The passionate fans of Mass Effect 3 have raised a fuss over the development of From Ashes since some players have discovered that the Prothean character can be playable just by tweaking the game's registry files.
Granted, what the complaints won't tell you is that even though the character is available, his quests and related dialogue are not. Most of the content relating to the character has to be procured through the 600mb download of From Ashes.
BioWare's Michael Gamble had this to say on the matter:
I've posted a summarized response on the BSN, but i wanted to give some more details on the 'From Ashes' development. As we've seen recently, our fans are extremely passionate and we have a great deal of respect for you.
ME3 was a labour of love for the dev team. To finish a game like ME3, it literally takes months of intense bug fixing and certification. At this point, our goal is to polish the game to an extremely high quality – not to add extra content. You hopefully see a lot of that polish in ME3.
During that certification time, we had a small team of developers begin to craft the ‘From Ashes’ content, with the intent to finish production on it long after ME3 was out of our hands as a dev team.
However, because the plot of ME3 is so richly interwoven with the character interactions and moments, you simply cannot use a DLC module to ‘insert’ a new character. As we've mentioned before, that character has to be planned and the framework has to be established ahead of time for us to build off of with the DLC module. You may have seen a similar framework developed in ME2 for the Zaeed and Kasumi characters. We wanted Javik to be a fully featured squad member, with deep dialogue throughout the game – and we needed him to be accessible via the character selection GUI (which you cannot simply ‘overwrite’ with DLC). Thus, certain elements of the Javik appearance and some of the VO needed to be included on the disc. That is a fact. But that doesn’t mean the content was created, and then removed. It is a necessity of adding a rich character presence in our game.
That, however, is the extent of it. As mentioned above, the DLC is over 600 mb. The DLC data holds the mission itself, the cinematic flashback moments, the cinematic dialogue interactions with Javik, his weapon, the appearances for squad members… everything that makes the adventure a cohesive experience. 'From Ashes' is not Javik’s character model. It is the story of finding the last remaining Prothean, and how his tale interweaves with Commander Shepard’s as he struggles to destroy the Reaper threat.
Thanks for listening.
