One of my most universally derided hot takes is that Mass Effect Andromeda was great, actually. A lot of the criticisms levelled against it at the time were valid, and it definitely shouldn't have launched in the buggy state it did. But Andromeda's one of those games where you could almost feel the backlash before it even released: and sure enough, it got mostly middling reviews (though PCG gave it a healthy 80%), and an absolute savaging from elements of the audience.

But I loved it, and the whole setup of being space pioneers trying to establish a foothold for humanity in an unknown corner of the cosmos just worked for me. It quickly became clear, however, that Andromeda was not going to kick off its own Mass Effect trilogy, or even get its mooted singleplayer DLC before Bioware ended support for the title.

Andromeda's protagonist, Ryder, was customisable like Commander Shepard and could be played as male or female. Voice actor Tom Taylorson played the male Ryder, and has given a new interview to fansite We Are Mass Effect in which he bemoans the game's critical and commercial response, and gives publisher EA a bit of a kicking.

"I think, like many, the game got a bum rap," says Taylorson. "It was done dirty by a publisher expecting too much from it, not being fully cooked, forced out the door too early, forced to use corporate's shiny new engine when many of the team didn't know how to work with it, and it was not suited to the storytelling part of the game."

Andromeda was developed on the Frostbite engine, which was the case for the vast majority of EA games in this era (the OG trilogy was developed on Unreal). Bioware did have some familiarity with this toolset, and built several games using it, but Andromeda's development was a troubled time and Frostbite was a big part of it (as this excellent Kotaku investigation details).

"On top of that, it was released to a very toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space," says Taylorson. "It quickly became punching bag of the week for online chuds for views and clicks. Their love of hate sealed the deal. What saddens me is that this would not be the last time I was in a project doomed by online haters picking a game for Punching Bag of The Week: I also worked on Highguard."

Andromeda was planned to have post-launch DLC, though in reality Bioware Montreal spent most of the first few months after release firefighting the game's many technical issues, and obviously the larger intention was for this to kick off a new Mass Effect saga consisting of multiple games. Instead, EA had seen enough, and pulled the plug entirely.

"Personally, I was bummed, but moved on quickly," says Taylorson. "You have to. You're only as good as your last project or audition. So you go out and audition again. Personally/ artistically? It hurt most because I knew that was it—Ryder wouldn't be coming back. I, and others, thought we'd have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that—gone."

Bioware is now working on its fifth Mass Effect game, and though it's not a direct sequel to Andromeda there are hints that it will incorporate elements of it as the studio tries to reboot one of its flagship series.

Taylorson adds that he "felt terrible" for the developers at Bioware Montreal, and "that hate" directed at them, but says that as the years have passed he's felt a lot more audience affection for Andromeda than it got at release.

"Over time though, I've seen a lot of love for the game and its characters, for what it did well, and appreciation from fans for whom it was their game of the moment," says Taylorson. "A game that helped them, a game that got them through a tough time. There is something to be said for a 7/10 that comes to you in a time of need."

We know very, very little about the next Mass Effect game. In fact, BioWare hasn't even revealed its name yet, so we've all been calling it Mass Effect 5 in the meantime. That aside, it was announced at The Game Awards 2020, and over five years later, there's little to show for it. But Mike Gamble confirmed in a 2025 N7 Day post that BioWare is now "heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect", which was reassuring after EA downsized the developer.

When questioned about the awkward lack of updates on the new entry in one of the most treasured RPG series of all time, project director and executive producer Mike Gamble said it plain and simple: "Just busy workin. Not a lot of time for tease." Mic drop.

The developers don't have time to put together a fancy trailer or info dump because they're hard at work constructing the thing, especially now that the studio is smaller post-Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Still, over half a decade on from its announcement, it would be nice to have more than two vague CGI trailers and a handful of (beautiful) concept images. It's frustratingly similar to The Elder Scrolls 6, which was also announced way too early in advance—a rough eight years early, in that case.

As for when we might get some more details on the next Mass Effect game, I'd say N7 Day, a ME celebration day on November 7 every year, is the most likely scenario. It's a good six months away, and a key date for any Mass Effect fan. Another option is The Game Awards 2026 on December 10, after all, that's where it was originally unveiled. Fingers crossed we'll get an actual in-game trailer next time we get an update, though that might be too hopeful.

Still, many fans (including myself) are fearful that the age of Mass Effect has passed, as it seems it has for BioWare's similarly beloved Dragon Age. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown argues that for BioWare to make a comeback, it needs to cancel Mass Effect and create something else to find a new identity for the studio all these years later. Honestly, I think I agree. But I'll still be eagerly awaiting any news on Mass Effect 5, whenever that comes.

At the end of 2024, I resigned myself to the fact that BioWare was no longer capable, or willing, to make the kind of RPGs that once cemented it as the titan of the genre—or to put it more selfishly, the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. After The Veilguard, which followed Anthem, which followed Andromeda, I'd lost faith. I was emphatic and probably a little bit dramatic: I was out and the studio that excited me more than any other RPG developer was long gone.

A year-and-change later has caused my fire to dim, leaving behind disappointment but not as much dismay. I played more Baldur's Gate 3. I fell head-over-heels for Esoteric Ebb. I annoyed some people by insisting that Crimson Desert was definitely an RPG—and a pretty damn good one to boot. But that distance from The Veilguard has also made room for speculation—could BioWare make a comeback, and what would that even look like?

First, some hard truths for the folks who understandably bounced off The Veilguard.

A lot of people liked BioWare's last RPG. Reviews were broadly positive—including our own—and it was initially celebrated by EA for becoming its biggest Steam launch. It also managed to net a few awards along the way. While the narrative that BioWare has lost its touch has become increasingly popular and repeated over the last decade—and I believe it to be true—there is no consensus that The Veilguard was a dud.

Anyway, with that out of the way, The Veilguard was a dud. A year and a half after launch and its user review ranking on Steam is sitting at Mixed. In its first three months, sales reached 1.5 million copies, which in isolation is a large number—but was only half of what EA expected it to shift. Publishers like EA frequently have inflated expectations, but I don't think it was unrealistic in this case. A decade before, Dragon Age: Inquisition almost reached that same milestone in a single week, and went on to become BioWare's most successful game in its already long history.

Origins, Dragon Age 2, Inquisition and the original Mass Effect trilogy all received significant post-launch support. But like Andromeda, The Veilguard was quickly cast aside. No expansions, and only one surprise bit of DLC, offering some weapon skins and nothing else. What followed The Veilguard's launch, unfortunately, was redundancies and "downsizing".

So with its last two RPGs underperforming and being cast adrift, and the failure of the Anthem experiment, how can BioWare make a course correction?

BioWare is dead, long live BioWare

Anthem was a huge mistake. It was so disconnected from the studio's RPG roots that it held little appeal for BioWare's primary audience, and it blundered into an established and notoriously competitive market without offering a big hook. But it wasn't a mistake for BioWare to attempt something different. This is even more true now.

Both BioWare's long-time fans and the studio itself need to accept that the old BioWare is dead. The redundancies and staff shuffles have gutted BioWare over the years, and while old devs sometimes return, you cannot simply replace everyone—and you cannot shed this much institutional knowledge and expect success by sticking to the same playbook. We will never get another Baldur's Gate, a KOTOR or an Origins from this company ever again. But with the resources the studio has available, we could get something new.

Here's the thing: BioWare never used to rest on its laurels. In the '90s and early '00s it was bringing tabletop RPGs to PC gamers; then it was taking advantage of console dominance, creating streamlined RPGs that focused on best-in-class storytelling; and by 2007 it was experimenting with cinematic storytelling and shooter mechanics. BioWare's secret sauce was its ability to read the room. It was always looking for new ways to bring us RPGs.

By not putting all its eggs in one basket, the studio weathered the changing industry and maintained its reputation as a juggernaut. Several times over, it reimagined what an RPG could be. If modern BioWare was around in the '90s, it probably would have stuck with Infinity Engine games. Which would have been fine with me! But these isometric RPGs (temporarily) went out of style, and BioWare would have vanished with them. We wouldn't even have been blessed with Neverwinter Nights—an all-timer that only the modders and their fans truly appreciated.

Much has been made of BioWare's incredible legacy, but its ability to move forward and not rely on that legacy is what helped it become such a success story. But this wasn't simple trend-chasing. BioWare wasn't just following the crowd. It was leading them.

Then EA acquired it.

EA, let BioWare cook

BioWare's overlord is undeniably the biggest hurdle to its survival. It would be naive to act like the studio doesn't have any responsibility for its missteps, but it also found itself in an impossible situation, with executives not just pressuring the studio and breathing down its devs' necks, but overtly interfering with it.

The endless sequels, the rush to get Dragon Age 2 out the door, the absolutely unhinged pivot to a multiplayer live service game—not just Anthem, but The Veilguard as well, which started out as a singleplayer RPG, switched to live service, and then back to singleplayer again. This is life under EA.

This pressure created an overreliance on its big brands, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and when BioWare did attempt to get out of its comfort zone after too long resting on its laurels, the results were disastrous. BioWare is just as responsible for Anthem as EA—but the environment it was created in was a product of the publisher. Casey Hudson pitched EA a very EA game—something that could keep making the publisher money forever—but BioWare had no idea how to make this kind of game, the decision makers had no clear vision, and the rest is history.

The studio needs to go back to the drawing board and take a long, hard look at the RPG landscape. Not just to see what's trendy at the moment, but to predict what kind of RPGs players will want in five years. Where are things heading? It needs space, not pressure.

For a risk-averse publisher like EA, though, whose only real priority is to please investors, this is like asking for the world. The only reason it was excited by the prospect of Anthem was because it thought a live service game would print money—it didn't see it as a risk because it couldn't see beyond the big live service successes, despite the massive pile of corpses behind them.

This is also why we're just getting another bloody Mass Effect. People love Mass Effect, so let's do it again—while completely ignoring Andromeda.

Mass extinction event

I'm about to lose a lot of you here, I suspect. In fact, I know it. If anyone so much as whispers "Mass Effect", people go wild. I saw how y'all reacted when we mentioned that Zero Company and Osiris Reborn had big Mass Effect vibes. Regardless, I'm convinced that BioWare should not be making another Mass Effect. It's too late to stop that train, it's already left the station, but I don't see this ending well at all.

Folks, Mass Effect 3 launched in 2012. In videogame terms, it's absolutely ancient. And as a brand, it's not been able to even prove itself when it doesn't have Shepard. Andromeda, on paper, includes most of the things people wanted out of a new Mass Effect: Cinematic storytelling, vastly improved action, denser alien worlds to explore, some more angry krogans. And it was not great.

Awful last minute crunch, the Frostbite Engine (which bit BioWare in the ass in Anthem too) and a dip in writing quality all contributed to this, but beyond that BioWare just never figured out how to replace its heroes and villains. With Shepard and the Geth/Reapers gone, you don't really have Mass Effect at all.

While Dragon Age's original trilogy successfully played around with different protagonists, art directions and vibes, Mass Effect was always about Shep. It's their trilogy. And with Shepard presumably out of the picture, we've not been given any reason to believe BioWare is in a position to reignite the spark that made those games magic.

The Veilguard's missteps should also make us extremely worried about the future of its sci-fi sibling. While change is baked into Dragon Age's DNA, modern BioWare seems so detached from its classic library now that The Veilguard felt more like mimicry than a sequel—as if an entirely new studio had been given the reins.

And that's because it kinda was—even though it still contained some key veterans, like lead writer Trick Weekes. Weekes is a great writer: They'd been with BioWare since 2005, giving us some of Mass Effect and Dragon Age's best characters, like Mordin, Tali, Iron Bull and Solas. I mean, if anyone could write a great Dragon Age with the egg-head as the villain, it's Weekes. But they didn't. They wrote The Veilguard.

And even that version of the studio is gone now, with Weekes and many others no longer with BioWare.

Back to the start

I don't see a way for BioWare to thrive without it finding a new identity. Mass Effect is not the way. Dragon Age is not the way. Wheeling out the corpses of beloved games time and time again won't keep working because it's already stopped.

Modern BioWare needs to find its own Grey Warden, its own Shepard, liberating itself from the constant comparisons to past glories. And it probably needs to start small.

I don't mean a short game—not specifically, anyway, though I'd be here for it. I mean that it needs to find a new focus, one or two things it can build a game around. It needs to be given space to experiment and find itself again. It needs to host game jams and do the indie hustle.

And sadly, none of this will be remotely possible because it's still one of EA's star studios and the publisher is never going to stop chasing those multi-million launch targets. It cannot be freed from this prison. EA would kill it first.

So unless we can go back 20 years and stop BioWare from getting involved with a private equity firm, which two years later would lead to it getting gobbled up by EA, I think it's cooked. And it's so frustrating because there is a path out of this—but nobody will let the studio travel down it.

Nightmarishly, it's possible there are people reading this who were either unborn or incapable of forming long-term memories when Mass Effect 3 released in 2012. If that's you: consider it a blessing, because my chief recollection of that era is everyone being very upset about it on the internet.

What were they upset about? Well, they said it was a lot of stuff to do with the endings and your choices across the series not mattering that much. I know better, though. In their heart of hearts, in the deep, festering reaches of their collective subconscious, the gamers yearned for the lifts. The first Mass Effect was beloved. It was also a game about standing in a lot of lifts. These things are not unconnected.

Now, a doughty modder has restored the third Mass Effect (in its Legendary Edition form) to the pristine condition of its predecessor. Glorious Elevators (LE3) comes from Linkenski, who also put in the work to restore the original setup for ME1's Saren fights to the Legendary Edition and created, ah, Miranda Buttfarts Restored.

"Glorious Elevators return to Mass Effect beyond the first game," declares our modder. "Originally Mass Effect 3 actually had a working elevator right up until its finaling phases. Because the game was stuck on PS3/Xbox 360 as the lowest common denominator at the time, they couldn't optimize the game any further and ended up with load times just as notorious as Mass Effect 1 was originally known for."

But in 2025 my PC vibrates with parts potent enough to wound god, and there's no need to cut out these little additions. So Glorious Elevators sticks them back in. Using the lift in the Normandy? Rather than a humdrum load screen, you will whirr your way up or down in (something resembling) real time. I know. I'm excited too.

It is, I admit, a pretty minor thing, but I find this kind of obsessive, detail-oriented modding rather admirable and more than a little fascinating. Plus, I hear tell it's a banger. "It's better than the elevators in ME1, and adds to ME3's signature seamlessness and slickness," boasts Linkenski. "That's why this is a must-have!"

Amazon's Mass Effect adaptation just found its commander in Doug Jung, who will be the series showrunner and executive producer, as reported by Deadline.

You'll be familiar with Jung's work if you've seen Star Trek Beyond, Mindhunter, or Cinemax's Banshee series, where he was a writer. He was also a showrunner, executive producer, and writer on Apple TV+'s upcoming Chief of War series, which stars Jason Mamoa as a Hawaiian chief fighting to unite the warring islands against the rising threat of colonization.

Jung will have a similarly significant role in the Mass Effect show, so Chief of War could give us an idea of what to expect. It will be premiering on Apple TV+ on August 1.

Even if we only look at Jung's past work, there's reason to be optimistic about his impact on the Mass Effect show, especially considering his hand in crafting Star Trek Beyond, which earned a "Certified Fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 80% from viewers. Netflix's Mindhunter has similarly glowing ratings, and was nominated for "Best Drama" by the Writers Guild of America in 2020.

Jung joins a handful of previously-announced production staff for the Mass Effect show, including screenwriter Dan Casey and producers Michael Gamble and Karim Zreik, along with Ari Arad and Emmy Yu of Arad Productions.

Fans of the Mass Effect games may already be familiar with Gamble, who was a producer and project manager on several BioWare titles, including Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

While Jung seems like a good choice for showrunner, some fans might be rightfully concerned about other members of the production team, particularly producer Ari Arad.

