It’s an early start to a big weekend of Mass Effect 3 news. Today, BioWare and Electronic Arts confirmed that they are going to address the controversy-laden ending of Mass Effect 3′s single-player campaign by releasing free DLC this summer that will add additional cutscenes to flesh out the story.
The announcement comes just before a weekend where the city of Boston will host PAX East, an event featuring a BioWare panel where more DLC announcements are expected. It is here we predict that Mass Effect 3 multiplayer DLC details will be revealed, or at least confirmed.
Allow us to explain.
As has become the norm, every weekend is host to an N7 Bounty Weekend where players can complete individual and community challenges to earn in-game rewards, or an N7 Multiplayer Weekend where players earn a bonus percentage of XP for playing, usually to level up characters for the following weekend.
It began with Operation Goliath where players had to fight off reapers and was followed up by a multiplayer weekend like this one in Operation Fortress where players earned 25% extra XP. Then there was Operation Raptor this past weekend where players were again tasked with specific goals to earn extra packs of items for their online profiles.
As BioWare announced on Tuesday, Operation Raptor was a success and the community met the goal of recruiting 150,000 characters, beating it by 200,000. Along with the announcement, they teased another event, Operation Beachhead, and essentially confirmed that every weekend will be an N7 weekend and that it’ll likely alternate between bonus XP weekends and bounty weekends where additional content can be unlocked.
Operation Beachhead is now official with the following mission details:
Allied forces have matched krogan mercs and batarians with asari justicars for unconventional warfare. Their mission: to create resistance on Reaper-occupied planets to tie down local Reapers.
All N7 Forces will receive a +25% Experience Bonus for participating in Operations in any Theatre of War against any foe.
Note the mention of Krograns, Batarians and Asari Justicars. Sound familiar? They were exact same characters revealed through a leaked screenshot of a DLC pack. By name-dropping them now, they are confirming their inclusion in the game and they could be detailed/fully unveiled at the PAX panel this weekend and potentially available as soon as next week. Hopefully, this pack will be free or unlockable through completing in-game tasks if they’re playing more make-fans-happy cards.
The extended event will run from 6PM PST Thursday April 5, to 5AM PST Tuesday April 10 and this one is actually open to PS3 players as well!
Mass Effect 3 is now available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
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Follow Rob on Twitter @rob_keyes for more on Mass Effect.
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I have yet to play the game let alone the multiplayer, but I’ve heard some about it. Is it actually all that fun or not all it’s cracked up to be?
It’s fun for the first character or two, then it becomes repetitive and boring IMO.
I actually enjoy it, but like Fiachra, some random hero and Ender21 say, it gets stale pretty quickly unless you’re playing with friends.
What keeps me coming back are the N7 Bounty weekends where you can complete a challenge to earn an exclusive N7 weapon.
The problems is that the mode is comprised of one, very basic 11-wave horde mode and there are only six maps – all taken from the campaign.
Its fun for a little while then gets boring after awhile
It is a fun multiplayer if you have a group to play with on a consistant basis.
There are some really glaring troubles with it though. I have made a couple cool friends to play it with and had been playing just us three for around a week when my roommate decided to hook up his computer monitor to his PS3 and play with us. After about an hour we all got into a single lobby and played for quite some time. Then sometime last week I was on when he got home from work and we immediately tried to start a party. We ended up spending 4 hours trying to connect to one another using every trick in the book without success. They have some bugs to work out before he will even pick up the game now and my friends and I are without a exceptional soldier.