Mass Effect fan claims massive discovery and a win for game preservation: DLC prototype uncovered after 19 years with a look at the cut side mission that became Bring Down the Sky

Commander Shepard smiles bizarrely in Mass Effect — (Image credit: BioWare)

Notch another win for game preservation, as a Mass Effect fan has uncovered a prototype version of the cut mission that became the Bring Down the Sky DLC. It represents an extremely specific slice of the legendary RPG's development history, but for those of us who've been waiting nearly a decade for Mass Effect 5, any look at "new" content is sweet manna.

Oddly, this story starts with a YouTube comment. Back in 2010, Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick posted a track from an unreleased piece of DLC, offering no insight into what the expansion was meant to be. But a few years later, one comment declared that "it was a Caleston DLC." This user, offering no sources for their claims, alleged that "a guy said years back that it was leaked on Xbox Live for a short period of time."

Mass Effect - Caleston DLC Prototype - Xbox 360 - YouTube

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That video, which you can see above, showcases a full playthrough of this DLC prototype. It's not the most exciting thing in the world – it mostly consists of a bunch of the same cookie-cutter sidequest areas that always drove me up the wall about Mass Effect 1 – but the fact that it exists at all is fascinating. Particularly since it is, indeed, labeled as Caleston DLC.

The name Caleston is already familiar to hardcore of Mass Effect fans, as it's the original name for the cut planet – technically, a cut moon – that eventually became Therum in the final game. Despite the location's appearance on the galaxy map in this prototype, TheUnsungHero26 explains that "selecting it actually takes you to an entirely different cut planet: a very early version of Bring Down the Sky, when it was meant to be a side quest in the main game."

But it's very different from the DLC that we actually got. "The map is different," TheUnsungHero26 says. "There are no Batarians, instead, the enemies are humans (as per the mission's original plot, which you can read about on the wiki), there's a timer, and instead of three bases, you are looking for three mine shafts with generators to shut down. There's also some oddities, like three crates with unique armor and weapons that were previously inaccessible, and a rachni nest."

It's a bizarre confluence of things – a cut mission, tied to the name of a cut planet, that eventually became DLC – but I'm hard-pressed to think of a game dev story that doesn't involve a bunch of pieces shifting around in ways that only make sense once the project is finished. Saving these sorts of development insights is a big part of what game preservation is all about.

"Now I realize the contents of this probably aren't too exciting to anyone except the most hardcore Mass Effect fans," TheUnsungHero26 concludes, "but experiencing 'new' content for a nearly two decades old game that I hold dear is something special. My hope is we see more pre-release builds of the game dumped, so we can uncover more cut content (of which there is a lot!) Big shout out to everyone who helps make game preservation like this possible."

The Mass Effect series includes some of the best RPGs ever made.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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