He has a rocky track record, especially with video game adaptations, having previously worked on the Uncharted and Borderlands movies. Both received lackluster reviews, especially Borderlands, which earned a dreary 10% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

However, Arad was also an executive producer on the 2008 Iron Man, so maybe there's a glimmer of hope that he can bring back that old magic with the Mass Effect show.

We're still a long way from any casting news, but the addition of Doug Jung to the production team is at least a signal that Amazon hasn't forgotten about its Mass Effect show, which has been in the works since 2021. With a showrunner on board now, hopefully production will pick up the pace. There's also the upcoming Mass Effect 5 to look forward to, although it's been facing its own troubling updates over recent months.

The story of PC gaming simply cannot be told without the Crysis series of FPS games, which since the original game burst onto the scene in the late 2000s not only cemented the PC as the place where you got groundbreaking new graphical technologies showcased, but genuinely blew gamers and critics away with its combination of intense action and cinematic storytelling.

Indeed, PC Gamer magazine gave the original Crysis a stonkingly high score of 98% on review—one of the absolute highest scores we’ve ever handed out—and we then followed that up with an 89% Crysis 2 review and an 81% Crysis 3 review, scores that propelled the series into the upper echelons of FPS history.

Speaking directly to PC Gamer, Crysis’ director and co-founder of its developer, Crytek, Cevat Yerli, recently explained that the original game was designed to be so graphically impressive as he "wanted to make sure Crysis does not age", and I think it fair to say that even if you play the original three games today, it is remarkable at how good they still look. Back when they were released, these were the games that spurred PC gamers to upgrade their rigs en masse, and since then there has arguably never been the same phenomenon in PC gaming.

All of which explains why when I saw that the Crysis Remastered Trilogy is currently discounted in Steam’s Crytek 25th Anniversary Sale by 60%, I thought I would bring it to the attention of the PC gaming community. This remastered trilogy delivers all three games with a series of modern graphical enhancements that take the amazing-looking original games and then dial things truly up to eleven, with ray-traced lighting, improved textures, enhanced resolution and aspect ratio support, DLSS and more added in. Here are the details:

Neatly, all three remastered games come with a unique ‘Can it run Crysis?’ graphics mode, which is the top-tier of graphics available. Turn this on and you’re treated to the very finest visuals on offer, with ray tracing and post-processing effects. But, even if you run the remastered games on one of their lower settings, they still look notably improved over the originals. Just take a look at this side-by-side shot showing the original Crysis (at the top) and Crysis Remastered (at the bottom) side-by-side.

Exactly! As good as the original games looked at release, and still look in many ways today, the remastered versions of these FPS games are 100 percent what PC gamers should play today. Which is why I think this price cut is very attractive to anyone who hasn’t had a chance to pick up and play the remasters yet. It's a way to enjoy some incredible, great-looking FPS action for not much outlay.

Oh, and one more thing, each game in the series is available to pick up individually with a discount, too, so if you fancy playing one game but not the others, then that option is also available. The Crytek Publisher Sale runs until April 3.

Voice acting has been an underestimated profession for a while now—and, while things have certainly improved, there are new fights for voiceover artists to grapple with, like the knock-down, drag-out fight SAG-AFTRA is currently embroiled in over AI.

That's why Astarion's voice actor, Neil Newbon, has assembled a group of actors called the 'Pixel Pack', as revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The full interview spans a few big-name talents like Matthew Mercer and Yuri Lowenthal, and is well worth a read—though one quote from Mass Effect's Jennifer Hale really stands as an example of how rough voice actors have had it.

If you're not aware, Hale voiced the female Commander Shepard—often abbreviated to 'femshep'—making her the de facto protagonist of Bioware's flagship trilogy, as well as the voice you hear the most throughout the game. However, as she reveals in the interview, she basically had to go in cold.

"The work we do in games—this does not cover performance capture but in voice capture—is 85-90% cold reading," Hale reveals. "The entirety of Mass Effect, I saw no line before the moment I recorded it. It was all cold reading on the spot. A couple takes, maybe a few, and it goes out to market. That's it."

I want to emphasise again that Hale wasn't a bit part, a side-NPC, or someone doing random barks. She was the protagonist, the voice you're going to be hearing for 99% of the game. And yet, for most of her line delivery, flinging about sci-fi technobabble, she had to stay on her toes and come up with something solid on the spot. That's an absurd level of adaptability, even more so given the fact she did a stellar job.

"It's extraordinarily demanding," Hale adds, and yet she also recalls moments in her career where she was treated like "the utensils on the table." She recounts the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, wherein she was invited and nominated for a category—but wasn't told until the end that the category winner had already been pre-recorded:

"I waited and waited and waited for my category to be announced. I had a 6-month-old at home who I was still nursing. I really was watching the clock. I finally sought out the stage manager toward the end of the show. He goes, 'What's your category?' And I told him the category. He said, 'Oh, we taped that earlier with the winner.' The dismissiveness of it—definitely I felt that.”

Newbon had a similar experience circa 2012 where, despite having now shared a category with more 'famous' film stars (and winning), his work was similarly disrespected. I'm staggered, but unfortunately not surprised—despite videogames raking in more cash than film and music combined, it's had a history of chronic disrespect. Both towards the games themselves, and the people like Hale and Newbon who bust their arses helping to make them. Good thing no-one's disrespectful to videogame actors nowadays, right? Haha. Ha. Ah, crap.

Mark Darrah is a true BioWare veteran, having worked at the studio for 24 years before returning in a consultancy role to shepherd Dragon Age: The Veilguard over the finish line. Darrah is now freelance once more, and has been using some of his time to post YouTube videos about both the company's history and future in what he calls "an unprecedented time for BioWare."

Darrah's latest video, however, has another subject: The more toxic elements of videogame fandom, which are much more of an issue for developers than some players might think. In a 2023 GDC survey of game developers, 91% of respondents said abuse from players was a problem and, if we're being honest, we've all seen some people go way OTT at developers online. The problem feels even more pronounced at the bigger-budget end of the industry, where certain folk seem to feel that, if they've paid their money, that entitles them to open season on the people who made it.

The video's called "Your $70 Doesn't Buy You Cruelty" (thanks, GR+) and sees Darrah address issues as diverse as players celebrating layoffs to the kind of persistent personal harassment and threats that can result in the courts having to get involved. The former producer makes clear he's not talking about folk criticising a game they've paid good money for or telling others they don't like it, which feels like it doesn't really need saying but I guess you have to be explicit about this stuff on the Internet.

Darrah's issue is fans feeling they have the right to target random developers who work at the studio behind a given title, even when "you don't know the circumstances that resulted in the thing that you're mad at."

If you're mad at a Ubisoft game, says Darrah, "be mad at Ubisoft. Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it, [you] don't need to go out of your way to cause harm to other people because of a videogame."

There's also the fact that, whatever someone dislikes about a game, pinning that on one individual or even a group of devs is just wild, and betrays a total ignorance of how these massive projects are brought-together. "All of this isn't to say that you aren't allowed to have your own opinions to not like the things you don't like," says Darrah. "It's specifically to point out that you being angry at a specific person, you attacking a specific person is often misdirected."

Darrah even accepts that, as someone who's held an executive producer role on the likes of Anthem, he's a fairer target for some of this ire: Better for those in leadership roles to get an unpleasant complaint or message than some junior designer who probably had nothing to do with the decision-making that led to the issue. Which leads on to a point that, again, seems obvious but doesn't seem to be understood by many.

"Be aware that this stuff is carefully scrutinized," says Darrah, referring to complaints and feedback, even the screeching kind. "Not just by the social media teams, also by the teams themselves. Arguably, in a lot of cases, to too great of a degree. The team is listening, I would say, often too much to what you're yelling about and complaining about."

Darrah has a particular and understandable bugbear about the kind of fans who grave-dance when layoffs are announced. "When you celebrate layoffs at a studio because the game that you don't like didn't do that well," says Darrah, "you're crossing a line into being cruel, and fundamentally, you should have more grace for other human beings."

That's probably what prompted Darrah to make the video in the first place. Following the lukewarm commercial reception of Dragon Age: the Veilguard, publisher EA laid-off a host of senior talent last month, including veterans of both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. Reports suggest that over half of the studio was either let go or re-assigned elsewhere within EA's studio structure, leaving a skeleton team working on the next Mass Effect.

The layoffs at BioWare felt like EA was gutting a studio because it had no idea what to do with it: The boots on the ground paying the price for poor leadership, as is sadly the case in most industries. This is a view shared by some in games including Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, who tore into EA for abandoning that "institutional knowledge" in favour of "cost cutting in the most brutal sense. It's always people lower down the food chain that suffer, when it's clearly strategy higher up the food chain that's causing the problem."

As Douse says: "On a pirate ship, they'd toss the captain overboard."

"You are entitled to your opinion," ends Darrah. "You are entitled to be angry about a game that you bought—you paid good money for it. But try to remember that it's just a game. Even more importantly, when you are expressing your complaints, stay away from cruelty. Stay away from targeting individual people, stay away from trying to cause harm, stay away from celebrating harm done to actual human beings ... when you are personally attacking individual devs, you are crossing a line, and you're probably attacking the wrong person anyway."

Mass Effect 1 and 2 are, as far as I'm concerned, two of the best albums ever released, and the games they put out to promote them aren't bad either. That's in no small part down to its composers: Sam Hulick and, of course, Jack Wall, whose fingerprints are all over the iconic, wobbly synths of tracks like Vigil, Suicide Mission, and that one that plays in the galaxy map.

You know what his fingerprints aren't all over, though? Mass Effect 3, whose music was done by Clint Mansell and Hulick instead. ME3 had some bangers, sure, but it was a very different vibe, and Wall's absence was a major reason the game felt like such an odd duck in the original ME trilogy. Now, in a chat with The Guardian, Wall's reflected on what caused his absence from the third Mass Effect: he had a John Lennon and Paul McCartney-style split with Mass Effect series lead Casey Hudson.

"Casey was not particularly happy with me at the end," says Wall, and though "Fallouts like that happen," his spat with Hudson was "one of the few times in my career that's happened. It was a tough time, but it is what it is."

Alas, Wall doesn't say why he and Hudson fell out, just that they did, though he seems to suggest Hudson wasn't quite happy with ME2's ending. That's baffling to me. Mass Effect 2's crescendo, that suicide mission they keep banging on about, is so striking and memorable in no small part because of Wall's incredible soundtrack. "I'm so proud of that score," remembers Wall, who notes that "It got nominated for a Bafta, and it did really well" in spite of the fact "it didn't go as well as Casey wanted."

Making the suicide mission theme was, says Wall, "the biggest mind-fucking thing I've ever done in my life. And there was no one available to walk me through it, because they were all freaking out trying to finish the game." When he finally turned it in, BioWare devs had to "do a lot of massaging" to make it fit what they'd made. "The result," reckons Wall, "is still one of the best ending sequences to a game that I've ever played."

I have to agree. Although I'm a paid-up member of the 'ME1 was best' alliance, ME2's climax is a high-point for the series as a whole. I'm curious how Wall's music fell short of it in Hudson's eyes. Perhaps he resented all that "massaging" the devs had to do, or perhaps he just had a completely different creative vision. Whatever the disagreement, it meant Wall's signature sounds were absent from ME3. To that game's detriment, I think.

Everyone has their favourite Bioware joint, and mine by far is the original Mass Effect trilogy. Unless you're one of those weirdos that likes playing The Old Republic solo, they're probably still the best sci-fi RPGs ever made and, unlike much of the competition, are also great action romps full of high-octane setpieces.

Bioware would subsequently return to the games, spending years remastering all three for 2021's Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which included texture, lighting and 4K resolution upgrades, as well as control improvements, bug fixes, and gameplay enhancements. It vastly improved the original game, which wasn't quite as mechanically polished as the later entries, and is now the definitive way to play these titles.

The current Steam Sale has the best-ever deal that Mass Effect Legendary Edition has seen, a 92% discount, meaning you can pick up hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Bioware at its best for $4.99 / £3.99. This offer also chucks in over 40 DLCs across all three games to boot: You just don't get much more bang for your buck than that.

The main reason to recommend the Legendary Edition over the original trilogy (apart from the beautiful visual overhaul) is the improvements made to the first game. Mass Effect had all the ideas, but was definitely a stepping stone between Bioware's older RPG sensibilities and the swashbuckling style it would perfect in Mass Effect 2. The Legendary Edition's version of the first game isn't a complete overhaul, but it does smooth-out a lot of the more annoying kinks (inventory management, I'm looking at you) and, 14 years on, even made the Mako a tolerable vehicle to drive.

The first Mass Effect is still a great experience, but it's in the sequels that Bioware just cooks, weaving its classic choice-and-consequence RPG formula around a Star Trek-style planet of the week structure. The combat is just enormous fun: rock-solid cover shooter fundamentals mixed with space magic that can reach ludicrously powerful levels, and endless brooding cosmic baddies that need a good thwacking.

I think of the Mass Effects in the way I think of the Saturday shows I'd watch as a kid, and I mean that as the highest compliment. They've games I've always loved that, somehow, haven't lost their lustre. And if you haven't played them then, for this price, you simply cannot go wrong.

According to Variety, Amazon's Mass Effect TV series is finally coming to life after it picked up the rights for it three years ago.

Details are pretty thin at this stage, but Amazon says it's actively being developed now. Fast 9: The Fast Saga writer Daniel Casey will pen the script and executive produce it along with Karim Zreik, Ari Arad, and EA's Michael Gamble.

Zreik previously produced a bunch of superhero shows under Marvel, including Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher. And Arad produced other game adaptations, like Borderlands, and Uncharted. For those who may have lost track of exactly where F9 sits in the Fast & Furious pantheon, that's the one in which they drive a car into space. Successfully. Which presumably formed a key part of Casey's job interview.

Details about what the show will actually be about and whether or not Commander Shepard will even appear reamin unknown. The Mass Effect universe is vast and has been covered in all sorts of media outside games. It could be anything. But if I don't see my big buddy Wrex in there, I will be upset.

So far, Amazon hasn't even hinted at a release date. For reference: The recent Fallout TV series was announced in 2020 and dropped two years later, so it might be a bit before we see a turian or an asari on screen. The explosive success of that show—with its two Emmy Awards and 65 million viewers—probably prompted Amazon to hit the gas on the Mass Effect series. That, or the fact that the Fallout show came out with no new game for people to play in the fervor.

BioWare has been teasing the game for years now and with Dragon Age: The Veilguard out of the way, it could be out within the next few years alongside whatever this TV series ends up being.

Despite being based on one of the most iconic RPG series of all time, there's something oddly dry about the upcoming board game Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz. Set during the events of Mass Effect 3, the premise is basically a sidequest that never was—taking place over the course of a single night as Shepard and crew board and fight their way through a crashed Cerberus ship to recover research data.

Even for those who can still remember the specific story details of a game that came out 12 years ago, the stakes here feel low. Why does this pretty minor mission matter, when we already know how the wider story plays out? It's a serviceable excuse for a series of linked combat missions, but there's no drama to it or any hook to pull you in. And from what I've played so far of our review copy, that's the game's fatal flaw: It's completely lacking in the drama and narrative flair that define Mass Effect.

It's a shame, because there are admirable qualities here. Right off the bat, there's a level of restraint here that I appreciate. Where many licensed board games are bloated, over-expensive, shelf-breakingly heavy crates full of plastic, Priority Hagalaz is a tight and efficient box at a reasonable price.

There's enough production value here for it to feel like a premium experience—with some lovely miniatures of the playable characters (both Shepards, Liara, Wrex, Garrus, and Tali), plenty of cardboard tokens, laminated playmats, and more—without being overwhelming. And for those who do want a more extravagant set up, additional miniatures can be bought separately (though to be honest I'm not sure how you'd use them in play—the usual cardboard discs have vital info printed on them).

