Ah, come on, it was fine. Better than fine. We can argue for another fourteen years about whether BioWare should have redone the ending or not, but Mass Effect 3 was really a compendium of endings, a ludicrously ambitious wrapping-up of dozens of plot threads, character arcs, and running gags. Even if you can point to other RPGs that, on an individual basis, are more branching and reactive, Mass Effect 3’s largely successful closing of a galaxy’s worth of choose-your-own adventure books – filled in and followed across three evolving instalments – showed an audacity and grandiosity that no other three-part series had matched before. Or, at least on that scale, has pulled off since.
It didn’t hurt that Mass Effect 3 also had the trilogy’s fiercest, bangiest action by far, nor some of its highest-stakes, often most lip-chewing moments of decisionmaking. It is true that the accumulation of War Assets wasn’t always as heavy on character drama as the game-long preparation for Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission, but then you don’t simply play Mass Effect 3 to make a number go higher. You play it to punch or hug reporters, to love or shoot your friends, to save or damn entire species. And it has loads of that, right up to the point to have to choose the colour of an explosion. Potentially beyond, if you treat the (assuredly, delightfully) fanservice-forward Citadel expansion as Shepard’s true last ride.
Back in 2013, and again with 2021’s Legendary Edition, I was sad that Mass Effect 3 ended and glad that it happened. That, at the risk of appearing less furious at EA’s stewardship than I am, does not change with BioWare’s closure. What does bother me is the uncertainty over what now happens to Mass Effect 3’s surprisingly entertaining, weirdly long-lived co-op mode.
I don’t doubt this was put in for boring, C-suite, “gamers want multiplayer” reasons. But that only gave the resultant palled-up superpower maelstroms a sense that they were better than they had any right to be, with explosive moments of player-to-player power synergies and spacious, blindspot-filled maps that could maintain a thrilling feeling of being permanently surrounded. Post-release additions to the species-spanning character roster also showed glimpses of that same, fuck-it swagger that BioWare exhibited in the campaign, as they increasingly moved away from familiar soldier archtypes towards electric whip wielders, regenerating lizards, teleporting ninjas, and three-foot-tall psychic asthmatics. While many of today’s co-op shooters fret over miniscule balance changes, in pursuit of some mythically perfect meta, Mass Effect 3’s gave you a crate of action figures and told you to go nuts.
While I haven’t played it recently, there’s a small but loyal contingent who do, and for their sake I hope the multiplayer’s P2P setup helps it survive the EA cull. I was, and for now technically still is, too good to be doomed to oblivion. Or, worse, vibe-coded Legendary Edition mods.