The Citadel

is going to be the subject and setting of the final Mass Effect DLC. Pretty much everybody is going to be in it. Yes, including Zaeed. But probably not Thane. (And thus probably not Mordin either.) It's going to be expensive, but also about as big as Lair of the Shadow Broker.

And it drops basically a year to the day after Mass Effect 3 did, and a year minus one week before everybody started hating on the ending. ...and about a week before StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, so I have to ask, what is it with sci-fi video games and March?

The other thing, of course, is figuring out when the right time is, story-wise, for this DLC, which I won't be able to do until I've played it obviously, but I still like to wonder...

With Mass Effect 1, I only have Bring Down the Sky (and I've heard Pinnacle Station is awful, so...), and really I don't have a set time that I like to play that one, although I do have some criteria...

• Before Virmire. It doesn't make sense for Shepard to go off to save one colony when the entire galaxy is at stake.
• After the Heart of Darkness "Father Kyle" mission. Usually after Feros as well.
• If Shepard is a Colonist, either before or after the encounter with the escaped slave back on the Citadel, depending on whether or not Shepard's going to sacrifice the colonists to kill Balak. (See, once I know the variations on the story, I like to mold it as much as I can.  This is why the series doesn't feel stale yet.)

In Mass Effect 2, I tend to do Zaeed's and Kasumi's missions early on, because my understanding is that TIM sets up the trap on Horizon because you're taking too long dicking around the galaxy.  Alternatively, I'll do Kasumi's mission before Horizon, and then Zaeed's and Garrus's back-to-back because they're thematically similar. Despite the fact that Shadow Broker is kind of written as a post-game mission, I like to do it beforehand, usually around, again, the time of Garrus's loyalty mission. Overlord has to be done before the Derelict Reaper mission for it to make any sense, and if you can time it right and do it right before the Collector Ship mission (so you have even more incentive to distrust Cerberus), more power to you. Arrival is always dead last, after the rest of the game, unless a) I'm rushing through to see how one change I made in 1 affects the story in 3, or b) I want to see the holographic Collector General for some reason. Firewalker and Normandy Grave Site are dead to me.

As for Mass Effect 3, I like doing From Ashes near the beginning, to give Mordin time to work on his genophage cure. Also to get Javik and not miss out on too many of his lines (getting him after the salarian homeworld mission means missing out on the line about a certain Prothean delicacy... oh well. It also preserves the integrity of giving the Atlas its own cutscene on Sur'Kesh but not on Eden Prime).  I really like to spread Leviathan way the hell out over the entire game, because the tone is just a tad schizo. At the beginning of the game you've still got the time to get bogged down in Dr. Bryson's hobby, which doesn't seem to work near the end of the game.  Near the end of the game there's more urgency, and it's more reasonable to accept Anne's willingness to get herself mind-raped to find Leviathan. Don't get me wrong, I love that scene, but she seems a tad too eager to volunteer. Omega is, if nothing else, a great diversion from the tedious Act 2.

Now, knowing nothing else about Citadel, I'm going to go ahead and play it... hrm. My first instinct was to play it during Shepard's trip to the Citadel at the beginning of Act 3, since that's the last time he has to go there... but there have been hints that not doing it right before the point of no return means that a certain character won't show up because their fate hasn't been determined yet.

We'll see.