass Effect 3 has gone gold!

 

After an awesome effort by our team, I’m proud to announce #MassEffect3 is officially GOLD! Many surprises await you – this week and beyond.

 

The Demo comes out tomorrow (some Xbox peeps got an early crack at it this weekend).. and the game itself comes out the 6th of March!

Mass Effect: Deception was released at the end of January, since then Mass Effect fans have been able to get ahold of it, and read it..and find out that apparently BioWare made a huge mistake in picking Chris Diets to write this novel.. it has so many continuity, lore, and technology errors.. that it’s apparently the Mass Effect equivalent of “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and doesn’t deserve to be in the timeline.

Here is a link to the community compiled list of errors.  It shows that 3 years between stories.. is enough time for characters to age 6 years, get cured of autism (with no mention of it at all), and have a total sexual orientation change.

The BioWare Social network forums have, obviously, been kinda blowing up about this… which led Chris Priestly to make this statement:

Mass Effect fans have been asking for a comment on recent concerns over Mass Effect: Deception. We have been listening and have the below response on the issue.

The teams at Del Rey and BioWare would like to extend our sincerest apologies to the Mass Effect fans for any errors and oversights made in the recent novel Mass Effect: Deception.  We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel.

We would like to thank all Mass Effect fans for their passion and dedication to this ever-growing world, and assure them that we are listening and taking this matter very seriously.

So… there you have it… BioWare is going to patch a novel.  Granted.. you’re probably going to have to repurchase the novel to get the patched version… so if you haven’t already purchased Deception, wait for the next revision to be published so that the story actually fits.