User blog comment:Kaloneous/Mass Effect 3 Ending DLC Denied and PAX/@comment-3062992-20120318230526

So, "the Truth," a supposed multiplayer pack/campaign add-on (supposedly brought up by 4chan), has been brushed off as rumor by Bioware's twitter feed. I admit, I was optimistic when I first read about the Truth, but the cynic in me (90% of me, lol) believed that this was too good to be true. I realize that Bioware is in "defense/damage-control mode" right now, but honestly, I would take their word for it that the Truth was just a hoax.

This is why:

I've been thinking since I first read about this (bear with me), if we take Bioware by their word and believe that they thought this was the perfect way to end the trilogy and were simply content to leave the ending of the game as is, with no plans of picking the story up, there'd have been no way they could have release a revised ending within a month. (Look what they did after the original was leaked SEVERAL months ago?)

If they had less honorable intentions, the opposite may be true. But for the sake of argument…

Looking back at Mass Effect 2, it was released in the latter part of January back in 2010; if we ignore the Cerberus Network goodies and the Firewalker DLC, the first satisfactory full-scale mission was released in April, four months later, in the form of Kasumi: Stolen Memory (that was pretty good, IMO). Next came Overlord in June, FAIRLY good and thought-out, but nothing ground-shaking.

Nothing they released for ME 2 could hold a candle to the Lair of the Shadow Broker, which has to be one of the best add-ons I have ever seen in ANY game. (Don’t get me wrong, Arrival was epic, but LotSB was my personal favorite.) There's no way we can tell how long those add-ons were in the making, but we do know that they weren't released right away.

Now, let's analyze Shadow Broker: it was fairly big for a Mass Effect mission (not as long as Overlord in terms of environment and time spent beating it, but it was still pretty big). It included a boss fight with a biotic Vanguard (which we never did before) and the Shadow Broker himself, an epic new score and a surprisingly engaging story that showed how Liara had grown as a character, causing me to ultimately defect from Team Ashley over to Team Liara in Mass Effect 3 (forgive the Twilight reference…)

Oh, and we also had a friggin’ CAR CHASE through the “highways” of Illum…

Additionally, they brought Ali Hillis back to reprise her role as Liara, but little else besides Meer and Hale as the Shepards (a given) and several "extra" voice actors. Although the rest of your squadmates remained silent throughout the mission, that’s forgivable, since there were TWELVE individual actors that would need to be recorded and paid for nothing more than “cameos.”

Shadow Broker was a great DLC, but assuming it was in the works since January, it took nine months to build that 1.6 gigabytes we downloaded.

Now with all this fresh in our minds, let's think about the proposed extended ending for ME 3 by looking at Garrus, Liara, Ashley/Kaidan, Tali, Joker and EDI.

More or less, those are characters that would definitely NEED a speaking role in the ending to better add closure, because most of them have been with you from day one and are some of the more popular characters in the series.

Now add at least Anderson, Hackett, James and maybe Javik. Getting most of the major players back together alone won’t be cheap, let alone the time it would take to coordinate and schedule recording sessions with them. None of that even counts the cost, both in time and money, for animation or building the in-game worlds and programming them.

Now add Miranda and Jack and whoever else you want to see again.

We have: Yvonne Stahovski, Keith David, Lance Hendrickson, Seth Green and Freddy Prinze. Now, I doubt any of them are cheap and would return out of charity, so if Bioware is going to pay these famous faces to return, they’d want to get their money’s worth of dialogue, as anyone would.

Assuming they ignore the Indoctrination theories some of the more passionate fans have conjured (a somewhat frightening thought), they need time to write a script with enough closure; banter for Paragons, Renegades and romantics; but also gunfights and action (in theory). Then they got to put all this together; the voice actors, the programmers, the modelers, etc.

I can only imagine that if this is ever put in the works the way many fans would want it, the extended epilogue would have to be effectively three to five times as big as the Shadow Broker and could take close to several months to maybe over a year before a finished product is rolled out.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, Bioware put themselves in a bit of a rut with ME3, whatever their plan was. I don't think they're ignorant of that, but if they truly care about what their fanbase thinks, they're going to take their time and plan this out VERY CAREFULLY…

…unless they truly believe they are immortal and either ignore our pleas/bludgeoning or say “to heck with it” and give us a mediocre patchwork ending and continue thinking they are the gods of the gaming industry.

So, the Truth is a lie (meh-heh). That doesn't necessarily mean everything is doomed. We only need make like Kirrahe and HOLD THE LINE until we get results!

Wow, that’s quite a mouthful… I hope this makes sense.