When the Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out in 2021, it included the single player campaign of all three original games, along with all the DLC. But while all the story content you could ever want was included, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode was conspicuously absent, despite having a dedicated fanbase.
Now, just a few weeks after EA's shutdown of BioWare, a team of modders has successfully ported Mass Effect 3's multiplayer to the Legendary Edition, with all the graphics and engine improvements that came with that re-release. The mod will be coming out on N7 Day – November 7th – and will be free to play, as long as you already own Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
I also got a chance to sit down with Mgamerz, who runs the ME3Tweaks team that created the mod, to talk about Mass Effect 3, and about the state of modding in 2026. And if you want to download the mod yourself, it's available now on Nexus Mods.
IGN: So, tell me a little bit about the project, and how you got started on basically porting the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer over to the Legendary Edition.
Mgamerz: Yeah, so my dev team, ME3Tweaks, and I run it. We ported Pinnacle Station back in 2021. Crazy effort. I don't know how we got that done in a two-month timeframe. And then we were doing other projects for two years, and then near the end of me working on LE2 Randomizer, which is a randomizer for legendary Mass Effect 2, someone discovered a copy of the Citadel in Mass Effect 2.
There's an area from the wards. I can't remember which game it was, but they found an area of the game that nobody knew about before, and you could load into and you're like, 'Well, this was clearly supposed to be something, and then they just never finished it.' It was a very early prototype. And it was like, 'Man, what if we could port something like that into another level?' And so I made this project called Project Wardle, Ward being the first part of it. (We have a bunch of stupid internal code names.)
And I eventually made it so we could port a Mass Effect 2 level into Mass Effect 3, and we fixed up the cover, because cover is just an unbelievable nightmare. It's very important for enemies to be able to use it. Gameplay's a huge component of why Mass Effect 3 is fun. And we got that working and then I was like, 'Well, man, what if we could port the multiplayer levels?' Because we did it for Pinnacle Station. We ported the old game. But Pinnacle Station is mostly just reused assets from Mass Effect 1.
Like 90% of it was just existing assets that they just reused. But multiplayer was totally different. It's like, yeah, none of this content exists. So the scope of work is just huge. So at the end of 2023, right as we finished LE2 Randomizer, literally on N7 day, I spun up a new Discord.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/bioware-may-be-dead-but-a-modder-has-rebuilt-mass-effect-3s-multiplayer-into-the-legendary-edition
