Mass Effect: Legendary Editionis the remaster many fans were hoping for. Familiar faces return with stunning new textures and lighting upgrades, quality-of-life changes help create more consistency between the three games, and fans get to relive the original trilogy now with the knowledge that Shepard’s story may not truly be over with a newMass Effectgame on the way.
However,Mass Effect: Legendary Editionstill can’t overcome the originalMass Effecttrilogy’s biggest behind-the-scenes flaw. Here’s a breakdown of some of the developers talking about how the trilogy’s story was planned, and some of the reasons that led to flaws that even theLegendary Editioncouldn’t hope to fix.
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Planning The Mass Effect Trilogy
The general consensus amongMass Effectfans is thatMass Effect 3is the weaker game in the trilogy, while opinions on the series' best installment generally err towardsMass Effect 2.Mass Effect 2got to reunite the player with old friends while building up to an extremely memorable suicide mission for the finale.Mass Effect 3’s endingwas infamous on launch, with far fewer possible endings than the second game. However,Mass Effect 2is in-part responsible for many ofMass Effect 3’s most glaring problems.
While there were broad ideas of the arc of theMass Effecttrilogy, BioWare did not decide on some fundamental pieces of the puzzle until very late in the game. In an interview with Eurogamer, Drew Karpyshyn, lead writer ofMass Effect 1and2, discussed howMass Effect 2was written with several potential answers to one key question in mind: why do the Reapers want to wipe out organic life every 50,000 years?
“Maybe the Reapers kept wiping out organic life because organics keep evolving to the state where they would use biotics and dark energy and that caused an entropic effect that would hasted the end of the universe,” said Karpyshyn, discussingMass Effect 2’s dropped Dark Energy plotline, hinted at in Tali’s recruitment mission.
“Maybe there’s an inevitable descent into the opposite of the Big Bang (the Big Crunch) andthe Reapersrealize that the only way they can stop it is by using biotics, but since they can’t use biotics they have to keep rebuilding society as they try and find the perfect group to use biotics for this purpose,” continued Karpyshyn. He described the Dark Energy plotline as “very vague and not fleshed out,” and ultimately it would be abandoned betweenMass Effect 2andMass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3’s Ending
In the end, it was revealed that the Reapers had been created by an AI known as the Intelligence, created by an ancient race of cuttlefish-like aliens known asthe Leviathans. In typical AI-gone-rogue fashion, the Intelligence took its prime directive to ensure the continuation of life in the galaxy to extreme logical conclusions. to stop synthetics from ever being able to fully wipe out galactic life, ironically it had to routinely destroy every space-faring civilization capable of creating such synthetics.
Though the execution ofMass Effect 3’s ending is infamous and has undergone revisions since the game’s retail release, the idea of the Intelligence isn’t necessarily a bad one. The real problem, asDrew Karpyshyn’s comments indicate, is that BioWare didn’t have a plan for why the Reapers existed or what their true motivations were until after the story of the second game was set in stone.
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Foresight And Mass Effect’s Future
One of the reasonsMass Effecthas so many alternate theories interpreting the ending - from some fans who speculate that Dark Matter could still have played a role to the far more commonIndoctrination Theory- is that the original trilogy was experimenting with different potential plot-threads which were then abandoned when the real ending was decided upon. A good ending should feel surprising but necessary, as if the stars align and every piece of evidence so far suddenly falls into place. That’s certainly easier said than done, but it’s also practically impossible to achieve without there having been an ending in sight to hint at throughoutMass Effect 1and2.
A similar lack of foresight can be seen with one ofMass Effect’s best moments, the suicide mission. Earlier this yearMass Effect 3’s lead writer Mac Walters talked to GameStop about the suicide mission while discussing some of the characters that were cut fromMass Effect 2. “A suicide mission with 10 or 12 of your favorite characters is creating just the most brutal future world for ourselves inMass Effect 3, because now you’ve got all of these permutations that we’re gonna have to deal with. And we’d all just laugh and say that’s for our future selves to worry about.”
Mass Effect 2’s ending was incredible when the game first released, in part because it raised the question of just howBioWarewould deal with so many different possibilities in the third game. In most cases, however, the suicide mission’s outcomes don’t radically alter the plot ofMass Effect 3. Instead, dead characters are mostly replaced by rough stand-ins who can fulfill similar roles. If Mordin is dead, for example, he is replaced by another Salarian scientist called Padok Wiks. This patched the holes and kept things on-track, but ultimately fans had to save everyone inME2to get the most satisfying and character-driven story.
Mass Effect Legendary Editionis a testament to how much fans still love the originalMass Effecttrilogy, for all its flaws. TheLegendary Editionwouldn’t have been able to fundamentally change the story of the trilogy at this point without causing uproar, and there isn’t much to suggest that the alternate endings BioWare toyed with would have been received any better thanMass Effect 3’s retail ending. However, the lack of overall planning when it came to the Reapers' motives throughout the trilogy, and the lack of foresight when it came to things like replacingMass Effect 2’s dead squad members, can still be felt in the remaster. No story is perfect, but as BioWare embarks on a new chapter in theMass Effectseries, hopefully its future is more clearly charted.
Mass Effect: LegendaryEditionis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
