Cerberus Daily News is finally back.
Mass Effect has some of the best worldbuilding in any RPG, period. Seriously, even with the impending Reaper invasion it still seems like it’d be fun to live in that version of the Milky Way. One of the coolest bits of background flavor BioWare included in the series was the Cerberus Daily News, a little ticker on Mass Effect 2’s home screen that provided short news bulletins about the galaxy’s happenings. Now modder Cirosan on the Legendary Edition Nexus has brought these stories forward into the Legendary Edition re-release.
The original CDN was really ambitious for how much of a minor addition it was—Mass Effect 2’s main menu was updated with a new story every day from January 26, 2010 to January 24, 2011, with short revivals later in 2011 and 2012 to promote ME2’s DLC and, eventually, Mass Effect 3. Some of these stories would foreshadow later developments in Mass Effect’s main story, while others simply added to the texture of the setting.
My favorite was a running series of updates about an AI-powered ghost ship found in deep space. In subsequent stories, CDN revealed that it was actually the home of a virtual civilization that had digitized their consciousnesses in order to escape a dying star, and this series culminated with their attempts to integrate with wider galactic society. Just a nifty little sci-fi short story you could look forward to from your favorite action-RPG’s main menu.
Until now, you could only find the CDN updates preserved on the Mass Effect Wiki, but Cirosan’s mod reincorporates them in Mass Effect 2 in the form of new in-game emails at your personal computer on the Normandy. Cirosan has attempted to space them out in a satisfactory manner, with the mod sending you a new CDN story on the completion of each mission. Cirosan notes, however, that the sheer amount of CDN updates exceeds the number of missions in the game, so they opted to include some and excise others at their own discretion instead of spamming poor Shepard’s inbox.
I had almost completely forgotten about CDN until I saw this mod, but Cirosan’s work has caused my fond memories to come flooding back. I think their deployment of Shep’s email terminal as the vehicle for these stories is particularly inspired, and this is going to be a must-download for me on my next big replay of the series (a once every two to three year occurrence)
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