The upcoming Omega DLC for “Mass Effect 3” is officially the biggest DLC content that the company has pushed out in recent times. However, BioWare did not originally intend for Omega to become so huge.
According to Bioware Montreal producer Fabrice Condominas, the design team responsible for the new Omega DLC was given a free ticket from BioWare to entirely explore the story of Aria and Omega Station at length. Condominas stated that there was "nobody to convince" at the company for any kind of approval once the project started to grow in size as there was an underlying approval of the designer's ambitions.
“We had a lot of feedback asking to know more about Aria and Omega and we decided fairly early on making this a personal history of Aria and the Station,” Condominas told Polygon. “But the game at its current size was not the original goal. Around the first 1/3 of the project when we first validated the writing we realized we needed to include strong moral choices throughout the game and didn’t ask ourselves how long this would end up making it.”
Condominas added that the freedom BioWare was given as a developer was a luxury, and he also accredited the DLC's length of roughly four hours to the freedom offered to the designers throughout its development.
“We don’t see that a lot in the industry as a whole,” he said. “It’s a luxury to have that freedom.”
However, per a Polygon report, the team was “restricted technically by DLC size limitations on Xbox 360 that would keep the DLC under 2GB.”
“Mass Effect 3” Omega DLC releases today for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. It will cost 1200 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live and $14.99 on PC and PSN. It will not, however, be available for the Wii U players.
The Omega DLC will require players to free the space station and work along with Aria T’Lok who has to fight Cerberus soldiers who have captured the place. It will also bring in new weapons, characters and a lot of new enemies to the game.
