Datamining the Trilogy (AKA Things That Were Cut)

The one you get when you recruit Javik. You have to have From Ashes DLC to get it in SP.

Quick question: If we bought the ME3 disc with this stuff on it, can they legally ask us to pay for it as DLC?

Technically, yes. There is nothing prohibiting them from doing so. Non-gaming app developers do that sort of stuff all the time - put EVERYTHING on the distribution disc, and then let you install only some of the things depending on how much you pay (and you can pay up later to unlock more features).

Prothean Particle Rifle is part of the From Ashes day 1 DLC. it doesn't use thermal clips but a la ME1 uses a cooldown system to regenerate "ammo". at least that is the case if your Shepard equips it. but when your squadmates equip it, it is practically is infinite ammo and no noticed cooldown effect which can make an easy Insanity mode even easier.

IANAL, but legally I say yes. whether it's morally objectionable from a consumer point of view is the better question. and EA is not the first in recent history to do so. Capcom's latest Street Fighter had the entire DLC locked on disc whereas EA/Bioware could put forth those are just assets (incomplete and out of context, could be argued) that were recorded but did not end up in finally shipping product.

Technically, no Mass Effect had on-disc DLC. Pre-order bonus unlockables aren't really "DLC", you know? Day One DLC for ME2 and ME3 have both been separate downloads, of which in the vanilla game only stubs exist to expediate connectivity (as in, to make integrating them into content easier, which is why ME2 contained the location comments and cutscene cues for Zaeed and Kasumi and ME3 contains some of the radio chatter for the Eden Prime mission).

Ah right, thanks guys. I think I used it once and didn't find it very effective (compared to something like the Black Widow) and so never used it again. Maybe kept it on Javik for the sake of authenticity?

Maybe. I find Vega uses it best, he's apparently the only one besides Javik to properly trigger its secondary firing mode, although if fully upgraded, Shepard can make great use of it too. But since it makes the game too easy, I can see why it's not in MP yet, they can't balance it =)

Hmmm they could slow down its rate of ammo regeneration or bump up the recoil or decrease the damage. If it makes its way into multiplayer I'm sure it'll get one or more of the above!

Just to confirm what the others said - yes. Back in days of yore (and still is to an extent) it was standard to give people a trial version of software that would time out or had limited functionality - if you purchased it, you unlocked the software.

Honestly, we live in an age where the letter of the law specifies that it's illegal to transfer music you LEGALLY PURCHASED from one medium to another - so, EA doing this shouldn't be surprising.

So, I finally got the EC to download and am unpacking it as we speak. Let's see why it weighs so much and contains so little, shall we?

This I would love to know. I certainly didn't witness 2 gigs of extra material. I think perhaps they forgot to compress their videos or deliberately didn't compress them to make it seem like the EC is bigger and contains more stuff than it is/does.

Uncompressed size: 2.39 gigs.
Content breakdown:
1.3 gigs - pre-rendered videos (all those ending slides? that's video, that's [REDACTED] VIDEO, the thing you can render in-engine at a higher [REDACTED] resolution is [REDACTED] VIDEO; this is Activision-level idiocy right [REDACTED] there), including re-done ending videos, all the various ending slides, new flashback anims, more detailed inserts for what exactly the Crucible energy does to soldiers on Earth, as well as the "new" Stargazer scene.
216 megs - sounds (~32 megs per voice file - as usual, in 5 languages; ~80 megs - other sounds (one file, labeled as SFX sounds; I am yet to check if there's actually any new MUSIC in there - people reported that the endings had music they haven't heard before, but it just as easily could've been something from the vanilla game that wasn't used before)
842 megs - redone or new (some clearly replace existing files) model, scene and animation packages
24 megs - new textures
357 kilos - TLK files (subtitles)
~20 megs - new sound filters for weapon sounds (don't ask me why they'd wanna change them)

So absurd. So patently absurd. I am ignorant on such things, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if this "inefficiency" is somehow related to cost. EA was already chafing at the bit making this thing.

Lol. Well that explains all the data. And here I was foolish enough to think 2 gigs of data meant they had done something substantial. When I got up to Citadel and the only new thing I'd seen was the Normandy picking up my squad I was actually excited - I thought it must be IT for sure - there was no other possible way that I could see 2 gigs being accounted for. Trolled again!

Admittedly I'm a bit late to the party here, but this line right here explains some odd sound files I found while trawling the game's audio (hosted on my dropbox to save HTL some bandwidth):

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19427702/HTL/odd_audio.zip

The file names suggest they were supposed to play during the endgame, so that taken with the idea of the "Guardian's Garden" (or "Starchild's Garden" if you will) gives me the impression the original idea was a talk with the starchild in some sort of glen not unlike the one in Shepard's dreams.

That's what I don't get.

Rendering those slides in-engine is as easy as making paper doll theater - you have three or four layers on top of one another depicting, say, the background of the sky, the background buildings, background NPCs and foreground Krogans holding babies. Do you spend 5 megs on making them HD textures and render it in-engine at whatever native resolution the player is playing at or do you make a 5-meg grainy SD-resolution video of it? Oh, and if you have more than one scene with the same background (say, variations of one)? That's 5 megs per video, but less than one meg per new texture variation for the live-render approach.

{EDIT: Actually, it's TWO layers, judging from the videos. That's even less resources both for storage and rendering.}

And don't give me that bullshit about "special cinematic visual effects" that they used to explain pre-renders in the vanilla game - it's not as if four sprite layers take up sooooo much video memory, you wouldn't be able to use higher-grade VFX on them. Max [REDACTED] Payne 3 does it with high-poly models, and has a higher FPS count than those videos do. And I still don't understand why they didn't do it with MODELS. Not like they would have to make a lot of them.

Well, you probably don't want to know what I think they do with our money, but I think they were too busy doing a lot of that to actually work on the DLC.

I've seen some people denying it but...
Over on BSN this thing is in hot discussion... whats more... there are quite a number of people who have tried it... and who have claimed to find it... I have not found it myself but I am curious if someone would verify it.

According to the post you conver file: DLC_Shared_INT.tlk using the ME2 TLK tool you will see the following text...

http://pastebin.com/rHzNDedX