Three months after the release of Mass Effect 3, fans will finally get to see the expansive closure that producer Casey Hudson and writer Mac Walters say the development team envisioned all along.
XBox 360, North American Playstation 3, and PC customers worldwide will be able to download the 1.9-gigabyte Extended Cut on June 26th, while Ps3 owners outside North America will have to wait until July 4th. The Extended Cut will be available for free and add “several minutes'” worth of additional content.
“We’re trying to put on the screen what we imagined was implied by the original endings, and address a lot of the feedback that we received,” Hudson said. “It’s drawing from a much larger set of content that we’ve built, because it’s now quite variable, and it was actually quite a challenge for us to fit it within the 2-gig download limit for the XBox.”
Walters and Hudson promised a wide permutation of possible ending and epilogue content to more clearly reflect upon player choices. They also admitted that the extended cut will further emphasize the fates of beloved characters.
Hudson and Walters once again reiterated that the Extended Cut is not in any respect a rewriting of the ending, and the podcast accompanying the release date emphasized the claim that the Extended Cut existed to clarify what they felt were fan misinterpretations of the ending and provide additional closure to fans unhappy at the conclusion of a ten-year-saga.
For additional information, and a podcast interview of Walters and Hudson by Community Manager Jessica Merizan, check the official press release.
Stay tuned for a first assessment of the Extended Cut for at least one play-through over the next few days.