Mass Effect 3's 'Operation Exorcist' N7 Challenge Is The Toughest Yet

Game Rant

By Rob Keyes

Published Apr 25, 2012

BioWare details the next N7 multiplayer challenge event for 'Mass Effect 3' multiplayer, where players must defeat a million Cerberus Phantoms and survive the game on Gold difficulty.

Last week BioWare said that they were no longer going to host weekly N7 event weekends for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and would instead move to launching them every second week so they could focus on more creative, meaningful challenges. This was fine considering the alternating weekends weren't really events and instead only consisted of bonus XP weekends, but upon that announcement they teased the upcoming event for this weekend: Operation Exorcist.

Operation Exorcist is officially a go, and this time, the challenge is to take out those pesky Phantoms.

Operation Goliath had players battling it out against the reapers on Silver difficulty and attempting to take down a million brutes, where the community instead managed to take out 3 million. Operation Raptor shared a similar success but had the much easier goal of simply leveling up and recruiting a pair of multiplayer character classes into the single-player campaign. Operation Exorcist offers the greatest challenge yet for players.

When it comes to retrieving classified data, Cerberus has been beating the allied forces to the punch. New intelligence has tipped us off to one of their offensives, and it is time to give the N7 teams the payback they want.

Objectives:

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

Rewards:

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.

The event begins 6:00PM PST, Friday April 27th and runs until 5:00AM PST. Like previous Operations involving reward packs, Exorcist is only available to PC and Xbox 360 players. Thank Sony for the lack of PS3 reward events. They will not allow BioWare to run them on PS3.

[Update: BioWare and Sony worked it out and Operation Exorcist is available on PS3 as well!]

Playing on gold is extremely difficult but it's the commendation packs that come with an N7 weapon and therefore is the pack, players strive for. BioWare wasn't kidding in telling players to boost up their characters to prepare. Our advise to to bring along an Asari adept or two with you - they can hold Phantoms in stasis which is critical in close-quarters situations or when outnumbered.

BioWare also said previously to pay attention to their official blog and the Mass Effect website for "cool upcoming features" and "an update from the Alliance News Network," but we still don't know what that is for. With the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut DLC coming this summer, we suspect it may have to do with more multiplayer DLC or added features.

More the merrier because without these events and in-game rewards, none of us at Game Rant would be playing.

Mass Effect 3 is now available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Follow Rob on Twitter @rob_keyes.