How Mass Effect 3: Omega accidentally became the game's biggest DLC offering

Today's launch of Mass Effect 3: Omega marks the release of BioWare's largest DLC expansion for ME3 to date; However, it wasn't originally designed to be four hours long and nearly 2GB in size, BioWare Montreal producer Fabrice Condominas told Polygon.

According to Condominas, the design team behind Omega was given free reign from BioWare to fully explore the story of Aria and Omega Station at length. Condominas states there was "nobody to convince" at the company for consent once the project began to grow in size as there was an underlying approval of the designer's ambitions.

"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. But the game at its current size was not the original goal," says Condominas.

"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 attributes the DLC's length of roughly four hours to the freedom offered to the designers throughout its development. "We don't see that a lot in the industry as a whole," he says. "It's a luxury to have that freedom." He adds that the team was, however, restricted technically by DLC size limitations on Xbox 360 that would keep the DLC under 2GB.

Mass Effect 3: Omega launches today on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The new content will cost $14.99 on PC and the PlayStation 3 and 1200 Microsoft Points on the Xbox Live. The DLC will not be available on Wii U.