How could Mass Effect’s DLC be ‘lost’?

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It’s been recently reported that the Citadel DLC of Mass Effect 1 will not be returning in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remastering due to corrupted files.

Apparently the only source code of the DLC the developers could find was too corrupted to salvage, and so it was cut.

How can that be exactly if I have that DLC on my Xbox 360 right now? What meaningful difference is there between the source code the original devs should have had, and the retail version of the code thousands of fans have?

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Source code is written in languages that humans can understand. But computers need machine code which is a binary format. The source code is translated into machine code and that’s what distributed.

Compare it to encoding a piece of text. Say you have a file that says “Hello world” and an encoder that translates it into “#!$%@#$%TFEVQW” and puts that into a different file. That’s what the computer can read and understand. Even if you lose the original file, you still have the encoded version. You can still copy that even if you don’t know what it says.

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