Trivia / Expanded Galaxy Mod

• Creative Differences: Due to apparent disagreements between members of the modding team on Priority Earth Overhaul Mod, a separate modding group formed and subsequently released Take Earth Back, a like-minded mod that greatly enhances the final combat mission of the game, Priority: Earth. While both mods do have a handful of similar elements (including some restored content), team members from the latter project have gone on-record saying there were elements that they wanted to add to the former, but differing design philosophies meant that whatever elements could have been gleaned from both parties working together will likely remain unanswered, as both mods run into inherent conflicts and cannot work in tandem.
• Dummied Out:
  • Earlier versions of EGM allowed the player to go back through the Omega 4 Relay, in a manner similar to a rejected concept from 3 (which would have allowed the player to go back through after recapturing Omega). The ability to access the relay was removed from later versions, and the place where you can get the Collector weapons changed to a different planet (attempting to go through the relay caused a message to pop up that says that the crew would rather not relive that experience again). Later versions of the mod would readd the ability to access the relay.
  • Accessing the Cybernetic Implant/Bonus Power terminal onboard the Normandy after the Omega DLC is completed shows an option to respec the powers of Bray, the Batarian enforcer who aids Shepard and Aria during the DLC. This suggests that Bray was intended to be used as a viable squadmate, but was never fully implemented.
• Flip-Flop of God: Whether or not any of the mods are actually finished. Several of the creators behind the various mods related to the Expanded Galaxy project have unequivocally said that no further updates would be made... then turned around and updated them anyway:
  • Production on the Expanded Galaxy Mod was presumably finished as of the 1.0 release, with the comment forums on NexusMods being turned off and Kinkojiro and others describing it as feature-complete... until mid-2020, when they dropped a surprise "Lockdown Edition" of the mod that added the ability to have characters onboard the Normandy wear any of the armor suits found in the game (or DLC), additional Galaxy Map revisions and the EGM Squadmate Pack (a formerly-separate mod that expanded the usage of Mass Effect 2 squadmates in missions) getting baked into the final product.
  • Kinkojiro's Ark Mod was initially a single mission, built to be the first in a set of linked missions dealing an investigation into the Andromeda Initiative, that was released and presumed to be left dormant, as both the creator and others working on the title said that despite their efforts, the levels they wanted to construct (including missions adapted from multiplayer maps) were too difficult to code. Less than a year later, however, the mod got a surprise update with two additional levels and a boatload of extra features included, such as armors and weapons (taken from Andromeda).
    • An explanation post on the mod page states that in addition to the creation difficulty, the team - and especially the writers - were disappointed by Andromeda once it released, lost interest, and without the writers the completion of the remaining missions became impossible.
  • Development of the Priority Earth Overhaul Mod initially stalled out after modder Orikon25 had to juryrig part of the last Horde Mode battle to prevent a Game-Breaking Bug from occurring — the cutscene where the Destroyer Reaper is killed and Anderson arrives to pick up Shepard and their squad never plays (a Datapad pop-up would prompt the player to click an option to skip the cutscene), and Orikon had expressed frustration that he couldn't find the problem, thus giving up development. A few months later, however, after a surprise update that fixed the issue, he went one step further and created "The Orikon Collection", an all-in-one mod that baked the overhaul, Immersive Thessia Mod (a restoration of cut content for Priority: Thessia), the Ambient Audio Overhaul (restoration of unused sound effects and music) and a new submod, Prologue Overhaul (restoration of cut content for the opening mission) into a single file, with compatibility with EGM and other fanmods and additional level streaming / bugfixes.
• Role Reprise: In the Priority Earth Overhaul Mod, George Szilagyi returns to voice Major Kirrahe (with lines taken from unused dialogue written for, but never implemented, into the final mission. As such, he can be recruited, provided that he survived through the events of Priority: The Citadel II.

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