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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?
Mgamerz: Yes. Yes. Multiplayer is my jam, dude. I racked up thousands of hours, probably at least a thousand hours in the first year before Origin even tracked how long you played the game. And then I have another 2,800 hours on top of that, and most of it was modding multiplayer. And then I don't even know how much I have in Legendary Edition. I don't really play Legendary Edition. I never really played the original games, either. It was just always multiplayer. Everyone that's ever interviewed me is like, "You must love the story." And I'm like, "I've played the trilogy, the actual trilogy played through maybe twice since 2012."
IGN: So if you weren't really into the story of Mass Effect, how did you get into the multiplayer?
Mgamerz: Oh, well, I played Mass Effect 1 shortly before Mass Effect 3 came out because [of] the ads. It was actually on GameSpot. It was just littered with ads. You couldn't do anything on the page without there being a Mass Effect 3 ad. And I was like, "Oh, that looks kind of cool." And so I played Mass Effect 1. I used some texture mods and made it look better. I'm like, "Oh, this is kind of a nice game. I'm enjoying this."
And then Mass Effect 2 was pretty good. Then I got to Mass Effect 3, played about halfway through it, and then I was like, "Ah, maybe I'll try multiplayer." And then it was fun. I had a good time.
And this is where my modding career on this game started. I was playing, it was on Firebase White, and every enemy was a husk, and there were 30 of them, and my poor laptop was dying.
There were 30, but my computer was like, "Kill me, just end me right now." I remember asking on voice chat in the game, I was like, "Is anyone else's game freaking out? Why is it all husks?" And some other person was like, "I don't know, man, it must be some sort of glitch." And I was like, "Huh, weird glitch." And obviously now I know that the person was modding the game, but I had so much fun. I was like, "Man, how do I do that?" And then I learned how to do it and made my little mod manager, and then I just kept getting more and more ambitious until here we are porting multiplayer.
IGN: How did you get your start in modding? Was it with Mass Effect 1? Those texture mods?
Mgamerz: No. My technical first part of modding was SimCity 4 when I made the world's worst 3D model of a library. I think it's still on Simtropolis. I won't tell you my original username, but it was essentially just a donut and a block underneath it, and everyone roasted me for it because it was so trash. I was like 13 or something. I was super young. I didn't know what I was doing.
But then my real modding started. I got into GameMaker, which is a game development app. It was really great for learning how to program without having to learn how to program. It taught you concepts like a random chance is a dice roll. That's something everyone could understand. So it was a visual language, and I made a couple of small games. They were really fun. I really enjoyed it.
And then I found a decompiler for something called Ninja Fight Screensaver, and it's just two boxes with little limbs attached. It's just a physics simulation and it just moves them back and forth. And then the physics will cause the arm to swing, and they would calculate damage based on the velocity, and there'd be some stupid blood particle effects. It looked terrible, but I was like, "Man, I'd love to make my own level in this game." So I found a decompiler for a GameMaker build, decompiled the game, and found tons of unused levels and stuff. I was like, "Whoa, this is awesome. There's a truck in this," which was never in the released version of the game, but it's like, "Oh my God, they made a truck." I was like, "That's awesome."
And then I actually got into Mega Man Battle Network modding back in the old days. I remember doing online net battles before the Legacy Collection, before CapCom re-released it. And I was like, "Man, I remember doing that back in the day playing other players like 2006 or something." And that was all assembly modding. You have to learn how to read pretty much machine code. Really difficult, but really fun. Very dedicated little community. I took a break from modding for a couple of years, and then Mass Effect 3.
IGN: How do you feel about the pervasiveness of cloud-based AI decompilation ports and the mashup mods?
Mgamerz: Boy, it's a mix. So for the first two years of this project, we didn't even use AI at all. If you could use it, which I never did, it probably wasn't up to par to get any of the stuff done that we would really need it to do. There's been some mods recently released in this scene, and I'm not going to mention any names. I'm not targeting any specific ones.