The campaign is similarly focused, though whether that's a perk or a flaw will depend on your expectations. It's essentially a flowchart offering a few different paths you can take through a selection of possible missions, each its own turn-based strategy battle. Between main missions, you can also take on optional loyalty missions—side objectives themed after each character, which can earn them a unique new ability.

A full campaign is three main missions and potentially two loyalty missions—probably about 4-5 hours of play, maybe less once you've got the rules down, with the idea being that you'll replay it to try different paths and see the outcomes of making different choices. On the one hand, the idea that you can actually finish a full campaign in one or two sessions is appealing. So many dungeon crawlers and campaign games promise 100s of hours of content that realistically most groups will never get through—I do often think it's better to provide that sense of progression and completion at a more approachable scale.

On the other, though, I don't think there is enough incentive to replay it, meaning that first run may well be all you get out of it. You can certainly see a different selection of missions each time you go again, but your choice of characters is pretty limited (there are five, and you have to bring four into each mission) and there don't seem to be any rules included for ramping up the difficulty, which is limiting for a game that's pretty easy by default. While there are narrative choices to make with different outcomes for the story, the bland writing and set-up ensures none of them are interesting enough to keep you coming back.

You'll also need to make sure you've gathered the right number of players each time. No matter how many are around the table, there will always be four characters in play. As you'd imagine, with four players that works well, and with two you'd probably fare fine controlling two characters each. But with a group of three, one of you just gets twice as much play time (and cognitive load) as everyone else, and solo play feels like musical chairs as you rapidly hop around the table between the different sheets. It's oddly inflexible for a game that seems to otherwise be striving for convenience and accessibility.

Mass destruction

The missions themselves essentially emulate the third-person shooter combat of Mass Effect 3, with waves of enemies to gun down as you work towards claiming objectives or defeating bosses. Parts of the combat system are pleasingly elegant. I really like the laminated character sheets for each character, which lay out their abilities in a clear visual form. After rolling the custom dice at the start of your turn, you simply place the ones you want on abilities with a matching icon and resolve their effects. It's simple and easy, and the combat identities of each character are clearly conveyed—from Wrex's massive up-close damage to Tali's hacking and drone control.

The battlegrounds themselves are neatly presented, too. Each mission has its own spread in a ringbound book—you just flip to the right one and the map is there on the right hand page, with mission rules on the left. Though the maps do feel a little pokey as a result, it allows for plenty of variation without filling the box with boards or map tiles.

Beyond those neat elements, however, what should be a very straightforward combat system is oddly fiddly in play. There are slightly too many moving parts. Between all the tokens in play, stuff to track on your sheet, and things moving from one player to another, it's easy to trip over yourselves. When you're not sure of a rule, the rulebook is no help—it's clearly written but poorly organised, and without an index it can take far too long to find where a particular concept is explained.

But even when you do feel like you've got a handle on it all, the experience is just too flat to get excited about. For your first few turns, there's enough novelty in exploring all your different options to make things fun, but after that it becomes clear what you're in for is a bit of a grind.

Enemies die fast but respawn just as quickly—in the tight confines of the ship they feel more like clutter than opponents, and it's often hard to get a sense of when it's actually tactically advantageous to kill them rather than simply ignoring them. Bosses take longer to kill, but tend to be easily neutralised with debuffs, their larger health bars only ensuring you're stuck bashing away at them for multiple turns before you can move on.

There are lots of mechanics at work and optional objectives you can strive for, but it doesn't cohere into a compelling strategic puzzle. You could sweep half the tokens off the board and the core experience would hardly change.

After a bland opening mission, I hoped our first loyalty mission—with Wrex, who wants to smash up some Cerberus research on the genophage—would evoke more Mass Effect flavour. Instead, it was emblematic of the game's problems. Our first objective was simply to kill an arbitrary number of enemies—easily done and uninteresting. Then we had to get Wrex to a terminal, which triggered an evil Krogan boss to literally drop out of the ceiling.

Only Wrex could deal normal damage to this boss—the rest of us could only inflict one with each hit, meaning we were better off keeping the room clear and supporting Wrex's efforts while he went round-for-round. On paper, that's a cool moment: Wrex gets his time to shine while his squadmates act as his cheerleaders. In practice, he had the most boring job of all—simply standing in one spot doing the exact same move for three turns in a row to maximise damage, while Liara's biotic abilities debuffed the boss, preventing it from dealing any damage back.

That term, "loyalty mission", conjures all sorts of memories from the videogames. Difficult moral choices, interesting dialogue, narrative twists, and wonderful interactions with one of the medium's most beloved casts of characters. There's really none of that here. You start a mission, you spend 10 minutes finding every little token that needs to be placed on it, you shoot things for 40 minutes, you read a dull paragraph of exposition, and then you move on to the next.

It's not easy for a board game to capture the magic of a great BioWare RPG, but I'm sad to say Priority Hagalaz doesn't really even come close. Fans of the series will enjoy the well-crafted miniatures, but they'll find very little else of the series' distinctive personality in the box.

The game is up for preorder now, with release planned for early October, but even at its very reasonable price, I can't recommend it. If you want a compact box of co-op combat, check out Unmatched Adventures instead. If you want a compelling narrative campaign in a familiar setting, you might enjoy Journeys in Middle-earth or the behemothic but beautiful Divinity: Original Sin board game. With its dry adventures and failure to find the fun in the Mass Effect universe, Priority Hagalaz unfortunately just isn't worth your time.

The original Mass Effect trilogy remains, to this day, an unparalleled sci-fi action RPG experience. But that isn't surprising considering that Mass Effect was the brainchild of BioWare, the legendary studio that had previously made such PC gaming hits as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

So when the folks responsible for that landmark trilogy spent years lovingly remastering all three games and re-releasing them as the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a package that included texture, lighting and 4K resolution upgrades, as well as control improvements, bug fixes, and gameplay enhancements, it became the definitive way to play the masterpieces.

So when I saw that the Mass Effect Legendary Edition is currently 90% off—taking its price down to $5.99 in the US and £4.99 in the UK—I thought I would bring it to the PC gaming community's attention. I've played all three remasters, having bought the Legendary Edition at launch, and can confirm that this is the best way to spend a fiver I've seen all year. It's literally hundreds of hours of top-class gaming for very little spend.

As Alan Dexter details in our best settings for Mass Effect Legendary Edition guide, the beauty of the remastered package is not just that all the game's assets have been improved in quality—with more detailed textures, more complex and subtle lighting, as well as a 4K resolution increase—but that key aspects of all three games (but notably the original game) have been overhauled to make them play better.

The original Mass Effect was a great game on release, but it was very much still in the old school of RPGs that BioWare had made before, such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, playing much slower and coming with unwieldy inventory management and controls. BioWare largely fixed this in Mass Effect 2, moving towards a more streamlined action RPG interface, inventory and control setup, which was then carried into Mass Effect 3. So what the Legendary Edition does is retroactively fit those action RPG improvements back into the original game. This not only makes the first game easier to play, but also makes it feel more coherent as part of the trilogy.

Personally, what I like best about the Legendary Edition is that it includes over 40 DLCs spread over the three games. This means that if you missed out on any of the trilogy's original add-on content (which I did, as I simply couldn't afford it all), then you can enjoy it here without restriction. Those DLCs include weapon, skin, armor, and character packs, as well as full-blown extra missions.

The recommended system requirements for the Legendary Edition are incredibly modest, too, with a Intel Core i7-7700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB of RAM, 120GB of storage space, and the equivalent of a 4GB NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD Radeon Vega 56 graphics card required. Honestly, on essentially any modern gaming PC then these games are going to run like butter. The Legendary Edition remasters look stunning, for example, running on my RTX 3090Ti/AMD Ryzen 7 5700X system.

Want to research the Mass Effect series some more? Then be sure to check out our Mass Effect Legendary Edition review, as well as our original Mass Effect 3 review. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think it's time for me to start a new Renegade playthrough.

Mac Walters amassed an enviable list of credits during his nearly 20-year career at BioWare on games including Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, eventually rising to lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and 3 and creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda. He then stepped into the role of production director on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, before leaving the studio in January 2023. In a new interview with MinnMax, Walters talked about his reasons for leaving, saying he was prompted to do so in part by the success of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

The Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster of all three Mass Effect games and nearly all the DLC (only Pinnacle Station is missing, because the source code was lost), effectively transforming the sprawling trilogy into a single, massive game. And despite the notorious anger over Mass Effect 3's ending when it was new, the Legendary Edition was, after some teething trouble, a big hit.

It was also a major undertaking. The Legendary Edition was a remaster, not a brand-new game, but the sheer scale of the content involved meant it was "an immense project," Walters said. But it "wasn't on the roadmap," so BioWare had to accommodate it without disrupting other ongoing projects: "All of a sudden we've got this project that's unplanned. What do we do with it?"  That forced Walters to become "a little bit entrepreneurial" in his approach to leading it.

"I knew I wasn't going to have a huge internal team ... I quickly realized that we're going to need co-dev work, we're not going to be able to handle this just with our internal team," Walters said. "So [it was] just a whole different mindset of how we want to run things. 

"Long story short, that process reminded me a lot of early-days BioWare, because we were a small, scrappy team, a lot of people wearing lots of different hats, a lot of people with opportunity to lead even if it wasn't in their title, just because that was the nature of what we needed folks to do. There was a lot of camaraderie formed with that team, I think because we stayed small."

On top of that experience, Walters said he'd had the opportunity to work on three original projects over his time at BioWare—Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Anthem—and realized that he wanted to do something new again. He made some inquiries about that possibility at BioWare or Electronic Arts, but said "it became pretty clear there probably wouldn't be, at least not for the foreseeable future."

"After Legendary Edition, because it was so successful to me as a project, in the sense of the team was healthy, we really got along, then of course it was critically and financially successful, it just felt like, this is the bow on all the things I've done in Mass Effect, which is like all the things. I don't want to do any more Mass Effect after this. Why tempt fate?"

Walters said Mass Effect Legendary Edition was "a reminder of what a smaller team could accomplish," and while larger teams aren't inherently bad—and are sometimes even necessary—they can lead to a feeling of disconnection between team members, which is something he wants to move away from.

"I also deep down felt like maybe there's a different way. Maybe there's a way that we can actually have a smaller internal group where we really focus on culture and we really focus on who we are and showing up every day and actually enjoying working with each other and making that a focus, as opposed to just the project, and the needs of the project."

While he was done with Mass Effect, Walters said he still loves the sci-fi genre and apparently wants to stick with it. That ultimately led him to take the reins at Worlds Untold, a new NetEase studio that launched in November. Details of its first project haven't been revealed but the studio announcement described it as "a near future action adventure game in a breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration."

Mass Effect, as we all know, has always hungered in its secret heart to become a twitchy first-person shooter. To cast aside the aged moniker of "RPG", whatever that means, and to transform into the helter-skelter, thrill-a-minute Call of Duty-like it was always meant to be.

Well, some dreams cannot be denied. Thanks to the ongoing MassFPS mod series, you can now transform two thirds of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition into a first-person cover shooter. Okay, I admit they're still very much Mass Effect games, so it's probably a bit more like turning them into proto-Starfield rather than COD, but I still find myself rather impressed by how well these things work.

Created by a modder named Aphar, the MassFPS mod got its most recent release—for ME2—at the beginning of this month, and differs from prior mods that go for the same effect by extending the first-person mode into combat, too. I've messed around with first-person mods for Mass Effect before, but they've always had the disappointing drawback of reverting to third-person mode as soon as you whip out your gun. Aphar has managed to overcome that drawback, though, meaning you'll only ever see your Shep from the third-person in conversations.

It doesn't just stick the camera behind Shepard's eyes and call it a day, either. Aphar says they went in to adjust "all combat cameras" in ME1 to better fit a first-person view. Likewise, movement has been tweaked a little to make Shepard feel a bit more responsive. The ME2 version has "feature parity," but with the added bonus that Aphar is working on adding a crouch into that game to make it feel a bit more coherent with ME1's mechanics.

It works strangely well. Admittedly, the weapon bob is wildly enthusiastic in first-person mode, but apart from that it all looks quite natural. For whatever reason, the plasticky-looking guns and ME1's trademark zany physics makes the whole thing strangely reminiscent of Deus Ex: Invisible War. In a good way.

You can pick up Aphar's first-person mods for ME1 and 2 over at Nexus Mods, where you can also find their recommendations for a range of additional mods to use alongside them, and the author themself says a similar project for ME3's Legendary Edition version is underway. They can be installed (relatively) easily by using ME3Tweaks Mod Manager. 

I was already riled up enough when yesterday I wrote about my frustrations with BioWare's endless cryptic teasing of its upcoming games, so it's probably a good thing for my blood pressure that it wasn't until today that I realised the studio is monetising them too. 

For the pretty steep price of $45 / £37.25 plus shipping, you can get a lithograph (basically a fancy poster) depicting the teaser image revealed this past N7 Day. That is, a character we don't know anything about yet, wearing a futuristic coat that blends into an image of a location we don't know anything about yet, from a game we don't know anything about yet, that doesn't even have a name yet. And they don't even throw in a frame!

BioWare is no stranger to merch, of course—the N7 symbol was designed right from the start of the creation of Mass Effect as a logo that would look good on a sweatshirt—and I don't begrudge any fan for splashing out on something fun from one of their favourite RPGs. I'll admit it's a cool bit of art, even! But there's something pretty distasteful to me about a studio that hasn't put out a decent game in over a decade not only stringing fans along with bits of concept art and fuzzy videos, but then turning around and making merch out of its flimsy marketing campaign too. 

Turns out this isn't even a new initiative—there was an even more shameless poster back in 2021, simply saying "Mass Effect will continue". Merch of a teaser for a teaser! How long has this been going on?!

It's hardly the first time the BioWare merch machine has gotten a bit out of control, either. It's not even six months since it tried to milk fans' affection for Mass Effect 2 with a $135 statue of a dead Commander Shepard, a move so brazen and bizarre that even the studio's long-suffering fans couldn't put up with it. BioWare ended up having to apologise and remove it from the store.

But hey, maybe I'm just an old grump. If you see the faceless, nameless hero of a game probably still four years off coming out, wearing an outfit that may or may not change entirely before that game actually launches, and think "That's perfect for my wall and also my pockets are overflowing with dollar bills", then more power to you—head over and get your preorder in. I'll just be over here, grumbling next to my blank walls. 

Yesterday's cryptic Mass Effect tease revealed precious little about what we can actually expect from the upcoming sequel, but it did make one thing very clear for me: BioWare really doesn't understand what a mess it's currently in. 

A complex ARG, an ominous countdown, and not one but three thin clips in lieu of an actual trailer or announcement; this is the kind of teasing of your fanbase you can do when you're flying high, when anticipation is it at its peak and it can be taken for granted that you've got something special cooking. This is Rockstar-announcing-GTA-6 behaviour. It's the kind of thing FromSoftware could get away with when they reveal the Elden Ring DLC. It's what you do when you're taking your victory lap.

BioWare, I have deeply loved so many of your games, but you are not taking your victory lap right now. In fact, you should probably still be on your apology tour. 

Let's be clear—this isn't a one-off. For the last four years, BioWare has shown more cryptic teasers than it has any actual signs of life. This latest round is basically just a repeat of last year, and it's been doing the exact same nonsense with the next Dragon Age for even longer. Whether it's showing a logo, a piece of concept art, or a bit of puzzling audio, the technique is the same: a long, anticipation-stoking build up to revealing nothing of substance. At first it might have been intriguing; at this point, it feels like toying with the fanbase. 

The BioWare of 2023 is not the BioWare you remember. It's been over a decade since Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. A lot has changed since those days. Founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka are long gone, along with key talent such as David Gaider, Drew Karpshyn, Matt Goldman, Mac Walters, Mark Darrah, and others. In other words, the creative leads and writers who built these settings we love. More recently, BioWare chucked another 50 of its employees, including Mary Kirby, who had been a writer on Dragon Age since its inception, creating Varric and the Qunari. That's not to say there are no veterans of the good old days left, but you're looking at a very different group of people than the one that made the studio's greatest hits.

