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.
I invited a couple people and they're like, 'What's this Discord about?' I'm like, 'We're going to do something stupid. We're going to port [Mass Effect 3] Multiplayer.' And those were the first two messages I ever sent. I have some screenshots of it.
And then people were like, 'Yeah, you're joking, right?' And I'm like, 'No.' And then the last three years we've been working on it. It hasn't been constant. Last year I broke my arm, which set us back six to eight months.
But for the first two years, it was tons of prototyping. Within the first month of this project, we actually had multiplayer working. It was a proof of concept. And then we spent the next two years getting audio to port, from a different version of the audio engine because they upgraded it. It's like we got shaders building, which was a total nightmare because BioWare compiled the game with a bunch of sources that don't ship with the game.
And so we had to figure out 'how do we replicate that?' So that took a long time. And then it's like textures. We have a bunch more people that know how to do texture upscaling. The first two years is almost all prototype and then asset generation. We want to make it look good. We're planning stuff out, that kind of stuff. So that's really not how it started.
IGN: So, you basically built from scratch again? Did you take assets from the original Mass Effect 3?
Mgamerz: Oh yeah, the whole thing ports from it. It's not a one-to-one port. We're not just taking Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and dumping it into Legendary Edition and then, 'Hey guys, check out it's multiplayer, [as] you remember it.' Where we took a lot of extra steps, the lighting actually gets re-baked in Unreal Engine 4's light solver.
Essentially what that means is, imagine you have a light bulb in a room and if you wanted to project what the lights would look like, a light beam's going to hit your microphone and it's going to cast a shadow.
And then that light bounces off for you, goes into your closet and it bounces off and illuminates the closet a little bit from the inside. Unreal Engine 3 had a solver and that's how all of the lighting for all the Unreal Engine 3 games worked. But in Unreal Engine 4, they added like, 'Oh, we can do additional light bounces or we found a better statistical way to do light bounces.' And so you get crisper shadow edges or the more soft, like a grate covering on some maps. The light bounces through the grate, and unless you have super high resolution textures, it looks terrible. Mass Effect 3 is full of terrible light maps. If you look at them, you're like, 'Wow, it's just a big stair step of shadows and it looks bad.' And so we spent a lot of time upgrading that kind of stuff.
I modded Mass Effect 3 multiplayer for eight years before Legendary Edition came out, and there's a bunch of stuff I was like, 'Wow, I didn't even realize three of the character classes don't even use the highest-quality mesh.' So it's like BioWare made the Geth Infiltrator, and they made it at a high quality where it has all the polygons and triangles. And then as you get further away from the camera, it gets less triangles, because you can't see as much detail. But BioWare was just like, 'We're just not going to use the highest quality one. We'll ship it in the game, but you'll never see it.' And so it's like, 'Oh, well, we can just turn those on and it's an immediate quality upgrade.'
IGN: Was quality a big reason why you took on this massive undertaking to bring ME3 multiplayer to Legendary Edition? Because if I understand correctly, the servers for the original ME3 multiplayer are still working, for now at least.
Mgamerz: By the time we publish this, I don't know, man. N7HQ's gone, so I wouldn't be surprised if it disappears before.
Actually, the whole reason this project started, I was getting to the end of LE2 Randomizer and I was like, 'Man, I love Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.' I modded tons of stuff into it, and it was really fun.
I went back and I was like, 'I want to make a new one. I want to make a new mod.' I went back to it and I was like, 'These tools,' and I'm totally throwing myself under the bus, 'These tools suck. There's no debug tools. Everything is so immature compared to what we have in Legendary Edition, thanks to what BioWare changed for us.' And so I was like, 'Man, I'd rather just port multiplayer than have to deal with this awful development environment.'
And then I was like, 'Okay, well, I've modeled this forever.' I know where all of the pain points are in extending this because I made a new map pack, I made a new enemy pack that adds a new faction. So I'm like, 'I know where all the landmines were, because I had to pioneer it.' And I'm like, 'What if we rebuilt multiplayer and accounted for those landmines so if someone else wants to do it, they don't have to go through the same landmines, or they're at least aware that they're there?' So there's a bunch of considerations for extensibility.
As a user, if you just go in and you just play Standard, you might not notice the changes, but the next dev who wants to add a new faction, it'll be like, 'Wow, I don't have to deal with all these stupid problems that I would've had in the original game.' And so a lot of stuff like that that people won't appreciate, but will make a difference in the long run.
IGN: And it'll probably mean more mods end up coming out for it, as well. So, I'm sure you had a certain amount of people that you expected to play this once you launched it. How much did BioWare's closure change your expectations for your launch date?
Mgamerz: We were already targeting N7 Day. It was probably about in early August, late July. We were getting to a point where it was like, okay, this is fully playable. It doesn't crash. The shaders look right. It's like, this is something we could probably ship by N7 Day. I was more like, We should probably ship this in January.
But then I was like, it's N7 Day. I hate doing the N7 Day crunch, but I always do it, because I secretly feel like I'm a masochist and I kind of enjoy it. There's a satisfaction of essentially killing yourself to get the thing out the door and then being like, oh, it's finally done.
I am a hundred percent ready as of this interview to ship this thing. There's so much stress going on around this release that's killing me. But Bioware's closure, honestly, didn't really factor into it [the release date] at all.
IGN: Do you think you're going to get more people checking it out though?
Mgamerz: Oh yeah, because there's tons of attention on Mass Effect right now, so I'm sure there's going to be a lot more, which is adding to the stress. I've done launches like this for years, and I know on the first day, stuff's going to be broken. I mean, I've been developing software, the mod manager and stuff, and you launch a new feature and some user clicks a button you didn't think they'd click at the exact frame of the installer or whatever, and the whole thing dies. So I'm expecting the first day to just be kind of a train wreck, which sucks, but it's just how it is. It'll get better over time.
IGN: Do you expect that EA is going to pull access to some of the tools that are necessary for modding the game?
Mgamerz: I don't think so. We had an NDA with BioWare back in 2021. It's expired by now, but they had my dev team, not the current dev team — there's a couple more members now, but more core members back then — they had us all under NDA before Legendary Edition launched, and we provided some input to help modding.
So they clearly were interested in having modders to some degree as part of it. I don't know if new EA ownership shares that same view, so it's a little concerning, but I mean, our game requires you own Mass Effect Legendary Edition. This was never going to be like DotA where, "Hey, we split the game off and you get to go do whatever." The goal has always been, "You own Mass Effect Legendary Edition. We're going to source assets from it during the install."
Our game is technically self-contained, so it's not like a mod into Mass Effect 3. It generates a new copy of essentially Mass Effect 3, we call it LMP, and it's fully standalone. So all of your existing mods, they actually don't work with the new install by design because we don't want people immediately installing and immediately breaking everything.
It's one of those landmines that working on the old stuff, I know for a fact doing that will break multiplayer for a lot of people. So I'd rather be more restrictive at launch and then relax it as we figure it out versus, "Hey guys, here's all this stuff. You install a bunch of mods and then it just doesn't work on day one." And you're like, "Well, I'm never going to come back to this again."
IGN: Yeah. Are you hoping to support this project long term, then?