In the modding community, you have an ecosystem. For example, I have my mod manager, you deploy mods through the mod manager, it runs a bunch of checks on the mods to make sure you're not going to ship something that's just going to break someone's game immediately. And there's certain knowledge, like you don't put stuff in startup files because it wastes tons of memory. If you stuff everything in there, you boot the game, oh, now the game takes an extra gigabyte of memory for your single mod to work because you didn't want to do it the proper way.
So there's an ecosystem of knowledge that when you start modding, you have to integrate yourself into so you can play nice with everyone's stuff. Is it as convenient as typing a prompt into Claude, "Hey, make me this mod?" Of course not. For our AI usage, and in relation to your question, there's a difference between what I call vibe coding, where you just kind of prompt it until you get what you want, and having expertise in understanding what it's actually writing and you're reviewing it, that's more like AI assisted. For decompilation specifically, we've used Claude for some of it, but a majority of our decomp was already done before AI tools were even available.
I can tell you from just seeing what it can do, it's insane how good it is. The problem is when you make it so... This will sound like gatekeeping, and it kind of is. I'm just being honest with you, it's kind of gatekeeping. The difficulty of making mods and getting into it filtered out a lot of low-quality stuff. You see this on stuff like the Switch eShop. It's full of slop, because there's no quality control, and you can just ship whatever, and then users have to dredge through all sorts of stuff like that.
There's a balance. I want to make my tools easy for people to use. I don’t want it to be like, you have to be the most masochistic person to get into modding, but I also don't want it to be like you type a prompt into Claude and you can just ship something that doesn't have any awareness of [whether] it's going to break everything else.
We've seen mods where the description and the images of the mod are not even human-written. The directions are straight up wrong. The images don't even show the content. For me personally, it's really killing it. I want there to be... I'm not saying the people that do this aren't passionate, but they don't give a damn about how it affects anyone else, because when their stuff doesn't work and it breaks, they're not going to be the ones that are around here supporting and trying to figure out why it doesn't work. It's going to be everyone else that's been here for a while that wants to fix it.
IGN: What do you think the pathway for people now who are trying to get into modding, but the only thing they're exposed to is the AI tools?
Mgamerz: I've actually thought about this a lot in the last two or three weeks. Someone released a... I don't want to say... To me, it feels like it's vibe-coded. The developer says it's not, but I feel like the difference is I have a lot more understanding of the game than the person that worked on that. So it's however you want to interpret it. I don't know.
Getting into [modding]? I feel like modding is kind of dying. If you come in and you're like, "I want to just do this, no AI. I just want to cut my teeth, find the boundaries, break over them, have a difficult, challenging task," you pretty much have to work in secret now, because if you essentially have an idea and someone else is like, "Wow, that's a cool idea." And you're like, "Well, it's going to take me six months." And they're like, "I don't want to wait six months." They can spend 20 bucks and pump this thing out in a day or two, and it'll probably work, but the user will have no understanding of how.
The best way I can describe this is: When I moved into my house a couple years ago, I did my own roof and it sucked, and it saved me money, but it was ridiculously hard work. But at the end of the day, when I'm sitting in my house and it's raining, I'm freaking out, "Is it working? Is the roof working here?" But the difference is I can believe in the craftsmanship of my work. I can know that I did it right, hopefully, versus me just paying someone else and hoping it works.
I don't get any satisfaction that I paid somebody 6,000, 10,000 bucks to do my roof. I can take satisfaction and pride that I broke my back, got sunburns, and was up there doing the hard labor. And I feel like there's value in that that is completely being eroded by the fact that you can just prompt something to get you there.
But I do understand the flip side that, if you don't have the technical skills to do it and there's realistically no chance you'll get there, it isn't fair to say, "Well, you shouldn't be able to make mods. You shouldn't be able to, 'Oh, I want that cool thing to be there.'" It's like an impossible question to answer. If you don't release the stuff that you make, I don't see any problem. You made something cool for yourself, but once you hand this product over to somebody else, share it with the world, suddenly it can become everybody's problem. And from my experience, everyone that vibe codes stuff, two weeks later, they're gone. They're not supporting it. So the people that stick around have to fix and deal with all of it.
IGN: Going back to ME3 Multiplayer, once it ships, what's next? I know that you're using it as a way to basically port the Mass Effect 3 modding scene into the Legendary Edition. Are you going to work on more Mass Effect 3 mods, or do you have your eyes on something else?