Meanwhile, a simple look at the studio's recent track record should raise concerns. In 2019, we got Anthem, the biggest disaster in the studio's history. In 2017 we got Andromeda, the second biggest. In 2015, the studio cancelled ambitious new project Shadow Realms. 

Even before that the studio was on uneven ground. There was a lot to like about 2014's Inquisition, but also lots of valid criticism to be made; 2012's Mass Effect 3 likewise has its strengths but also an ending so widely despised the studio made the unprecedented move of retroactively changing it after release; and 2011's Dragon Age 2 is… well, it's a 94% of course, not sure why I included that one. Ahem. 

You have to get all the way back to 2010 to Mass Effect 2 to get an unequivocal hit. That's 13 years since we could last say a BioWare game was good without a "but…". Hell, it's almost 10 years since BioWare released something it didn't have to issue multiple public apologies for. Hope is a wonderful thing, but at a certain point you have to face the idea that things have not been going well for a long time now.

Faced with that reality, BioWare should be feeling humble—and focusing its efforts on winning back our trust. It should be showing, not telling; giving us a glimpse of the new Mass Effect and Dragon Age games when it has something substantial to reveal that might help dispel the real and valid concerns of fans. What it should not be doing is messing people about for the sake of a three second reveal of a fancy space coat. 

It's big talk from a studio that is yet to give us a reason to believe it can still back that up, exploiting the long-standing love people have for the two series by doing just enough farting about each year to keep them both in the news. Mass Effect and Dragon Age fans: you deserve better than this drawn-out breadcrumb trail that may well be leading nowhere.

I sincerely hope both Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and this new Mass Effect are great RPGs. I'm more than ready to dive back into both settings, and I'm not so jaded I wouldn't embrace a modern BioWare victory. But this constant, substance-less teasing… it's not just frustrating, it's arrogant, and beyond my concerns for the quality of both games, I now worry that leadership at the studio doesn't even realise how much there is still to prove. It's long past time to let an N7 Day or two go past in silence, until both games are actually ready to speak for themselves. 

N7 Day was a bit of a letdown this year, as a multi-stage tease for the next Mass Effect game ended up delivering basically nothing except another reminder that yes, it is happening. But bigger things were happening elsewhere, as former employees of BioWare and contract workers on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf took advantage of the annual Mass Effect remembrance to highlight their ongoing dispute with the company.

In September, Keywords Studios laid off 13 QA employees who had been playtesting the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf RPG. The layoffs came after BioWare ended its contract with Keywords, an external testing studio: In a statement sent to Polygon following the cuts, Keywords said that "13 Edmonton-based staff have now left the business following the end of a fixed term client contract."

The timing seemed odd, given that Dreadwolf is presumably still in the midst of development and testing is still necessary as a part of that process. The laid-off employees soon alleged that the real issue wasn't a lack of work, as Keywords had told them, but that Keywords and BioWare took issue with their unionization efforts.

Even though the dismissed workers weren't technically BioWare employees, they announced plans to picket the studio on November 7 to bring attention to their plight. A Game Developer report says they're demanding that they be reinstated at Keywords so they can continue to work under new contracts with other Canadian studios.

EA and BioWare had formally opposed the planned picket with the Alberta Labour Relations Board, saying the employees' dispute is with Keywords Studios, and that because they had worked remotely rather than in BioWare's offices they weren't legally entitled to picket there. "We hope that Keywords and the union are able to resolve their differences but ultimately BioWare has no role in that process," an EA rep told the site.

The ALRB came down on the side of employees, however, clearing the way for the N7 Day picket. The board ruled that striking Keywords employees cannot block access to the building or its services, but union rep James Russwurm said they have no intention of doing so. "We're going to be out there, getting the word out, and even talking to BioWare employees coming in and out of the building that might be interested in unionization," he said. "That's more of our focus than actual disruption."

And some BioWare employees apparently did come out to support the action: In a brief address during the picketing, which was recorded and shared on Facebook, Russwurm thanked BioWare employees "for coming out today and showing us support."

"We're here to make sure that we're heard by Keywords, and by the game community, and by clients of Keywords Studios as well," Russwurm said, gesturing to the EPCOR Tower behind him, the location of BioWare's Edmonton office. 

"We want to make sure that future jobs in videogames are unionized, and good jobs. Because we know that if you are suffering at a studio somewhere, we've lived that struggle with you, and we're here to talk for all of those people who have gone through the exploitation of this industry for years."

That's not the only labor dispute to flare up on N7 Day. In August, BioWare laid off 50 of its own employees, including Mary Kirby, the writer behind one of Dragon Age's most beloved characters. Two months later, seven of those employees filed a legal complaint over what they claim was "unreasonably poor treatment" from BioWare following their termination—specifically, that the severance pay they were offered was far below what is legally required. Those ex-employees now say that BioWare has rebuffed all efforts to negotiate a solution and has instead filed a statement of defense against their allegations, which means the matter is now officially headed to court.

"We are disappointed that BioWare prefers stalling and intimidation tactics to fair dealing with people who have given years, and in some cases decades, of dedication and hard work to the company," the former employees said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We believe they are using intimidation and stalling tactics to try and get us to drop out. A lot of the more junior employees and those with families, who had more monetary pressure on them, could not risk waiting on a court case that may take many months more to resolve, and have already had to drop out."

The employees also expressed their belief that BioWare will likely make even deeper cuts if Dragon Age: Dreadwolf fails to meet sales targets, which provides even more impetus "to hold BioWare responsible and get a clear decision on what [termination] settlement amount is legal," they said. "We’re no longer part of the development team, so the best way we can help our former teammates now is to hold BioWare accountable and ensure that the next group who is laid off are not treated as poorly as we were."

To help bring attention to the cause, the employees are asking Mass Effect fans to "have a little fun and express their support" by sharing memes and images using the #N7Severanceday hashtag. Several of them can already be seen on a new N7SeveranceDay account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

N 7 Day, the annual celebration of all things Mass Effect, is one again upon us, and BioWare is once again teasing the next Mass Effect with codes, encryption, and video clips—but whether or not we'll get any insight into what's actually coming in the next game remains to be seen.

The whole thing started with a message salted into the BioWare's N7 Day announcement: A series of 0s and 1s that fans on Reddit quickly translated into "Epsilon." That led to a site with a countdown, which eventually opened up to a small "Access code: Epsilon" site containing a mysterious tease about an encrypted distress signal from Andromeda.

That's interesting. BioWare has previously indicated that the next Mass Effect won't be a direct sequel to either Andromeda or the original trilogy, but also that there will be some connection with both of them.

At first blush, there's not much more to see. The bit about "they should know by now not to underestimate human [redacted]," for instance, is a direct lift from last year's hidden message, spoken by Liara T'Soni—and unless something has changed, that redacted word is "defiance." That also sure looks like Liara striding purposefully in the five-second video clip embedded in the site.

Fans on Reddit immediately started digging into the teaser site, however, and have already uncovered more. The VJBSVU segment has been translated to "Oculon," which like Epsilon was a pre-release concept name for Mass Effect, and discovered a date, 2819, the year the Arks arrived in the Heleus Cluster in Mass Effect: Andromeda. 

And from there we have a secondary site revealing an access code, Oculon-2819-Defiance, and another brief video clip:

There's likely more coming soon—executive producer Michael Gamble teased on Twitter that this is just the first and second "packet," whatever that is—and some fans are clearly having fun tugging at the threads. But I can't shake the feeling that all of this masks the fact BioWare doesn't have much more to say except that yes, the new game is still happening.

Sometimes that's unavoidable, especially with game development timelines as extended as they are these days. But repeated teases without any substance to back them up gets tiresome. We saw the same thing with a Dragon Age: Dreadwolf update from earlier this year, which was really more of a primer on game design than a glimpse at what's coming. It's a tease, yes, but do we really need another reminder that BioWare is in fact still making a new addition to its most popular game series? It makes me think that sometimes, the Bethesda model is really the way to go: Confirm that you're making a game, and then shut up about it until you actually have something to say. To borrow Fraser's reaction to that Dreadwolf teaser, I'm excited that BioWare is doing something new with Mass Effect, but for the love of god it's time to quit horsing around and just tell us something about it. 

Ah, but it's also possible that something more substantial is coming. Fans have discovered another countdown site bearing the name Post-Nebula, which is slated to hit zero at 4 pm ET. Will a full reveal of the next Mass Effect follow? Will we finally learn whomst from the crew of the great Normandy will return for the next adventure? Will I have to take back everything I just said about "please quit screwing around and tell us what's going on?" Perhaps, on all counts. 

Update: Sadly, the screwing around continues: The Post-Nebula teaser site went live with yet another cryptic message, and a longer—but still very brief—clip of someone dressed in a very stylish N7 coat pulling a gun and striding purposefully out a door into a decidedly unpleasant-looking environment. To some, the assumption that this character is Liara doesn't seem quite so solid now: Why would she be wearing an N7 insignia, given that it's a rank in the Systems Alliance military? But if it's Shepard, why is she masked? Confirmation of a Shepard return would be a huge booster for the next Mass Effect.

On Twitter, Gamble urged followers to "look closely," hinting at something hidden in the video, and of course many did. But a few expressed frustrations similar to mine: If BioWare is serious about winning back the Mass Effect fan base, it's time to put some cards on the table. 

And one more update: Gamble shared some new Mass Effect artwork on his Twitter feed. In the hi-res version you can see some sort of club scene featuring aliens of various sorts from the Mass Effect universe, including some from the original trilogy and others from Andromeda. It looks like a higher-class take on the Star Wars cantina scene, and again it's not particularly informative: Yes, there are aliens! From Mass Effect! Maybe there's a secret buried in there that deeply dedicated fans will suss out, but to my eyes it's just another reminder that BioWare is making a new Mass Effect, and beyond that we still don't know anything about it.

Update: After agitating fans with a statue depicting the demise of Mass Effect Trilogy protagonist Shepard, BioWare has "paused" sales of the item. All pre-orders will be cancelled and refunded too. 

"Earlier today, we announced the sale of our latest Mass Effect Shepard statue," the BioWare Gear Store announced in a tweet. "This statue was intended to be part of a series, commemorating some of the key and most emotional moments in the series. The way we announced it did not convey that properly, nor does it give the moment in the series the credit it deserves. As a result, we'll be pausing sales on the statue until we can share the larger plan with you."

It's a sad day for appreciators of death statues, but as the statement above implies, it may very well see a return with some more, erm, persuasive context.

Original story:

BioWare's merch team seems to love doing statues. The Dragon Age side of the BioWare Gear store is always getting pricey new resin figures, from that snazzy Iron Bull statue last year to the new Inquisition tarot card ones I've had my eye on. Apparently the Mass Effect brand goes hard into the polyresin game too, now with its latest iconic chara—sorry, a $135 statue of a dead Commander Shepherd?

"The Mass Effect Shepard’s Death Statue depicts Mass Effect 2's dramatic opening scene:  Commander Shepard expelled from a crumbling Normandy and hurtling through space to her untimely demise," the store page says. Not a moment I'd have personally pitched to commemorate as a collectible item but what the hell do I know?

I'm not judging you, Mass Effect fans, I promise. It's just that we've got these really dramatic statue poses for Inquisition characters on our side and you've got, uh, Kaidan lounging in a chair with a beer, Tali lounging in a chair (sans beer), an Avenger gun replica, and a Mako statue. I'm just judgment adjacent right now, aiming quizzical glances your way—or in the direction of whoever at BioWare is in charge of Mass Effect's merchandising.

Anyway, there's a Dead Shepard statue on the BioWare store right now if you're into that kind of thing. Approximately half a foot cubed. It's being produced in a run of 2,000 numbered pieces. If you're going to have friends over to gawk at your DeadShep, make sure to appropriately set the mood.

At time of publishing the store link for the dead shep statue is returning a 404 error but I promise it wasn't a fever dream and assume it'll be back soon.

Eurogamer's interview with Mac Walters, who was a writer on all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy before becoming creative director of Mass Effect: Andromeda and then Mass Effect Legendary Edition's project director, makes for a good read. Going all the way back to the series' origin as "Jack Bauer in space", it's a revealing history of BioWare's work on Mass Effect.

Some of the most interesting material covers Andromeda, which Walters joined late. He'd been working on Anthem along with most of BioWare Edmonton while Andromeda was being developed by BioWare Montreal, previously a support studio responsible for most of Mass Effect 2's N7 missions, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, the Omega DLC, and so on. Only after Mass Effect director Casey Hudson left BioWare in 2014 was Walters moved over to work on Andromeda, so his answers mostly focus on the later stages of its development.

However, he does confirm the claim from a report on Andromeda's troubled development that it was originally planned to have a procedurally generated galaxy, inspired by No Man's Sky. "Ultimately, that was too much at odds with a lot of the way that we tell stories," Walters said, "and the way that we create our content, which tends to be very bespoke—a lot of big set-pieces and things like that. It's hard to translate into a procedural world."

When Walters was brought on, Andromeda was "in that pivot point, in that sort of inflection of, 'Oh we can't do both procedural—all of this stuff—and fulfil all the wishes and hopes of our fanbase who really want to see a lot of this bespoke narrative written in a certain way." Another challenge was that "there were just a lot of things that we had to relearn, re-figure out", presumably due to the switch from Unreal to the Frostbite engine.

Walters suggested that, to avoid some of Andromeda's problems, "we probably should have—in hindsight—just reduced scope more and executed on what we could to [ensure] quality. But, we were also in a weird phase in the industry where a lot of people were saying quantity was quality, so we were deluding ourselves internally a little bit that if it's maybe not as polished as [Mass Effect 3], it's fine—it's bigger and there's more here, and there's more to do."

This was during the period where, as ex-BioWare developer Manveer Heir said, Electronic Arts was "pushing for more open-world games" because they were easier to monetize. Other publishers felt the same way, and the result was an era of bloated games with maps full of repetitive blah. Plenty of Mass Effect players, fresh off a trilogy that grew more reactive and personal with each entry, were unimpressed that Andromeda was one of them. Walters called it "a lesson learned", and said it's a shame the studio didn't get a chance to show what it learned with a sequel. "I only wish we had been able to then do a second one," he said, "because then you would have really seen that polish just like we did from [Mass Effect] to [Mass Effect 2] on the original."

Instead, after Andromeda's release BioWare Montreal was demoted back to a support studio role, and then merged with EA Motive. Which is why the next Mass Effect will be made by BioWare Edmonton, and it looks like it'll be made using the Unreal engine. It's apparently still in pre-production at the moment, however, while the studio focuses on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

My friends, money can buy you love. Or it can over at the BioWare store, anyway, where you can currently pick up a framed version of that picture of Tali from the end of Mass Effect 3 (spotted by Kotaku), the one she only gives you if you chose to romance her. For the low, low cost of $30, you can possess a portrait for your mantelpiece that will raise the eyebrows of visitors for years to come.

Here's the problem for me, though: It's the wrong one. The Tali portrait in the BioWare store uses the picture from Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, an original artwork that replaced the lightly edited, controversy-generating stock photo from the original ME3: "attractive woman in field smiling with sunset".

While you'll never catch me yucking anyone's yum in these hallowed pages, I have to confess that buying a framed portrait of my videogame girlfriend holds no appeal for me (but if you fancy it, hey, live your truth). But the notion of BioWare selling a fully dolled-up version of that stock photo everyone hated is very funny to me—certainly funny enough to buy as a surprise gift for my Tali-romancing friends—and I'm sad it's not an option.

