// KOTAKU — GAMING
How Modders Spent Three Years Remastering Mass Effect 3’s Fantastic Multiplayer For Legendary Edition: ‘Let’s Do Something Stupid’
Mass Effect 3Mass Effect: Legendary EditionMass Effect: UniverseN7 Day
When the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remasters launched in 2021, they had just about everything you could have wanted from a modern-day port of BioWare’s sci-fi RPGs. There were, however, two major exemptions: the original game’s Pinnacle Station DLC, and Mass Effect 3’s cooperative multiplayer mode. In 2021, the ME3Tweaks modding group brought back Pinnacle Station. Now, five years later, it’s back to finish the job, and is releasing a remastered mod of the multiplayer mode for those who have the Legendary Edition on PC.
The project began in earnest three years ago, with modder Mgamerz coming up with the idea shortly after wrapping up a randomizer mod for the Mass Effect 2 remaster. Luckily, the ME3Tweaks group had a lot of the foundations set in place to bring the missing mode into the Legendary Edition after years of working in the Mass Effect modding space.
“There was somebody who had shown that they could port a level when they found an unused level in [Mass Effect 1’s remaster],” he tells Kotaku. “There was like an extra Citadel area, and I was like, ‘Oh man, what if I could port that to another game?’ Sometimes I just get these crazy ideas, like, ‘What if I just did something crazy?’ And so I tried porting it, and I was able to actually get it to port because we did Pinnacle Station, so we had a lot of the infrastructure to do it, and I was able to port it. I’m like, ‘man, what if we could do like a multiplayer level?’ And I was able to port, I think it was [Firebase] Condor. It’s one of the first DLC maps. It looked terrible, but you didn’t immediately crash the game loading into it. And I had already ported multiplayer levels before in my Redemption map pack that I had made from single player to multiplayer, so I kind of knew everything that was needed. And then it was like, ‘Okay, well, I made this map, but there’s no game mode; you can’t do anything on it. Really, it looks terrible.’ And so I kind of shelved it for a couple of months.”
After some time, Mgamerz decided he wanted to make a multiplayer mod, and thus went back to the original Mass Effect 3, and says he was struck by how much “further advanced” the group’s modding tools had become while working on the remaster.
“Literally probably about three hours into it, I’m like, ‘These tools suck,’ and I say that as someone who helped write most of them. Our tooling for the original trilogy is so bad compared to what we got in Legendary Edition.”
Part of that is because, prior to the remaster’s launch, the ME3Tweaks group had meetings with folks at BioWare about making the Legendary Edition more modder-friendly, and although the company wasn’t able to implement everything, it did give the group a better starting point.
“It was probably just like a month before the game release,” he recalls. “We gave them a list of some of the most awful things we have to deal with, and we kind of didn’t expect them to do most of the changes. And they didn’t. I mean, it’s one month before launch, so you can’t really make big changes. But they snuck a few in right at the end of development for us, which has helped a lot of single-player development. They gave us some information that we couldn’t really leverage until we started working on stuff like this, like how does DLC mount work? When the game loads, DLC mounts into the game, but in ME3, it loads single-player versus multiplayer, and we didn’t really have any idea how any of that worked. So they gave us information about that, and then we, you know, over the years we built on top of it.”
Over two years later, on November 7, 2023, Mgamerz created a Discord server for Project Milan, what would become the Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition multiplayer remaster mod, telling the rest of the ME3Tweaks modders, “Let’s do something stupid. Let’s port multiplayer.”
He says that development was on and off over the course of three years, citing some personal ma