Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer mode won’t be included when you fire up Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. That’s sure to come as a disappointment to fans of the third installment’s multiplayer, but BioWare says reviving the mode would have delayed the rest of the remaster.
Mac Walters, the project director for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, spoke with Game Informer about the decision to cut Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer from the project. He said it’s like restoring a 1982 Porsche – except instead of a simple restoration, the car has been buried in concrete.
“So you’ve got to chip away at all of that, and every time you go to try something, it’s like ‘is this even going to work?'” Walters said. “I think people underestimate what it’s like to do this game, because at every step you are given an agonizing choice of ‘is this the thing that we want to spend our time on and really try to improve it,’ and ‘where will this lead us down the road?'”
Walters explained that having a multiplayer component in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition would have meant a cascade of additional considerations, such as post-launch support and tuning, ongoing support of the online mode, and a changed economy. Further, it could have had implications for the people still playing the original multiplayer game in legacy Mass Effect 3 on PC and consoles.
In the end, Walters said, BioWare decided that the time required to implement multiplayer was too great, and that it would have come at too high a cost for the rest of the project.
We’ve collected everything we know about Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in one place, which is where you can also find out about the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition release date and plans for the series’ DLC.