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BioWare zeroes in on Mass Effect download snafu

Fans treated to 1.5GB of 0s

Top marks to BioWare which yesterday pumped out a downloadable module for Mass Effect 2. The only problem: the DLC consisted of nothing but zeros - all 1.5GB of it.

Dubbed Lair of the Shadowbroker, the DLC went live yesterday evening. Within minutes, fans reported that the installer failed to work on their PCs.

At first, incompatibility with 64-bit Windows was suspected, but it soon became clear that other versions of the OS were affected.

The Xbox 360 release appeared unscathed.

It didn't take long for some bright spark with a Hex editor to take a peek at the 1.5GB file and spot the profusion of zeros. This pic appeared on the game's official forum:

Oops...

BioWare had the correct file out within hours of the problem appearing, and it seems that many a Mass Effect fan reckons the DLC is one of the best the company has done. ®

Thanks to Reg Hardwarereader Alan for the tip.

1.5GB?

Their compression algorithm sucks!

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0
Anonymous Coward

Watch out for the fakes doing the rounds on P2P

there's a 1 or two towards the end...

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*chuckle*

Talk about a Mass Defect ....

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I wonder

I wonder how many 48k Speccys you would need to store 1.5 gigs between them all? I cant be bothered to do the math(s) but maybe someone else could and then a "Speccys worth" could maybe become a new official unit of measurement?!

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if...

If you're into downloading huge DLC and patches and still only have a 2GB download allowance per month you've got nobody to blame but yourself...

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