But alas, it's not to be. Perhaps I can console myself with the little morsel of lore in the photo's description. You can find a letter from Tali to Shepard on the BioWare store page, the full text of which reads:

"Dear Shepard,  

As you may remember, I presented this picture frame to you as a gift on the Normandy. It was my way of expressing my admiration for you and our bond as comrades-in-arms. On the back of the metal frame, I've emblazoned a promise that will never fade - 'Shepard, wherever you go, I'm with you.' 

I know it's not much, but...this is what I look like under the mask. I'm sorry if it's not what you were expecting. I know Quarian faces can be a bit...different. Every time you look at my picture, I hope you will be reminded of our adventures on the Normandy, from our battles against the Reapers to our intimate conversations in the privacy of our quarters.   

I am not one to express my emotions openly, but thank you for being my friend, my confidante, and my inspiration. I look forward to many more adventures together. 

Keelah se’lai,  

Tali’Zorah"

Given that (spoilers for ME3) my Shepard's consciousness is currently scattered across the void of space so as to unite organic and synthetic beings into a new, higher order of being, they probably won't be enjoying that many more adventures with poor, dear Tali, but I suppose it's the thought that counts.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "I sure wish I had something to do with these free 500 hours I have". Well search no more, friend, because over on Steam you can pick up a bundle containing the entire Dragon Age and Mass Effect collection—some of our best RPGs in 2023—for £17/$20. Yes, that includes Andromeda. Sorry.

The BioWare Mega Collection includes Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 (in their remastered Legendary Edition incarnations), Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. According to the wisdom of the crowds over at HowLongToBeat.com, that's 500 hours of RPG if you go full completionist. When it's not on sale, the bundle retails for £160/$190, and you have until May 29 to pick it up at its discounted price.

That is, by any reasonable metric, Too Much Game. We're in 'book a month off work' territory, and even that might not be enough if you have literally anything else going on in your life at all. But (most of) these are some of BioWare's best, and absolute classics of the cinematic RPG genre. If you've somehow managed to avoid them so far, you're in for a treat.

If you've been deep in the Siberian wilderness for the last 20 years and don't know what those games are, then A: thank you for reading PC Gamer dot com, solid priorities there, and B: here's what they're all about. 

Mass Effect 1 through 3 tells the tale of Commander Shepard and their rocket ship full of attractive aliens as they try to save the galaxy from genocidal robots. It has lots of choices and lots of romance. The first game is, objectively, the best one, but plenty of people continue to insist the second game is one of the best ever made, and I suppose I can understand why. Even Mass Effect 3, which caused quite the controversy when it released, is still a pretty great game, edgy Troy Baker ninja aside.

Andromeda is, well, a failed experiment. In an attempt to disentangle itself from all the choices it let you make about the state of the Milky Way in ME 1, 2, and 3, BioWare set its newest Mass Effect in the Andromeda galaxy. It didn't take advantage of it, though: You only met two new alien races, both of which were quite dull, and the game's writing took on a grating, Whedon-esque tone that drove many (including me) away. Still, it has its defenders, and you might find something to love in it if you try.

I've only played the first Dragon Age game myself, so I can't tell you too much about the series as a whole, but they're all gritty, dark fantasy fare. Think blood magic, elf racism, all that good HBO stuff you came to know and love in approximately four of eight seasons of Game of Thrones, but in an original setting dreamt up by BioWare that's far more high fantasy than Westeros is. Dragon Age 2 is a black sheep, but nowhere near as reviled as ME: Andromeda, and hey, we scored it 94% in our Dragon Age 2 review. A move that remains entirely uncontroversial to this day.

Mass Effect has some of the best worldbuilding in any RPG, period. Seriously, even with the impending Reaper invasion it still seems like it'd be fun to live in that version of the Milky Way. One of the coolest bits of background flavor BioWare included in the series was the Cerberus Daily News, a little ticker on Mass Effect 2's home screen that provided short news bulletins about the galaxy's happenings. Now modder Cirosan on the Legendary Edition Nexus has brought these stories forward into the Legendary Edition re-release.

The original CDN was really ambitious for how much of a minor addition it was⁠—Mass Effect 2's main menu was updated with a new story every day from January 26, 2010 to January 24, 2011, with short revivals later in 2011 and 2012 to promote ME2's DLC and, eventually, Mass Effect 3. Some of these stories would foreshadow later developments in Mass Effect's main story, while others simply added to the texture of the setting.

My favorite was a running series of updates about an AI-powered ghost ship found in deep space. In subsequent stories, CDN revealed that it was actually the home of a virtual civilization that had digitized their consciousnesses in order to escape a dying star, and this series culminated with their attempts to integrate with wider galactic society. Just a nifty little sci-fi short story you could look forward to from your favorite action-RPG's main menu.

Until now, you could only find the CDN updates preserved on the Mass Effect Wiki, but Cirosan's mod reincorporates them in Mass Effect 2 in the form of new in-game emails at your personal computer on the Normandy. Cirosan has attempted to space them out in a satisfactory manner, with the mod sending you a new CDN story on the completion of each mission. Cirosan notes, however, that the sheer amount of CDN updates exceeds the number of missions in the game, so they opted to include some and excise others at their own discretion instead of spamming poor Shepard's inbox.

I had almost completely forgotten about CDN until I saw this mod, but Cirosan's work has caused my fond memories to come flooding back. I think their deployment of Shep's email terminal as the vehicle for these stories is particularly inspired, and this is going to be a must-download for me on my next big replay of the series (a once every two to three year occurrence)

I have a confession to make: I've never seen a single episode of the US Office, which remains an opaque and beautiful mystery to me, something I only brush up against when my downstairs neighbours put on yet another episode and the theme wafts up through the floorboards. I have played several hundred hours of Mass Effect, though, so I feel at least 50% qualified to tell you this Office/ME mashup is very well done indeed.

It comes from a creator called eli_handle_b.wav, and replaces Mass Effect's steely-jawed Commander Shepard with The Office's Michael Scott as he bumbles his way through diplomacy and romance of galactic import. I'm not kidding when I say it's well done: Scott is eerily seamless in every part, and the creator has even gone out of their way to pick clips of him where he's lit (more or less) correctly for each scene.

Eli_handle_b.wav, which I will never type correctly on a first try, told Kotaku that the video was a two-week labour of love, and he got the idea after marathoning the TV series. "Michael Scott is the perfect candidate for commander of the Normandy," he decided, before setting about creating the video using Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Mocha Pro.

It's far from the only strange mashup the video's creator has made. There are far too many to list here, but some choice standouts include Tony Soprano in God of War, Kermit the Frog in Half-Life 2, and Ace Ventura in The Witcher 3. All of which, I have no doubt, accurately reflect the original creative intentions of each series' respective creators.

Mass Effect 2's suicide mission—which you're about to read some spoilers for, by the way—is a much-loved finale to an excellent RPG. Forced to split your squad and assign appropriate specialists for a series of dangerous tasks, it's a test of how well you got to know your team over the course of the game. (And whether you completed all their loyalty missions.) Going in blind, it's entirely possible to make choices that result in some of your beloved squadmates dying, meaning they'll be absent in Mass Effect 3. Which is a pretty big consequence for failure.

If you're not following the suicide mission flowchart, you might think there's one choice that's a bit unfair. During a section called The Long Walk, where you have to choose a biotic specialist to maintain a force field bubble as you walk through a swarm of killer bugs, picking Miranda will get somebody killed. Unless you install the Miranda's Long Walk mod for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, that is.

Cards on the table: I picked Miranda to be the biotic specialist when I played Mass Effect 2 for the first time. She's reliable, follows orders, and her backstory is that she was genetically engineered to be superior at everything. Plus, in combat she's as powerful as any other biotic in your squad. And that's how I got Thane killed.

You're not supposed to be thinking of the mechanical balance of Mass Effect 2's fights, you see. In cutscenes, Jack has abilities well beyond what's possible for anyone else, and either Samara or Morinth, whichever asari is on your squad, has special cutscene powers too. Still, if you want to choose Miranda and not have anyone die, this mod lets you do exactly that.

To install it, first you'll need the ME3Tweaks mod manager, which lets you back up your game files as well as modify all games in the Legendary Edition. Then you'll need the Unofficial LE2 Patch, which you'll want anyway. After that, you can download Miranda's Long Walk. 

Since dialogue for the suicide mission was recorded before it was decided who the best choices would be, the mod restores Miranda's unused lines as well as altering the consequences for choosing her.

If you're planning to return to the trilogy, here's our list of the best Mass Effect Legendary Edition mods. And if you thought this story would be about a mod to restore the butt shots removed by the Legendary Edition, don't be ridiculous. That was done years ago.

A decade ago, EA pissed a lot of people off. That's normal for EA, but this move in particular earned the publisher some lifelong enemies among PC gamers: After releasing the first two Mass Effect games on Steam, EA announced that Mass Effect 3 would only be available on its proprietary client, Origin, blaming Steam's "restrictive terms of service." Rather than sitting in a neat stack in our Steam libraries, the trilogy was split between two launchers. It was a crime against PC gaming, as far as some were concerned.

Eight years later, in 2020, EA finally released Mass Effect 3 on Steam. Perhaps overcompensating, it then released Mass Effect 3 on Steam again in 2021 as part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. If any doubt remained that the publisher's Steam vacation was over, it killed Origin. Granted, Origin was immediately replaced by the EA app, which is the same thing, but the point stands. EA came crawlin' back to Steam, and it wasn't the only big publisher to do it:

• After sequestering the Call of Duty games on Blizzard's Battle.net for a time, Activision came back to Steam with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0.
• Microsoft started releasing games on Steam again in 2019, having failed to make the Microsoft Store essential. (Although it has found success with Game Pass and the Xbox App.)
• Following a couple years of Epic Games Store exclusivity, Ubisoft finally released Assassin's Creed Valhalla on Steam.
• Take-Two also toyed with Epic exclusivity, but only ever for short periods: Borderlands 3 was on Steam after six months, and Red Dead Redemption 2 was exclusive to the Rockstar Games Launcher and EGS for just a month.

Steam has recently welcomed notable newcomers, too. For a while, we wondered if Epic's relationship with Sony would mean that former PlayStation exclusives would favor the Epic Games Store as they trickled onto PC. Epic apparently made an offer, but Sony didn't pick a side: God of War and other PlayStation-published games are on both Steam and EGS. 

It's good to be Gabe 

Perhaps things would actually have turned out worse had EA, Microsoft, and others not annoyed us by pushing their own stores and launchers for as long as they did. A decade and change ago, it seemed like Steam was on its way to becoming synonymous with PC gaming, with only a few companies, like Blizzard, able to succeed outside of Valve's ecosystem. As influential as Valve is today, it did not ultimately become PC gaming's "Xerox," which I think most will agree is for the best. The reaction to Microsoft's hoovering up of important studios suggests that PC gamers don't like seeing too much power consolidated within the Seattle Metropolitan Area.

If Valve was made nervous by the sudden competition it faced over the last decade, and the departure of these big franchises, we certainly couldn't see it on its face—but then again, the company's sedate demeanor has always been hard to read. When Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posed the Epic Games Store as a direct challenge to Steam's 30% revenue cut, for example, Valve hardly budged. It did eventually lower its fee, but to 20% rather than Epic's more generous 12% and only for the biggest publishers, which pissed off a lot of indie developers. And yet, Epic still has to spend big to acquire notable exclusives, with its new publishing wing currently funding two Remedy games, one of which is Alan Wake 2. (Don't get me wrong, I think that's a great thing, because I always want more Remedy games.)

It feels premature to say that the era of the Steam rival is over, but I do think PC gaming has quietly (and sometimes loudly) endorsed a Steam monopoly. For all of the virtue that PC gamers and this publication proclaim about the platform's openness and freedom of choice, I think it's also understandable that so many of us value the predictability, convenience, and centralization that comes with Steam's dominance.

Valve's continued relevance hasn't always felt this secure: The 2010s were full of little and big controversies and blunders, such as the vaporous Steam Machines program, Artifact's failure, semi-frequent confusion around Steam's adult games policy, review bombing and Steam forum moderation quagmires, and the mild dud that was the Steam Controller. Lately, though, Valve's on a bit of a roll, with its hardware efforts especially looking more fruitful: It still makes our favorite VR headset, and the Steam Deck has been a small triumph. I'm glad to see Valve's long, slow effort to build a Linux-based lifeboat for PC gaming, SteamOS, finally made practical for the average gamer.

And Steam itself, which was once only a destination for publisher-backed games, is now a destination for cool, weird stuff like Cruelty Squad alongside mainstream hits, which now includes games we once didn't expect to see on PC at all, like Marvel's Spider-Man and God of War. That's in part down to the health of PC gaming in general: It's a very good time to play games on personal computers, on Steam or otherwise. But let's be honest: mostly on Steam.

(Apologies to the author of the entertaining Gawker essay 'They Always Come Crawlin' Back' for borrowing the phrase at the center of their observation about human behavior to discuss the business plans of videogame publishers.)

Mass Effect 3, the Mass Effect game we were all very upset about until they put out the next one, got a lot of flack for its endings. Fans said they were unsatisfying, that they didn't take your decisions into account, and that choosing between them was anticlimactic. Not unreasonable, but they all miss the real point: Why didn't everyone just kiss and make up?

Violet McVinnie, a former BioWare dev who now heads her own studio, clearly agrees. When she still worked at BioWare, McVinnie had a tradition of creating alternate ending videos for the studio's games that envisioned what would happen if everyone just snogged it out. Here's ME3's.

Touching, heartwarming, overwhelming. A cinematic triumph, and a more emotionally resonant final scene than any of that nonsense about "Control" or "Synthesis". Seeing Shepard and The Illusive Man finally put aside their differences and embrace really puts the Mass Effect series' themes into proper perspective, whatever they were.

Well, alright, I'll admit even this ending leaves something to be desired. Naturally, I'd rather that the lover awaiting Shepard at the end of his long run past all his dying friends was Harbinger, the two-kilometre tall space-dwelling elder god bent on the extermination of all advanced organic life. I guess Martin Sheen will have to do for now. Maybe in Mass Effect 4.

Speaking of which, it was N7 day recently, and BioWare gave fans a few more crumbs to feast on in the form of some old concept art with a hidden message in it. In it, Mass Effect's Liara T'soni can be heard saying "Exactly, the council will be furious, although they should know by now not to underestimate human defiance," which didn't really clear up any remaining questions I had about the next Mass Effect game. We do know the next game will be made in Unreal Engine 5, though, and that a few Mass Effect veterans are returning to work on the game. Also, it probably won't end on a passionate embrace with the main antagonist. Sigh.

Mass Effect is 15 years old as of November 20, and unofficial Twitter account Mass Effect News has celebrated by collecting together some of its prototype art, video, and documents. While none of this is new (the scan of the 2003 pitch document has been floating around on the internet for over a decade), it's still interesting to look back at how much of it changed.

For starters, when Casey Hudson submitted that pitch on September 15, 2003, it was for a game to be called not Mass Effect, but "SFX". Other suggested titles came later, several of which made it as far as having logos designed, like The Epsilon Effect, Biowar, Element Zero, Element, The Oculon, The Optigon, Unearthed, Nebula: Guardians of the Citadel, Star Citadel, and plain old The Citadel.

One of SFX's main features was to be multiplayer trading, with an entire online economy made possible by Xbox Live in which "you can meet friends online in special locations in the game to chat and trade valuable items in a virtual environment." This would allow players to "create powerful items not available without online trading" and make money via a "dynamic in-game economy". It sounds a bit like EVE Online, or maybe a contemporary live-service game, especially when it gets to additions made possible via regular updates like "new locations, special items, new quests, and online news updates about the best players."

Plenty of what the pitch describes is the same as what we ended up getting, from the basics of the setting to the idea of gameplay that builds on what BioWare did previously with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, only made "more accessible to the mainstream audience." Specifics like having a "small party of 2 or 3, selected from a larger group" and exploring the galaxy via "Jump Gates" that facilitate long-distance travel, while local travel is possible with your ship's on-board FTL drive, were right there from the beginning—with minor differences, some of which would end up being realized in Mass Effect 2. Your starship being upgradeable for one, as well as the ability to switch to other party members in combat.

