What Is This Mass Effect Doing In My Black Ops?

In one of the most incredulous manufacturing mess-ups we’ve ever been witness to, it would seem that some PC purchasers of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, yesterday received an incorrect second disc with their game.

How incorrect is it, you might ask? Well according to various sources, during installation of the game on Steam, the setup asks for disc 2 but upon inserting the second disc, printed and marked as the second Black Ops II disc in its entirety, they receive a Mass Effect 2 related read error.

Check out the video above if you need further clarification on this, but basically that means the second disc for Black Ops II is actually for Mass Effect 2, meaning a broken game for anyone without the bandwidth to just download the rest of Black Ops II off Steam.

What’s slightly more hilarious is that Mass Effect 2 — an excellent game if ever there was one — is an Electronic Arts game, whereas Black Ops II hails from bitter rivals Activision. If this isn’t a merger of the forces of evil, I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile, BioWare have been quite generous about the manufacturing derp and have used the opportunity to give away fifty free copies of their Mass Effect Trilogy, citing this as a sign from the universe that they must give users what they need. Here’s what the official blog has to say:

Rumor has it that about a thousand customers who purchased Call of Duty: Black Ops II for PC today were also treated to a surprise copy of Mass Effect 2. If you were one of the affected, chances are you thought it was a mistake, but we prefer to think that it was an omen, and when the universe talks, you should listen.

If the universe thinks that you should be playing Mass Effect right now, who are we to argue? In fact, we want to help! The first fifty fans affected by this phenomenon to send us a picture holding their special disc 2 will receive a code for a FREE PC copy of Mass Effect Trilogy.

Pretty awesome of them, if I may say. If they actually engineered this for the purposes of promotion, then they are absolute geniuses. As unlikely as the possibility of this being deliberate might be.

If you’re one of those affected by this, then rest assured that you can just download the rest of the game off Steam, but if you’d like a proper second disc then expect words from Activison soon as they attempt to sort it out for us.