Mass Effect 3: Omega wasn't originally intended to be so large, new screens released

Mass Effect 3: Omega launches today, and its been hailed by Bioware as the largest expansion to date for the action-RPG; however, it wasn't originally four hours long nor 2GB in size, according to producer Fabrice Condominas.

Speaking with Polygon, Condominas said the team behind the Omega DLC was given free reign to explore the story of Aria and Omega Station.

"We had a lot of feedback asking to know more about Aria and Omega and we decided fairly early on making this a personal history of Aria and the Station," he said. "But the game at its current size was not the original goal.

"Around the first 1/3 of the project when we first validated the writing we realized we needed to include strong moral choices throughout the game and didn't ask ourselves how long this would end up making it.

Condominas said it was a "luxury" to have such developmental "freedom" in the industry, and the only thing which restricted the team were the size limitations set my Microsoft on Xbox 360 - which is 2GB.

Mass Effect 3: Omega is out today on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 Xbox 360 for $14.99/1200 MS Points. The DLC is not expected to be made available for the Wii U version of the game at release, but never say never.

New screenshots are below and the launch trailer was released yesterday.