The early plot outline, from January 8, 2004, likewise has a lot of the basics of the setting down. That said, it does describe Earth as the game's start location, after which your home base would be a space station called "Star City" rather than the Citadel, and from which you'd be able to "establish new jump stations and expand the galactic frontier". The twist you'd learn while searching the galaxy for artifacts belonging to a vanished creator species who left technology behind would be that "Humans were engineered as the slave class of the creator race millennia ago."

The thread also bundles in the first prototype footage of SFX, showing that shooting people behind crates in warehouses was part of Mass Effect from the word go. It also includes a video compiling gameplay trailers from much later in development that include some stuff that was ultimately cut from the first game, like destructible environments, direct control of squad members in combat, and a mission on a mining world called Caleston that would be folded into Liara's rescue mission on Therum—complete with a scene where Shepard uses a renegade interrupt on Garrus in the middle of dialogue.

It's fun to have a look back at how things started while we wait to hear more about where Mass Effect is going next. The latest news on that front came on N7 Day, when BioWare dropped a video with a hidden message encoded in it. Last year, BioWare marked the occasion with a teaser image that said "Mass Effect will continue". At the bottom of that picture was a spaceship that will presumably be ours to fly in the next Mass Effect. And the name stenciled on the side of that ship? "SFX", in honor of the name Mass Effect almost had.

N7 Day, BioWare's annual celebration of all things Mass Effect, used to be a pretty big deal. Its significance has waned in the post-Mass Effect 3 years, though, and the lukewarm reception to Andromeda did not do much to reverse that trend. This year's November 7 event didn't seem to bring much in the way of big news either—but a little audio decoding revealed a big surprise.

"Regardless of when you joined us, through four games and more expansions, I can say with certainty that we’re in this because of you, and every N7 Day is a wonderful reminder of that," project director Mike Gamble said in his annual N7 Day message.

"As we look forward, each day is a fun and exciting challenge for the team. We love bringing this universe to life, and although there’s much more we want to share with you, that’ll have to be for another time.

"For now, there is something we want you to have a look at. We’ve intercepted some strange footage from one of the monitoring stations in known space. It could be nothing, but…"

And here it is:

Those of you with good memories (or who take the time to google these things) will note that this is nearly a direct lift from BioWare's 25th anniversary book, which was released in 2020, but rendered in greater detail than we've previously seen. There's also some text attached to this one, though: "Vacuum-dock Relay Construction Record / Monitoring Station Operated by Green Dagger Ltd. Property of Deepspace Dhow SAV / Ship Captain: Sub-Navarch Soa'Rhal Zhilian-Jones."

I played and enjoyed the Mass Effect trilogy, but I'm not enough of a committed fan that I can suss out any secrets or surprises in the image. It continues to look like an under-construction mass relay to me, which doesn't tell us much. When the image was first seen two years ago, some fans speculated that the relay could suggest that new locations in Andromeda would be opened for exploration—only the Heleus cluster is available in Mass Effect: Andromeda—or might even be used as a way to return to the Milky Way galaxy.

Gamble actually commented on a spot of that speculation in 2020, although—of course—with no detail, or even to specify which part of it is "wrong."

The Derek in question is presumably Derek Watts, the original Mass Effect art director, who returned to BioWare to take part in the new project.

Gamble did, however, suggest in a follow-up tweet that this is a mass relay, and that it's going somewhere new:

Now, this is where it gets really interesting. The concept art is old, but as BioWare suggested in its tweet, there's more to it than meets the eye—or the ear, in this particular case. Soundcloud user Mosaic Horse worked some audio magic on the video and discovered a hidden audio message:

"Exactly, the council will be furious, although they should know by now not to underestimate human defiance."

Our in-house audio enthusiast Tyler Wilde duplicated the effort described by _baundiesel_ and confirmed that the hidden voice track is in there. It sure sounds like Liara T'Soni, one of the high-profile companions of the original trilogy, with Geth sounds in the background. BioWare—or, more specifically, Liara face model Jillian Murray—has previously stated that Liara will return for the new game, but ironically voice actor Ali Hillis was unaware of any such development. Two years later, it seems that either BioWare has found an impressive soundalike, or Hillis has been looped in.

In case there was any doubt, Gamble confirmed on Twitter that the voice in the message is Liara. I think that concept art is new, too.

So it's a deeper tease than it first appeared, but even so it's disappointing that we don't have anything more substantial to see at this point, especially since we still don't know much about the next Mass Effect game except that it's happening, may see the return of at least some characters from the trilogy, and will apparently be made in Unreal Engine 5. In case you missed it, here's BioWare's N7 Day tease from 2021, which apparently has "at least five surprises, all of which point to an amazing future in the Mass Effect universe."

For a closer look at the embedded N7 Day image, here it is in full resolution, but without the animation. To see it in all its glory, click the icon in the upper-right corner:

If you're not into the chill deep-space vibe of Mass Effect 2's resource-gathering minigame, where you launch probes at planets and watch your pile of iridium tick up, other options are available. The One Probe All Resources mod, like the name suggests, gives you every resource on a planet with a single probe. Or you could just Cheat Engine your way to a massive stockpile and never run out of element zero again. If neither of those seems satisfying to you, now there's another way to get around hearing the words "probe launched" about a hundred times.

Nos Astra Mineral Exchange is a mod for Mass Effect Legendary Edition by beccatoria and Team Pyjak that lets you trade resources and currency on a galactic stock market, buying and selling commodities instead of—or as well as—mining them. In addition to being a spaceship commander, hostage negotiator, and advertising spokesperson, now Shepard can be an investor as well. 

The mods also includes new missions, with additional lines for existing characters created with AI dialogue tool xVASynth and voice acting by modder Gaige Barker. To begin the mod, head to Nos Astra on the asari world of Ilium in the Crescent Nebula where you'll find terminals for public trading near the docks entrance. There you can sign up to buy and sell element zero, iridium, platinum, palladium, and galactic standard currency for varying trade rates. 

As the mod's description explains, "Trade rates refresh after each mission, along with randomly generated economic conditions that have given rise to any surplus, steady supply or shortage." You can also play the market from a terminal on the Shadow Broker's ship. It's not the same as exploiting supply and demand in games like Elite or Wing Commander Privateer, but it's nice to have an alternative to planet-scanning that adds something rather than trivializing what's already there.

To install Nos Astra Mineral Exchange you'll need to download it from NexusMods or Mod DB, then install it with the ME3Tweaks Mod Manager. Apparently it's incompatible with the New Dresses for Females mod, since both alter content in the Ilium docks area, so I'm afraid you'll have to choose between playing the stock market or having every woman wear a minidress. 

For more, here's our list of the best Mass Effect Legendary Edition mods. 

There's no shortage of characters to romance in the Mass Effect trilogy. Depending on which version of Commander Shepard you're playing, you can enjoy deep relationships and clunky cutscene coitus with Ashley Williams, Liara T'Soni, Kaidan Whatsisname, Miranda, Jack, Garrus, Tali, Javik, that weird fish guy everyone stans, that non-fish guy everyone hates, and a handful of others.

But when you're horny in space, is that really enough? How about one more?

Thanks to The Hatboy Project mod, you can now add Jeff "Joker" Moreau to your seemingly endless list of intimate conquests in Mass Effect 3. The mod "creates an all-new romantic narrative for the player to explore" with the quick-witted and endearing pilot of the SSV Normandy. There are new branches of dialogue, custom-written romantic versions of conversations, new ambient voice lines, the option to go from flirting to a committed relationship, and yes, even a "romance scene that is in keeping with the other vanilla options." A traditionally awkward Mass Effect sex-cutscene, in other words.

How is this possible? According to modder SpaceD0lphin, the mod required lots of "patience, technology, duct-tape and prayers." You can see a bit of the mod in the launch trailer below, including new voice lines for Joker that seem to be a mixture of spliced existing dialogue and AI voice acting software (xVASynth is credited on the mod's page). 

It's pretty convincing—that really does sound like Joker's voice actor Seth Green, and only occasionally is there a tiny bit of awkward inflection that doesn't quite land. Still, it's extremely impressive.

If you want to see more, there's tons of video clips at The Hatboy Project's YouTube Channel, and you can learn how the mod came together at the devblog here (a good place to start is with this deep-dive on some particularly tricky dialogue).

Joker isn't available to romance for both versions of Commander Shepard, unfortunately. "BroShep," as I'm just learning he's called, can't knock boots with Joker, only the Jennifer Hale "FemShep" version of Shepard. The mod is also only compatible with the original Mass Effect 3, though a Legendary Edition version is in the works. You can find it here at Nexus Mods.

Everyone has their favorite Mass Effect companions. Personally, I liked to roll with Wrex and Zaeed; others prefer Jack, Legion, or Thane. There are probably even a few who have fond memories of poor Jacob. There's only one companion who seems to have universal appeal: Brave, tragic former lawman Garrus Vakarian.

It all seems obvious now—Garrus took an easy first place in our Mass Effect companions ranking, Garrus body pillows are not just real but really hard to keep in stock, and the page URL for our deep-dive into why he's so great is literally, uhh, "garrus-vakarian-smooches." But that wasn't always the case. In fact, Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer on the first two Mass Effect games, said during an AMA on Reddit that nobody saw the deep Garrus thirst coming.

"We always knew they'd come back as companions," Karpyshyn said when asked about how Garrus and Tali came into shape as romance options in Mass Effect 2. "I was a bit surprised fans wanted the romance options. Tali I could sort of see... you never saw her face, so it was easy to imagine something vaguely human. (But she had those weird feet!) Garrus blindsided me—but once we saw what fans wanted, we decided to deliver!"

Unfortunately for the truly dedicated Garrus shippers out there, while romance is on the table, a gaggle of baby half-Turians is not. Karpyshyn said he's not sure what the "official" BioWare position is these days—he left BioWare, for the second time, in 2018—but in his opinion, inter-species reproduction "wouldn't be possible."

"The various species in Mass Effect are too biologically different to breed with each other," he wrote. "Except Asari, of course... it's part of what made them unique. But that's just my personal take; I don't work on the series anymore so if BioWare wants to have Turi-quar babies, that's their choice."

Karpyshyn covers a lot of ground in the AMA including his own favorite Mass Effect character (no spoilers, but it's not a companion) and why he hopes Mass Effect is never made into a movie. He dips into other topics including the Knights of the Old Republic games, his Star Wars novels, his new novel Time Kings of Las Vegas, and how he got started in the business. All in all, it's a fun read—you can catch the rest of his responses on Reddit.

Amazon is well underway with its two days of price slashing on everything you can imagine, which of course includes a lot of Prime Day PC deals. Until July 13, Prime members can also claim a huge handful of games completely free. 

Prime Gaming gives out in-game treats and full games with some regularity, but this is a pretty big haul of over 30 freebies, headlined by the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which you can only grab through Wednesday.

The Mass Effect trilogy is a big get for a freebie, which I don't need to convince anyone of. For what it's worth, we gave the remaster of the first game in the series a 77% review, calling it a modest improvement, albeit on an already much-loved game.

• Check all Amazon's own Prime Day deals.

It's worth digging into some of the neat picks you may not already know if you claim the collection though. The Darkside Detective, for instance, is one of the best detective games on PC by our count. There's also Serial Cleaner, the stealth action game from 2017 by Draw Distance, which is about to follow it up with the sequel Serial Cleaners (plural) that I'm personally pretty jazzed to try. 

Oh, and Final Fantasy Tactics fans may want to spot tactical turn-based RPG Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, too.

Here's the full list of freebies available today and tomorrow through Prime Gaming:

• Mass Effect Legendary Edition
• Star Wars Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast
• Star Wars Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy
• Star Wars Republic Commando
• Need For Speed Heat
• GRID Legends
• 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure
• Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
• Metal Unit
• Metal Slug 2
• The Crow's Eye
• Samurai Shodown II
• Addling Adventures
• Clouds & Sheep 2
• Fatal Fury Special
• Road Trip
• Gone Viral
• Puzzle of the Year
• Pumped BMX Pro
• Bang Bang Racing
• Death Squared
• The King of Fighters 2002
• The Darkside Detective
• The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark
• 10 Second Ninja X
• Manual Samuel
• HUE
• Serial Cleaner
• The Metronomicon: Slay the Dance Floor
• Rain World
• Maniac Mansion
• Suzerain
• Fishing: North Atlantic
• Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

To take home the bunch, you'll head over to Prime Gaming and log into your Amazon account to claim all those 30+ free games. 

As spotted on the Resetera forums, Eidos-Montréal's executive narrative director Mary DeMarle has joined BioWare as a senior narrative director. DeMarle was most recently responsible for creating the story and leading the writing team on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, which had such excellent back-and-forth patter between its cast we declared it the new king of party banter. Before that, DeMarle oversaw all things Deus Ex, having been lead writer and narrative designer on Deus Ex: Human Revolution before becoming narrative director for the entire franchise.

If you were holding out for a direct continuation of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by the same team following Embracer Group's acquisition of Eidos-Montréal, it might be time to let that dream go. Remakes of the original games may well be step one in Embracer's plans anyway.

DeMarle's other writing credits include Homeworld 2 and both Myst 3: Exile and Myst 4: Revelation, but it's her work on Guardians of the Galaxy that seems most relevant to her new position at BioWare. While the plot of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is hopefully fairly solid at this point, just five months ago BioWare was advertizing for a Narrative Director - Mass Effect position, looking for someone to "Partner with the core leadership to establish the narrative, branching gameplay, and character vision." 

While we don't have a release date for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf yet, we do know the next Mass Effect is even further off. Though a narrative director would have to answer to a creative director, there's still plenty of time for DeMarle to make a mark on BioWare's sci-fi sequel. And those deep-and-meaningful chats between missions in Guardians of the Galaxy sure were reminiscent of Mass Effect at its best, bouncing between witty repartee and some surprisingly moving moments of bonding as they did.

After a dramatic month, comedian and actor Seth Green has finally seen the safe return of his Bored Ape NFT that was stolen during a phishing attack (thanks, Buzzfeed). According to Etherscan records, Green paid 165 Ether (nearly $300,000) in exchange for Bored Ape #8339, which the man who plays Joker in Mass Effect refers to as "Fred Simian." Get it?

Green went to Twitter in May to announce that he "got phished and had 4 NFT stolen." The Family Guy voice actor supposedly fell for a phishing scam that resulted in his OpenSea account being compromised, and his NFTs pilfered, although we can't be certain the whole thing isn't an elaborate marketing scheme for his upcoming show.

The scammer then sold Fred to someone named Mr Cheese (who also goes by DarkWing87) for almost $200K. Green tried contacting Mr Cheese in May to retrieve his stolen Fred.

Mr Cheese claimed that he had no idea he was paying for the stolen property since the NFT wasn't flagged as suspicious at the time. It seems that Green and Mr Cheese came to an agreement even after Mr Cheese told Buzzfeed that he had no plans to return it, but was willing to chat with Seth Green about it. It looks like they settled on almost $300,000 for Fred Simian's return home, which is about $100K more than Mr Cheese originally paid for the NFT. 

Green's Ape still has a "reported for suspicious activity" tag in its OpenSea listing, meaning that the NFT can no longer be bought or sold. This isn't the first time OpenSea has been at the center of bizarre NFT ownership kerfuffles. 

Green claimed his Ape was kidnapped just days before he was set to reveal that it was to be featured in his new animated series, called White Horse Tavern, along with other characters from his NFT collection. With the NFT stolen, the show's development was supposedly paused since Green could longer commercially adapt the NFT because he didn't own it anymore. 

What does the return of Fred mean for Seth Green's show? I guess we will find out soon. The ordeal serves as a good reminder to be careful when opening strange links in emails and other messages, lest the star of your TV show is apenapped, too.

