How Modders Spent Three Years Remastering Mass Effect 3’s Fantastic Multiplayer For Legendary Edition: ‘Let’s Do Something Stupid’

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 matters that got in the way including breaking his arm at some point during the whole effort, but the group had a working prototype of the mode as early as December of 2023. “You could pick at least one kit, and the game didn’t crash until you got to wave three,” he recalls. “Enemies would spawn. Audio was totally broken. Like there was virtually no audio. The shaders were all broken, so you just got checkerboards all over the place. But you could actually play it, and enemies spawn. You could kill them. You get points. You know, the absolute bare bones were there.” From there, the team built the rest of the multiplayer mode back up, but it isn’t just what BioWare created in 2012, as the mod includes new ways of play, as well as some alterations to the multiplayer’s progression system. What started as a scheme to bring the old multiplayer mode back to the masses became much more as Mgamerz says the team got “too ambitious” and decided to add more on top of the old bones. This includes new modes Coalition, which pivots between different enemy factions across a match with each wave hosting a different group, and Unified, which mixes enemies from all groups together. “it picks a quasi-random list of enemies,” Mgamerz says. “Originally we had it fully random, and that was terrible. It was so bad, but now it draws from all of the different wavelist options and picks from those, so you get like a mix of the original compositions that we made, and that one actually is pretty fun.” © BioWare One notable fact about the multiplayer mode is that it was one of the earliest examples of a game using modern-day loot boxes to let players unlock characters and acquire consumables. The progression system remains intact in the mod, but the ME3Tweaks modders wanted to give players options for whether they wanted to engage with the system or not. “There’s going to be options for you to choose how much you want unlocked at the start,” Mgamerz says. “Do you want the full grind? If you want to do the full grind, nothing changes. Do you want to start with tons of credits? We can just edit the same file to give you 10 million credits so you can get a nice start. Maybe you want us to just give you one of everything. ‘Give me the level one of every item, so that I have everything I want, but I still have to level it.’ I want to respect people’s time because when I started playing this game, I had a lot of free time to play this game, and now that I’m much older, I would never dedicate the time to grinding everything out.” The team is hoping to add a straightforward store for players to just buy things with credits directly, but Mgamerz says that won’t be available at launch. “It’s definitely something we want to do, but it takes a new interface and hooking all of it up and testing it,” he says. “That takes several days, even with people that know how to edit interfaces better than me.” The mod is also adding new items to the store, including new banners that feature images from the now-cancelled Mass Effect: Universe, so there’s more to unlock and see than there was in the base game, on top of playing and unlocking old stuff. One advantage of the mod is that it’s not reliant on BioWare’s servers and allows players to make their own private servers to play with friends. In theory, that means it could outlast Mass Effect 3’s official multiplayer. When BioWare was shut down on October 21, the N7HQ website where players were able to track their multiplayer stats was seemingly also lost, which has fans concerned that ME3’s actual servers could follow sometime in the near future. For the ME3Tweaks mod group, this didn’t start out as a preservation project, but now that EA has closed BioWare, it has, perhaps involuntarily, become one, and Mgamerz says he has complicated feelings on that. “When I had an interview for Pinnacle Station, people said the same thing,” he says. “They asked me, ‘Is this like game preservation to you?’ And I’m like, ‘Not in the sense that I think most people say, ‘Oh, well, you’re making it so that this stuff exists in the future,’ and it’s like no, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain how I feel on that front, but it’s going to continue. But I don’t feel like this replaces the original. I’m like, this is my rendition of it. BioWare’s will always be Bioware’s. Mine will build on BioWare’s, but I don’t ever want to feel like it replaces it because, you know, BioWare didn’t make it. I don’t feel like it’s fair to say that I built on top of your work and now my version replaces your work. That never feels right to me. But, I mean, once it goes away, this is the only way you’ll even be able to experience it.” For the ME3Tweaks team, the notion of “replacing” BioWare’s work is daunting given the group had a long-standing relationship with the company. “I went to work, and during the day, it was like it really started dawning on me,” Mgamerz says about the closure in October. “I’ve worked with this company on this company’s stuff for 14 years now. I’ve had an NDA with them for LE. I’ve toured their office in 2019. And so when it was gone, it was just kind of like this empty feeling. As a modder, and this is something I actually remember bringing up to EA in our call we had for Legendary. It was like, ‘you guys always recognize the artists. You guys always recognize the cosplayers and stuff, but it’s like you guys would literally never even acknowledge the modding scene, even though we did all this stuff.’ And they told us some stuff like, ‘Legendary Edition kind of came about because of the work you guys did. We saw what the modders were doing.’ I was on the team of the texture mod that they were pretty much citing. They’re like, “You’re the reason we kind of made this.’ right?” And so it was like, ’Oh, well, that’s quite a bit of acknowledgement.’ Yeah, that’s not public. And so you know, you build this hoping they would notice, even though you kind of know they never can really say anything.” © BioWare Mgamerz said that his contacts at BioWare were especially excited when the team brought Pinnacle Station to the Legendary Edition, which wasn’t included in the collection due to the source code being lost. “They’d reach out and be like, ‘Oh my god, that’s crazy, dude. We never thought that’d be possible,’” he says. As AI and vibe coding have become more prominent in the modding space, with some modders using AI to create assets and entire projects, Mgamerz says that the ME3Tweaks team didn’t use any AI to create or generate assets. However, he does say they used it in researching the actual game files. We’ve included his full explanation on the extent of AI use in the project below: I don’t use it to make any assets, no visual, audio. I don’t use it for any of that kind of stuff. I have a tool I made that can research into the game files, but I literally made it so it never can save anything. It can only tell me like findings. So, it’s like, one of our kits for some reason just won’t appear, even though we are like 99 percent sure we’ve configured it properly. And it’ll go through, and I’ll be like, ‘Okay, well I looked at how the game code works, and I looked at how you define this kit, and there’s a flag that makes it only appear if it’s been unlocked with this entitlement, which is just like a number that we weren’t sure where it actually came from.’ And then, that reminded me, ‘Oh yeah, BioWare drip-fed old kits back in 2012 on one of their DLCs to pad it out a bit, and that was the flag that was causing this.’ And so, we would use AI to do stuff like that. You know, it can help us prototype some interface design outside of the game and get a feel of what actually works, what doesn’t. But I’ve been on the scene for so long. I know when I make a certain change, what kind of wider impact it has versus, now this isn’t me trying to talk down on [developers who vibe code] or anything. Vibe coding is one thing when you make something for yourself and you don’t release it because you’re the only person it affects, but when you release it and it becomes a wider product and it starts causing problems for other people, you’re not going to be the only one that has to deal with those problems. So, I don’t like when stuff like—We’re seeing a lot of vibe coded apps or mods now. The first sentence of the description is, ‘I didn’t write a single line of this; it was all done by Claude.’ And so, whenever it’s like reviewing scripts and helping me design stuff, I review every single line that gets output, and it’s so tedious, and I hate doing it. So I totally understand why vibe coding is a thing, but I understand that if I’m releasing this, I’m responsible for this, so I should be the one that reviews it. So if AI goes away, for whatever reason, there’s still some chance someone can understand what the heck this thing is doing. And so I spend an awful lot of time going through all of the changes that we’re making. We didn’t really use AI until the last probably four months. Almost everything before that was all done by hand. With BioWare’s closure, Mgamerz and the ME3Tweaks team are now expecting “a lot more attention” than they were previously, as the mod is launching on N7 Day, a day when fans have celebrated the series’ legacy. Now, fans are more tuned in to the release than they might’ve been, as online and IRL demonstrations are underway and fans rally under the #SaveMassEffect banner. Some fans are even calling for people to play the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on Steam for N7 Day in order to raise the collection’s concurrent player count. “We’ve been doing this in secret, so it’s not going to be super…I mean, we’ve tested it, but I don’t know if it’s going to handle whatever influx of users it may get on the first day,” he says. “I’ve never run like a live-service kind of deal, even though it’s just like a server. So I’m like, yeah, going to be a stressful first day, probably for sure. But I’m sure it’ll even out. It always has. But yeah, I hope someone at BioWare—or former BioWare— notices.”