It appears I was premature in suggesting that the closure of BioWare might quickly spell an end for Mass Effect 3’s strangely good, preposterously enduring co-op mode. I reinstalled and logged on just last week, and easily found a series of packed lobbies. Still, it was always regrettable that 2021’s Mass Effect Legendary Edition opted not to remaster this multiplayer component alongside its dolled-up main trilogy, thus failing to introduce to a new generation the joys of performing teleporting psychic headbutts as a millennia-old bipedal frog.
This oversight has now been addressed, with the release of the Legendary Edition Multiplayer mod for said remaster. It’s both a reconstruction and a slight expansion of ME3 multi, built in secret since 2023 by the ME3Tweaks group: a modding collective who’ve previously imbued the Legendary Edition with Mass Effect 1’s Pinnacle Station DLC. It’s also, some of its makers tell me, a bittersweet expression of appreciation for a series that looks unlikely to continue after EA’s Mass Effect 5 cancellation.
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At least some of that affection can be seen in how Legendary Edition Multiplayer differs from the already-available LEMP mod, which uses AI vibecoding to slap a mechanically identical recreation of ME3’s co-op into the Legendary Edition’s ones and zeroes. ME3Tweaks’s version instead adds, according to member and longtime ME modder Audemus, a “completely overhauled UI, rebaked level lighting, upscaled and redrawn textures, upgraded shaders, native LE features such as HDR and controller support, networking and server replication improvements, extensive bug fixes, and entirely new wave modes such as Unified and Coalition.”
Unified mode, for instance, quite literally mixes up ME3’s enemy factions by forming mishmashed waves of baddies from across the Geth, Reaper, and Cerberus armies, thereby dusting off and stamping on your 14-year-old battle tactics. The mod also offers the ability to use ME3Tweaks’ own servers for matchmaking, though a private server option remains for scraps with mates.
I’ll definitely be giving this a try, once I’m back from my current travels. Though as with those OG ME3 multiplayer sessions last week, it’ll be with a certain glumness, knowing that – despite a vocal campaign to give Mass Effect 5 a reprieve– I’ll be playing something that had its future cut short.
The circumstances aren’t lost on Legendary Edition Multiplayer’s creators. “BioWare’s closure is an incredibly sad moment for the games industry, and a particularly heartbreaking thing for the Mass Effect fanbase to contend with,” Audemus tells me over email. “I feel as though our responsibility as a modding community has always been to carry the torch for this franchise, with or without an official future for it. But now that the future of Mass Effect has never been more in question, I feel that sense of responsibility more acutely than I ever have before.”
Mgamerz, another modder on the project, recalls how “The day BioWare closed it didn’t hit me until later in the day, a sort of numbness I can’t really describe. I’ve spent 14 years working on their games – it’s like watching a friend lose a parent – maybe you’re not attached, but you feel the secondhand distress.”
For some Legendary Edition Multiplayer modders, the affected BioWare staff included developers they knew personally. ME3Tweaks had previously been invited to embargoed discussions with both BioWare and EA on game modding, and Mass Effect writer and director Mac Walters (who left BioWare voluntarily in 2023) allegedly advocated for an even closer relationship.
“It’s a shame to see it shut down,” Mgamerz says. “Everyone speculated about it, but I know from talking to people internally there, that nobody knew the guillotine was about to drop.” [Owners EA say the decision was only made after “months of planning, review, and analysis”, though independent reporting suggests it was largely down to a straight choice between making ME5 or Star Wars Battlefront 3.]
“When we had our NDA with BioWare (since expired), apparently Mac Walters pushed internally to get my dev team brought into the manifold,” he adds. “I say this as ‘apparently’, cause due to scheduling issues we never got to speak with Mac. But secondhand stories tell me he was a big proponent of modders – something that I would have loved to see more publicly shown.
“It is disappointing to know that the people who helped build the world my work now builds upon were killed unceremoniously – a problem that plagues the industry, and what kept me from further pursuing entry into it, something I used to dream of doing when I was younger.”
RPS lawyers are telling me to tell you that nobody was literally killed. All the same, and even as someone much more familiar with playing the Mass Effects than tinkering around in their engine bays, the ME3Tweaks team make relatable points: we can frolick around an uprezzed Firebase Hydro, biotically biffing half-robot Turians like it’s 2012, but it’ll be hard not to look at all those conspicuous waist-high walls and think about the people who put them there. The same’s true of having your mind drift to thoughts of their successors.
But there’s another way of looking at it, which is that mods like Legendary Edition Multiplayer can preserve and maintain an original developer’s work well beyond what their leveraged-buyout executive overlords might deem financially inconvenient. “I hope,” as Audemus puts it, “that this mod – along with the fact that we’ve been able to build the technology to make mods like this in the first place – sends a message that there is incredible value in this franchise, and a passionate fanbase that is not ready to say goodbye to this universe and these games.”