Several months after Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out, modders released a community patch to fix a host of minor bugs and irritations in the remastered version of the first game. A similar community patch for the Legendary Edition's update of Mass Effect 3 followed. But the remastered Mass Effect 2 lacked a similar community patch—until now.

Although the Legendary version of Mass Effect 2 already dealt with the most egregious bugs in the best game in the series (don't @ me), there were still plenty of minor things left for the Unofficial LE2 patch to fix. The lengthy changelog notes a lot of lighting corrections, changes to make NPC uniforms match, fixes for inconsistent skin tones and misaligned props, as well as typos. There are a couple of more notable fixes, however.

If you played the previous game with the LE1 Community Patch installed, creepy Shephard superfan Conrad Verner will now correctly remember how you dealt with him rather than defaulting to the Renegade choice. Individual mods had fixed this oversight before, but it's nice to have it parceled up in the same patch that also ensures asari on the Citadel no longer have human hands.

The changelog description "Communications animation corrected" may not sound like much, but it gets rid of something that's bothered me for years. When characters held two fingers up to their ears in the universal "I'm talking over an earpiece" gesture, if they weren't wearing a helmet they'd still hold their hands a good 10 centimeters away from their heads as if they were. The same bug was present in third game until the LE3 community patch fixed it, and now it's gone here as well I can finally stop gritting my teeth about it.

Several of the minor changes amused me, so here they are for your edification:

• Jacob will not start typing in midair after Shepard breaks up with him. 
• Male quarians can now blink. 
• Hammerhead will no longer scream like an undead nightmare when mining nodes. 
• Legion will correctly reference Shepard's meeting with Sovereign happening on Virmire (rather than on Ilos).
• Restored eyelashes on Normandy crew members, including Ashley and Joker as the most noticeable cases. 
• Shiala's teeth are now visible.

As the Unofficial LE2 Patch's FAQ explains, though its team contains several modders who contributed to the other two games' community patches, they are a separate release group—hence the change in name compared to the LE1 and LE3 Community Patches. Since nobody else seemed to be working on an equivalent for Mass Effect 2, they stepped up.

They also note while this mod will continue being updated to "more comprehensively address smaller aesthetic and QoL issues", they believed it was worth releasing now, as in its current state it's still "a complete, functional bugfix mod."

Time to update our list of the best Mass Effect Legendary Edition mods, I guess.

Back in November, BioWare issued a teaser image for a forthcoming Mass Effect game, depicting four characters walking from a shuttle towards a geth-shaped crater. As of recently, you've been able to purchase a high-quality lithograph of said image, which is so high-quality that, according to its store listing, "no detail is lost, right to the specks of dust and snow." 

But that store listing made a bit of a boo-boo, apparently. According to YouTuber MrHulthen (via VGC), the listing originally alluded to the possible return of Commander Shepard, the beloved protagonist of the original Mass Effect trilogy. The text has been changed since, but when MrHulthen first spotted it, it contained the sentences: “Shepard's final quest may have ended the threat of the Reapers but at great cost including Earth itself. While Shepard and the survivors are left to pick up the pieces, fans are left wondering what’s next.”

Mass Effect fandom being what it is (read: cruelly starved of solid information; in love with Commander Shepard), that little slice of text has led to an outsize amount of speculation. It's understandable, because that sure is a lot of talk about Commander Shepard, and you'd think that a studio like BioWare, knowing its fanbase, would be a little careful playing with expectations. Also, what about poor Commander Ryder? Ryder was alright.

But Michael Gamble, project director on the still-unnamed Mass Effect game, says that it was indeed a mistake. "The original thing was written by the people who run the store and aren't familiar with the game," he wrote, adding a coy smiley face which could—and will—be interpreted in a thousand ways. 

Now the listing is vigilantly unexciting. Aside from some facts about the poster itself, it just reads: "Mass Effect will continue…" And that it will, though as of November last year the game was still in its early stages of development, so that continuation is likely a way off yet. 

Sticking Austin Powers in Mass Effect is one of those ideas that I never knew I wanted until I'd seen it. In October last year the first of these videos appeared out-of-the-blue, putting the playboy and international man of mystery in Bioware's interstellar setting, and frankly it worked because the films are all about silly sex jokes that fit perfectly into Mass Effect's stilted romance conversations.

I still watch this every so often just for the Mako sequence, but the whole thing is amazing.

Now the original video has a sequel, and it's somehow just as good. The highlight here has to be the Geth Colossus sequence, but once again I'm left floored by just how well Austin Powers suits Mass Effect. There's something about all of Bioware's serious sci-fi characters playing it straight while he flounces around that almost makes me wish this was a full movie.

At the very least, if I ever return to these games I'm going to spend hours in the character creator trying to get Shepard as close to the swinging spy as I can.

Massive credit to the excellently named Eli_creator_b.wav, whose various videogame mashups are executed with a technical skill and attention to detail that is uncommon: An hour spent on this channel is a good old time.

Oh and, if seeing Austin Powers in Mass Effect got you horny, why not invest in a Garrus body pillow.

The best Mass Effect mods were treated as a baseline for graphical improvements by BioWare when remastering the games to make the Legendary Edition. The studio also worked with several modders to ensure the new versions of the classic space opera trilogy about the dangers of dating a coworker would be just as tweakable, if not more so. 

Thanks to modding tools and mod management software, they finally are.

To install most of these mods, you'll need the ME3Tweaks Mod Manager. It'll let you modify all three games in the Legendary Edition, and you can use it to mod the original versions as well, though all the links here will be to mods for the remasters. The mod manager also lets you back up each game's important files, and each mod you download can be imported into a library before being applied. 

That makes it easy to enable and disable most mods, but note that texture mods work differently—once they're installed to any of the Mass Effect games, you won't be able to mod it any further. If it's graphical enhancements you're after, make sure you're happy with your loadout before you add a mod like ALOT. Apart from that, load order doesn't have an impact on Mass Effect mods. That sound you just heard is Skyrim modders breathing a sigh of relief.

Unlimited Sprint and Boost Duration

Not everyone noticed it, but in the original Mass Effect games sprinting only made you move faster during combat. The rest of the time, holding down that button simply zoomed the camera out in a dramatic fashion to make it seem like you were going faster while you trundled across the Citadel one more time. (Speedrunners used to drop grenades at their feet so Shepard would take damage, tricking the game into thinking they were in combat to enable the version of sprinting that actually let them actually move faster.)

The Legendary Edition fixes this, and sprinting really does make you go faster. However, it keeps the first two games' absurdly short limit on how far you can run before getting fatigued. The Unlimited Sprint mod extends this duration—it's not really unlimited, but it's such a huge increase to Shepard's stamina you'll rarely hit the end. It also removes the limit on the Mako's boost in ME1.

After downloading gigabytes of enhancements for all three games, I can say with confidence that being able to run further is genuinely the most significant improvement an impatient player can make.

Pinnacle Station DLC

Pinnacle Station was an expansion for the first game developed by an external studio, and thanks to corrupted source code it had to be left out of the Legendary Edition—restoring it would have delayed release by six months. For DLC that was never as beloved as Lair of the Shadow Broker or Citadel, that wasn't worth it. Modders have no such concerns, and Pinnacle Station was rescued from the cutting-room floor by the ME3Tweaks team.

This DLC adds a training facility Shepard can visit to hone their skills while hunting Saren. Inside its simulator you fight virtual enemies in four different modes across several maps, working your way up a ranked ladder. There's a small sidequest involving a soldier accused of hacking the simulator, and an apartment for Shepard to hang out in. 

The modded version actually fixes some bugs present in the original, and enhances it with music and rebalanced fights to suit the Legendary Edition's altered combat. It's quite an achievement.

Galaxy Map Trackers

In ME1, bouncing back and forth between your journal and the galaxy map to figure out where you're supposed to go for various sidequests is just a part of the game. A really tedious part of the game. Galaxy Map Trackers takes away that frustration, putting labels for all those UNC assignments on the map screen. Even ones you haven't triggered yet are on there, marked 'Anomaly'. 

The one downside is that if an assignment happens to be in the same cluster as a main mission, the label for the sidequest takes precedence. You'll have to click around to find out where, say, Feros is. Still, that's probably a lesser annoyance given there are only a handful of story missions in ME1, and they're easier to keep track of than the rest of the game, which is an explosion at the sidequest factory.

Saren Stages

During your final confrontation with Saren he boasts about how Sovereign upgraded him following your fight on Virmire, yet he looks exactly the same throughout the entire game. In retrospect, it's a little odd the Council were so trustful of him when he had a geth arm bolted on. Concept art makes it seem like the intent was for Saren to only look the way he does during the finale, becoming more inhuman each time he appears, and that's what Saren Stages does. 

It comes with an option to give Saren black robes and look more like the concept art in his first scenes, or an option to keep his armored, military look but tone down the mechanical elements.

Expanded Galaxy Mod

A major overhaul of the Normandy and the things you can do on it in ME3, Expanded Galaxy adds a firing range to the ship, lets you assign secondary officer positions as well as medics, marines, and engineers, gives squadmates extra casual outfits to wear, and more. (The complimentary EGM Armors, as the name suggests, adds additional armors.) 

EGM's quality-of-life improvements include one that lets you choose whether you have to slow down every time you pass through the scanner or not, and that alone makes it essential for me. The tweak that makes Shepard hold the right weapon in cutscenes is compatible with ME2 as well.

Skip Minigames (LE1)

If you're annoyed by having to play Circle Frogger in ME1 whenever you're examining an alien artifact or hacking a door, this mod removes it. When you open a locked container you'll get the option to play the game or bypass it with omni-gel as normal, except the omni-gel cost will be reduced to zero. You still get XP though, so you won't be under-leveled just because you're lazy. 

Minigames that are mission-related remain, so you'll still have to do the Towers of Hanoi puzzle on Noveria, and it'll cost omni-gel to bypass the minigames when activating the transmission tower and deactivating fusion torches in Bring Down the Sky. But most of the time, you'll be able to ignore them.

There's Skip Minigames for LE2 as well, if ME2's hacking games are the ones you want to do away with. You can get rid of them entirely, or have the hacking screen pop up as normal but defeat it with a single click if you find that more satisfying.

One Probe All Resources

In a similar vein, One Probe All Resources trivializes Mass Effect 2's planet-scanning. I once met a couple who played ME2 together, passing the controls back and forth because one of them enjoyed the combat while the other enjoyed the meditative planet-scanning. If it's not your thing though, this mod lets you deplete every resource on a planet as well as bring up any anomalies on its surface with a single probe. The heightened graphs showing every resource you'll receive all at once, peaking so high they kind of break the UI, are pretty great.

Photo Mode QoL (LE1)

Photo mode is neat, but it sure would be nice to be able to move the camera further away. With this mod for ME1, you can. There's also Improved Photo Mode (LE2) and Improved Photo Mode (LE3) for the sequels. All three disable collision, and let you speed up the camera with the number pad: pressing 2 sets it to double speed, 3 to triple, and 1 returns it to default.

Vignette Remover

Being able to turn off Mass Effect's vignetting in the photo mode—that's the thing that darkens the corners of the screen to draw your eyes to the center—makes it plain how aggressively the effect is deployed in these games. If it bugs you the way lens flare, chromatic aberration, motion blur, depth of field, and all the other cinematic graphical effects seem to bug people, Vignette Remover does away with it. 

Audemus' Happy Ending

(Spoilers for ME3 ahead.) The Happy Ending mod is kind of misnamed, given that it reinstates cut dialogue to extend Admiral Anderson's dying words and make that scene even sadder than it already was—there's a standalone mod called Anderson's Final Conversation Restored if that's the only change you want. 

As well as that, this mod snips out the Catalyst, aka the Starchild, simply having Shepard press a button to initiate the ending where all the reapers are destroyed (you know, the red one) as it plays out if you have a high enough Effective Military Strength score to see the epilogue where Shepard survives.

The mod also deletes the scenes of the Normandy crashing on a random garden world, and any suggestion that the mass relays were damaged. It gets rid of the more controversial elements of the ending, but if your beef was that so much went unexplained then The Unofficial Mass Effect 3 Epilogue Slides may be for you. It's not a mod, just a website that asks for some details on your playthrough and then presents page after page of fan-written follow-ups to fill in the blanks regarding the state of the galaxy and all your companions following the finale.

LE1 Community Patch

The community patch compiles a huge number of bugfixes for ME1. Did you know the Legendary Edition got rid of the twinkIing on the galaxy map that guided you toward unmarked points of interest in the asteroid belts? With this mod, it's back. There's also Unofficial LE2 Patch for the second game and LE3 Community Patch for the third game. 

A Lot of Textures and A Lot of Videos

If the Legendary Edition's graphics aren't improved enough for you, these mods push them even further. To install A Lot of Textures, you'll need a separate program called MassEffectModder. It'll take a while to install both the textures and the upscaled static lighting, which are available as a separate file for each game. Thanks to the way these games work, once you're done that'll be it for mods—you won't be able to install any more for whichever games you've retextured unless you first delete the game folder and reinstall it from scratch.

A Lot of Videos is an easier installation, working through ME3Tweaks like the other mods in this list. It swaps the pre-rendered cutscenes for 4K versions, which run at 60fps instead of 30. Even if you don't have a 4K monitor, the increased framerate's a nice bonus.

Fanciful EDI Armor Variations for FemShep

Commander Shepard as Green Lantern? It just makes sense. Captain Marvel too. I'm not so convinced about the Harley Quinn outfit, however. This mod for ME2 and ME3 includes heaps of new outfits for FemShep to wear, mostly based on superheroes, some of them bordering on the NSFW. If you want to look like Samus from Metroid, here you go. You'll need to install Invisible Vanilla Armor Parts (LE2) and Invisible Vanilla Armor Parts (LE3) first.

Among Us Reapers

While we're at the sillier end of the modding spectrum, here's one that replaces ME3's reapers with imposters from Among Us. If you'd prefer something more classic, here's a mod to swap them for Thomas the Tank Engine. While you're at it, why not replace the font for all ME2's text with comic sans, you absolute monster? OK, we're done here.

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the uproar of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy. For those who were fortunate enough to miss it, the crash course version is that after dozens of hours across a sprawling RPG trilogy, the ending of Commander Shepard's epic came down to a relatively simplistic trinary choice that was almost wholly removed from the player's journey up to that point.

It's difficult to overstate just how big a deal this was, not just for Mass Effect fans but on gaming culture as a whole. The blowback was fierce enough that BioWare actually released an Extended Cut DLC aiming to provide "more closure with even more context and clarity," and an ending that "will feel more personalized for each player." It was definitely an improvement, but the outcomes were still rather grim.

That's where the Mass Effect 3 Happy Ending mod comes into play—and if you don't want to be spoiled, I suggest you stop reading here, because they're coming. The mod makes a number of changes to the big finish of Mass Effect 3 by canonizing a specific ending, cutting some content to make the narrative work, keeping the geth and EDI alive, and of course ensuring that Shepard survives and is reunited with their crew—including their love interest.

The original mod is still available, but unfortunately it's not compatible with the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The good news for people who enjoy happy endings is that a reworked version, called Audemus' Happy Ending Mod, is—you can snag it now from Nexus Mods.

Audemus' Happy Ending Mod is described as a "spiritual successor" to the original, and is actually closer to JohnP's Alternate MEHEM mod, a rework of the original Happy Ending that incorporates the Extended Cut content. But the net result is essentially the same: It eliminates the Catalyst, preserves the Citadel and Mass Effect Relay Network, and of course keeps Commander Shepard—and their love interest, if applicable—alive.

It's also been designed to incorporate a Legendary Edition-compatible version of the Citadel Epilogue Mod, which turns the outstanding Citadel DLC—"a sweet, funny goodbye hug for long-term fans of the series"—into a Mass Effect 3 epilogue. The makers of Audemus' Happy Ending Mod are currently working on that and expect to have it out later this year.

