Cerberus Daily News To Die, Will Be Reborn

BioWare announced this week that Mass Effect 2‘s daily in-game news ticker, The Cerberus Daily News, is scheduled for shutdown on its one year anniversary, January 24. However, it’ll come back online for three weeks in 2011: One week before a new (and possibly final?) piece of DLC, after which it’ll go offline again and come back again two weeks before the release of Mass Effect 3 in late 2011.

The Cerberus Daily News lived on the right side of Mass Effect 2‘s main menu and listed daily news clips from the erstwhile Mass Effect universe — like a CNN for the Citadel crowd.

If you never read these little missives then you missed out on some great stories. Sometimes they were funny — any post about a holiday was worth a chuckle. Sometimes they were mysterious, like the series of posts about socialite Aish Ashland’s DNA being rejected from the Hollywood Bank of Fame. Sometimes they were serious or mirrored real-world events, like the posts about economic corruption on the Citadel following the events of Mass Effect or about a comet disaster on the planet Behlan after the earthquake in Haiti.

Thankfully, some intrepid blogger decided to chronicle all the posts here. You can read everything put out by BioWare, but things get really interesting around late February or early March, when people started commenting on the news posts — in character — so you’ve got fans arguing about the best way to intercept a galactic criminal and exchanging conspiracy theories about what happened to Commander Shepard.

Personally, I think these news items gave the Mass Effect universe an identifiable character worth saving. Sure, the codex was filled with extra information, but it was presented in such a dry, academic fashion. The celebrity gossip and political turmoil of the daily news was far more interesting. It’ll be a shame to see it shut down, but maybe there’ll be a new ticker in Mass Effect 3.