Mgamerz: Boy, I've been like, "Oh man, I need to find another game to mod for years." And then I always come back to this one, because it's just my bread and butter. I'm comfortable. I know what I'm doing. There's always some new technical challenge.
Honestly, the only projects I foresee myself doing from now on till the end of when I'm just done modding this game, I wanted to do my LE1 randomizer and my LE3 randomizer that I teased four years ago, and then just never had the willpower to finish. Because I've watched streamers play my randomizers and they're always dying laughing, the chat's having a great time. And I just watch that and I'm like, "Man, I love seeing people have tons of stupid fun with my mods."
Even if only 50 people play it, if someone had an absolutely hilarious [time], like when I was watching Criken, I was like, "It fills me with so much joy to see that." And then the other mod, obviously, I have my Map Pack, Redemption. Rejection is the enemy faction. I want to bring those up to the standard of my work these days now that our tools are modern. I really like gameplay modding. Some of our modders are like, "I have outfits, I have some story stuff," and I'm like, "I just want to have a different gameplay experience."
One of the big things I remember that ties directly into that statement, I was modding Mass Effect 3 before the Earth DLC came out in 2012. I had been modding wave lists, so the enemy factions changed, and I was editing the stats. I remember when they announced Platinum, like, "Oh, we have this new harder faction." And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." And then it came out and I'm like, "It's just a bunch of enemies with more health and damage, and it's just like a stat boost." I was upping enemy counts. It'd be the same difficulty as a lower one, but there'd be more enemies, so you had to be more aware of what was going on.
I was like, "Man, this thing sucks." I'm like, "I'd like mine way better." And so I've always been about, “Let's make the gameplay more dynamic and different. Let's give somebody something different to play.”
IGN: So have you seen the stuff that has come out about Mass Effect Universe since BioWare’s closure?
Mgamerz: Oh, yeah. In fact, I actually have the game up on my other monitor. We actually have, we're putting new banners in and we have a bunch of banners from the trailer because I'm like, "Well, this is dead." So we're taking some content from that, that trailer, the banners. We're adding a bunch of those, but we're putting a bunch of ones in from MEU, I guess is the short name. At least that's what I call it.
It's like a bar crawler, and it's a picture of the bar scene. It's just cosmetics. I always loved earning banners and having a little thing I can show [off], so adding more of that. That's one way we're incorporating some of that. I didn't actually watch [the trailer] until two or three days after it came out, and I thought it looked pretty cool. I was glad that at least if what the trailer was showing was where the game was actually going to end up going, I thought an investigative find... ME1 was like, "Find the conduit." This is kind of like, “Find Shepard,” orsomething. I don't know. It seemed like they were doing more of an investigative kind of thing, and I thought that was kind of cool.
IGN: And also from the leaks, it sounded like the gameplay was going to be a lot more action focused. Would you have been interested in a potential MEU multiplayer?
Mgamerz: Yeah, I would love to have seen newer multiplayer. Andromeda's multiplayer was not my cup of tea. I did not like it, so I didn't really play it.
But if it was more... I mean, it doesn't have to be Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, but I prefer more on-ground stuff, because it provides a lot more limited movement patterns for enemies that are more realistic to what me, as a human, can understand, than when enemies can come out of literally any piece of geometry.
It's like, I have expectations of what a person can do. I'm in a game where I can see what the people are running around doing. I'm not thinking about them flying up in the air and stuff and that kind of stuff, but it can work either way. It just needed to be executed better.
IGN: What do you think of Exodus and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Mgamerz: I honestly have not looked at them at all. I have heard that some ex-BioWare devs or Mass Effect devs are on them, but that's literally all I know about it. I watched the Expanse show. I don't know if I watched all of the seasons. I thought it was great, but I literally have been so dead laser focused on this the last couple of months that I haven't really done anything else. I haven't watched any TV shows or anything. I haven't played any other games.
IGN: N7 Day crunch?
Mgamerz: Yeah, that's pretty regular. I haven't done one in two years, but as you get close to the end, it's like, man, I'm working 16 hours a day trying to get this thing done.
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