Personally, I don't think the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy was quite the crime against humanity that some players made it out to be. A little disappointing, maybe, but not nearly enough of a letdown to negate countless hours of entertainment in one of the most wonderfully well-realized sci-fi universes I've ever encountered. That said, I do very much prefer happy endings over sad ones, and I think that if I ever get around to playing the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, I'll likely do it with this mod installed.

While the first three Mass Effect games were all made with versions of Unreal Engine 3, BioWare began using EA's in-house Frostbite engine for all its games after that. The transition wasn't easy—the first two Dragon Age games had been made with versions of the studio's own Eclipse Engine, and according to Mike Laidlaw that change was why Dragon Age 2's expansion Exalted March had to be cancelled. It's also been blamed for some of Mass Effect: Andromeda's problems, due to both the extra work switching engines created and specific areas where Frostbite was lacking related to animations, map sizes, save systems, and so on.

That's why it's significant a producer at BioWare signal-boosted a job listing for an associate technical director by saying, "BioWare is hiring talented programmers with UE4/5 experience! Come, join our team and work with us on the next Mass Effect game!" A job listing for a franchise director (now taken down), described as "the most senior engineering lead on the next instalment in BioWare’s acclaimed Mass Effect franchise", also included a note that "Experience with UnrealEngine4+ is an asset" even though the EA boilerplate at the top of the listing said, "Our teams drive innovation using cutting-edge tech and tools such as the Frostbite engine". 

Prolific leaker Jeff Grubb claimed it's Unreal Engine 5 specifically being used on the next Mass Effect, "And this was a choice made by the team putting the game together, which is how it should work." The Matrix Awakens UE5 demo was apparently quite impressive, not that I'd know since it wasn't made available on PC.

While returning to the Unreal Engine's loving arms wouldn't necessarily prevent a future Mass Effect game from suffering all the problems Mass Effect: Andromeda did (it wouldn't liven up a cast of bland companions, for instance), it probably won't hurt. The next Dragon Age game is reportedly still being made with Frostbite, however, as Dragon Age: Inquisition was.

Here's everything we know about the next Mass Effect so far.

Thanks, WindowsCentral. 

It was revealed earlier this week that Amazon Studios is "nearing a deal" to make a new series based on EA's Mass Effect games. No details beyond that "maybe it's happening" report have been shared as of yet, but the mere possibility of its existence was enough to grab the attention of a few former developers.

Interestingly, one of the first to react was longtime BioWare writer David Gaider, the lead writer on the Dragon Age series, who said the prospect of the show makes him "cringe just a little."

"For starters, ME and DA have a custom protagonist. Meaning said TV show will need to pick whether said protagonist will be male or female," Gaider explained. "Boom, right off the bat you've just alienated a whole bunch of the built-in fan base who had their hopes up."

"Secondly, those protagonists are designed to be a bit of a blank slate, one that the player fills out with their decisions. That's not going to work for a passive medium. So, suddenly, the protagonist will have their own personality... and their own *story*. That will be weird."

Gaider made the rather interesting point that Shepard is actually "pretty boring" on their own, and that the bulk of Mass Effect's "emotional engagement" is actually drawn through companions. But there's no way to include them all equally, even in the more open and accessible medium of a television show, which means that fans of some characters—such as, say, Zaeed Massani, the coolest man in space—are bound to be disappointed. And even with more supporting characters getting screen time, the show will have to focus on just a few of them—as the games do—in order to "maintain coherence."

Rather than trying to adapt the games directly, Gaider said the better option is to do a separate, new story in the Mass Effect setting. He also later clarified that he didn't mean to suggest that he hates the idea of a Mass Effect series, "just that it faces some big challenges."

A couple of other former developers were more upbeat about the show's prospects, however. Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer on the first two Mass Effect games and author of three Mass Effect novels, said on Twitter that he's not involved in the project, but would very much like to be: "Happy to consult if they want my input," he wrote.

Composer Sam Hulick, who contributed to the soundtracks of all three games in the original trilogy, threw his hat into the ring as well.

I think Gaider's points are valid, although producers may be gun-shy about straying too far from the original trilogy after the wipeout of Mass Effect: Andromeda. But interest in the series is clearly still strong, and it's possible that the new Mass Effect game in development at BioWare could open doors to more and better tie-in storytelling options than Shepard's concluded saga. 

And if Henry Cavill is actually involved? You can consider us very interested in that.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

The Wheel of Time series, which debuted on November 19, has apparently been a success for Amazon Prime. That's why, Deadline reports, Amazon Studios is doubling down on adaptations—among them, a potential Mass Effect TV show. "Amazon Studios is nearing a deal to develop a series based on the best-selling sci-fi video game franchise from Electronic Arts", as Deadline puts it.

Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, said the Lord of the Rings prequel series debuting on Amazon Prime next September (which is confusingly not allowed to reference The Silmarillion, the Lord of the Rings prequel that already exists) is part of the same commitment to adaptations. "We know our global audience is hungry for elevated fantasy and shows based on beloved IP", she said.

"You will see us continuing to invest in fantasy genre of all kinds, we have a genre-focused team on the ground in Studios who work tirelessly with our creative partners on those slates, and you can look forward to more," according to Salke.

Mass Effect would probably be more suited to an ongoing series than a movie adaptation, like the one that was planned and then abandoned after Legendary Pictures picked up the rights back in 2010. Explaining why the movie never did get made, BioWare's Mac Walters said, "If you're going to tell a story that's as fleshed out as 'Mass Effect,' TV is the way to do it. There's a natural way it fits well with episodic content." 

The games have a fair bit of Star Trek and Babylon 5 in their DNA, and Walters said that writing Mass Effect was a lot like writing TV. "When we build out a 'Mass Effect' game, we have a backbone, or an overall story that we want to tell, but each level or mission is like its own TV episode," he said. "It doesn't get written ahead of time. It gets written at the time that we get to it. So it gets added to the main story and sometimes the main story gets adjusted because we did something really cool in that 'episode.'"

November 7 is N7 Day, when the Mass Effect community comes together to celebrate the series. In previous years BioWare has been involved to varying degrees, last year using the occasion to announce Mass Effect Legendary Edition and confirm a new Mass Effect is in development. This year was a more muted affair on the official side of things, with BioWare presumably heads-down working on Dragon Age 4, though it did share a teaser image declaring "Mass Effect will continue".

The picture shows a squad of four characters leaving a shuttle to walk toward a crater that resembles a geth's face from above. Looking up close one of those four is a krogan, and they're walking toward what might be geth embedded in the ground. Is it Legion? I'm sure fans will pick apart the details in the days ahead and see what other hints it contains about the next Mass Effect.

BioWare also provided a blog post to that includes a deeper look at player data from the Legendary Edition. While a previous infographic showed basic Bro Shep soldier's popularity, this one focuses on some more surprising stats, like the fact that 15% of players did not recruit Garrus in the first game. (While it's possible to simply miss him by doing things in a specific order, I suspect a bunch of folk replaying the series deliberately dodge Garrus to see how different it is without him.) 

The infographic shows—spoilers for Mass Effect 3— that the most popular ending choice was Destroy, with 45% of players callously deleting EDI and the geth to get rid of the reapers. Synthesis was the second-most popular at 30%, with only 17% of people choosing to sensibly ascend to immortality and use the reapers to clean up their mess in Control. Meanwhile, 8% of players were contrarian enough to pick Refusal.

The post also notes that Mass Effect emoticons have been added to Steam's points store, there's a Mass Effect section on Giphy, Soylent Cosplay put together an official guide for cosplaying Liara, and the Legendary Edition is on sale at Steam, Origin, and the Microsoft Store. It finishes with an obligatory note that "We are, of course, hard at work on the next adventure in the Mass Effect universe." 

On the unofficial side of N7 Day, modders have restored the lost Pinnacle Station DLC. Other mods released today include one that makes it clearer which of Mass Effect 2's dialogue options are flirting, and one that lets you continue playing after losing your entire squad in the suicide mission.

"I typically measure the difficulty of a task by the number of aneurysms it gives me", says Mgamerz, head of the ME3Tweaks modding group. "This project definitely has given me the most out of all my projects I've done before."

That project is restoring of Pinnacle Station, an add-on for the original Mass Effect left out of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The source code had been corrupted, and as game director Mac Walters explained, restoring it would have significantly delayed the Legendary Edition. "It would basically take us another full six months just to do this with most of the team we've got," Walters told Game Informer. "I wish we could do it. Honestly, just because this is meant to be everything that the team ever created, brought together again—all the singleplayer content. And so, leaving it all on the cutting-room floor, it was heartbreaking."

The ME3Tweaks modding crew, Mgamerz, SirCxyrtyx, Kinkojiro, and HenBagle, set out to fix that omission. It was possible thanks to Legendary Explorer, a mod-making tool they maintain, which lets modders extract and repack assets from Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and edit everything from in-game text to pathfinding. It's a successor to ME3Explorer, a similar toolset that began as a 'creation kit' for modders who wanted to change Mass Effect 3's ending. "While this specific project is a few months old," says SirCxyrtyx, the longest-serving member of the modding toolset's development group, "it's in some ways the culmination of almost a decade of work on making the Mass Effect trilogy moddable."

The Legendary Explorer gave them an advantage over BioWare. "I'm fairly certain their tools are unable to work on the compiled files like ours have to," Mgamerz says, "since their tools are designed to be used with the source assets. I imagine that the loss of the source audio though was what ultimately doomed any chance of this DLC being recreated. Well, that and it's typically at the bottom of players' list of favorite DLCs."

It's true that Pinnacle Station isn't the most-loved Mass Effect add-on. It added a training facility where Shepard could compete in simulated battles, a short mission to find out if someone else was tampering with the simulator, and an apartment to be your home away from home. Where the best of the later expansions like Lair of the Shadow Broker and Citadel exceeded the games they grew from, Pinnacle Station was just an extension of what Mass Effect already offered.

That doesn't mean nobody liked it, of course. "I'm actually quite a big fan of the DLC", says HenBagle, whose first Mass Effect mod was a Pinnacle Station tweak, and more recently worked on the ME1 Community Patch. "The station and the apartment are super cool areas, and the game modes are clever as well." 

The mod has a few improvements over the original Pinnacle Station. "It's definitely feeling better than the original version when I've had to run comparisons between the two for testing", says Mgamerz. "While this is a 'port', we’ve put in considerable effort to improve the quality of life of the combat. For example, adding music to the level has had a pretty profound effect on making it feel more engaging. The original audio experience felt terrible, you essentially shot silent meatbags while Ahern yells at you."

Some of the modes and maps have had their difficulty retuned in response to feedback from testers, since combat is fairly different in the Legendary Edition—and often easier. As Mgamerz says, "this is Mass Effect 1 AI we're fighting. It’s about as smart as a can of beans. Things only in Legendary Edition, like being able to run much more often, have a significant effect on the difficulty."

As well as updating Pinnacle Station, the modders updated the tools they were using to work with it. HenBagle says, "we re-wrote a section of our Asset Database tool to make it easier for us to find replacement materials and textures. We love making improvements such as these, because they can boost the productivity of everyone who mods Mass Effect, not just the ME3Tweaks team."

"I built a 'donor' system", Mgamerz says, "given an object path in the original game, this system looks for the same named object in the Legendary version of the game, which if found, is then used in the converted file instead. This means we just pull LE versions of assets like meshes, sounds, etc, because porting everything would likely be impossible. The DLC is probably about 95% assets from the main game."

"Most of the assets are repurposed from elsewhere in LE1," SirCxyrtyx adds, "but all the objects that define the level (the lights, the locations of all the meshes, etc) and the gameplay (UE3's Kismet visual scripting) had to be converted." The original and remastered versions of Mass Effect run on different versions of Unreal Engine 3, which meant all of those objects were saved in different formats. For the sake of compatibility with all the games in the series, Legendary Explorer can edit files from seven different versions of UE3, automatically resolving format differences. "That's the result of many years of reverse-engineering effort, and it allowed us to focus our efforts on the comparatively small number of object types that were significantly different between the games."

So even though a lot of Pinnacle Station was built with existing Mass Effect assets, that didn't make it an easy task. "The single item that sticks out for me is Terrains," says Kinkojiro, creator of the Expanded Galaxy mod. "These are the assets that give ME1 its undulating mountains that the Mako famously struggles with. In Pinnacle Station they are much smaller, for example the ground of the Volcano level, but we had no alternative to replace them. Terrains are not really used in the later games, nor later editions of Unreal Engine and no ME modder had looked at them before. They are very large and complicated assets. We had to completely reverse engineer how they worked and then figure out how BioWare had changed them for LE. They caused most of the biggest headaches, not just because of the psychedelic effects they create when not working."

"We found a lot of problems with the original DLC," Mgamerz says, "so we've been fixing the ones users are most likely to encounter." They includes an area with invisible walls you could get trapped in, geth eye-lights floating above their heads, turians in the combat simulator not having holographic faceplates, an incorrect texture for an NPC's armor, and texture pop-in that's been minimized by streaming them ahead of time. "While this is a port, I also consider it a mod," Mgamerz says, "so I want to make sure users get more than just 'Pinnacle Station ported to LE'. We've put in considerable extra effort to make sure this DLC is built more like an official release."

The finished mod is available to download from NexusMods.

YouTube's People Make Games asked several ex-BioWare developers who worked on Mass Effect 3 how they felt about the endings, and in particular about putting together the Extended Cut—an update that expanded on the endings and addressed some of the many complaints players had. It's a great video and worth a watch, especially for the section where it highlights the additional crunch developers had to go through to pull the Extended Cut together, after already crunching to complete Mass Effect 3.

But before that, it also explains that during development much of the team didn't know how Mass Effect 3 would end. "A lot of us didn't have a whole lot of high visibility into what the ending was actually gonna be," says cinematic designer John Ebenger. Gameplay designer Manveer Heir explains the ending "came in really late" and for a long time before that, only an animatic—the video equivalent of a storyboard—existed.

While we've previously heard about a version of Mass Effect 3's ending planned by Drew Karpyshyn before leaving BioWare, this animatic version seems to have been created after that, and remained in place until the actual ending was written. It's got a lot of similarities to the ending we ended up with, but also some significant differences. Like, instead of the Catalyst, aka the Star Child, the annoying AI who shows up with a reductionist take on the inevitability of conflict between synthetic and organic life at the finale, there was a Reaper Queen.

This ending begins with Shepard arriving on the Citadel, which has fused with the mysterious superweapon called the Crucible, and jacking in. As animation director Dave Wilkinson puts it, "At that point Shepard was so augmented with like electronical bits and all the rest of that kind of shit, I actually had him just plug himself into the Citadel." Shepard enters "a virtual world" and meets what was described in the notes by project lead Casey Hudson that Wilkinson was working from as "like the God of the Reapers. I think it was a queen?" 

The Queen explains that she's been imprisoned by her servants for arguing that their cyclical destruction of civilizations wasn't sustainable. She'd say, "'We have to evolve, but we're incapable of evolution because of the limitations of our AI,' and stuff like that. She was their queen, but she proposed things the reapers didn't like, so they locked her away inside the Citadel and just never ever listened to her again. And so the conversation was her going, 'This is a chance to evolve everything. Like, we can move everything forward.'"

From there, players would have the traditional three options for their preferred flavor of ending. "The renegade option was, Shepard's just like, 'Go fuck yourself.'" After that, Shepard leaves the simulation, and sets off the Crucible by blowing up the Citadel. This destroys the reapers, though at great cost—not the loss of all synthetic life, as in the final game's Destroy ending, but rather the Earth being wiped out in the explosion.

"And the paragon option," Wilkinson says, "was 'I'm so awesome I can take control of these reapers and I'll use them for the right reasons.' So then you, Shepard, turned into the big King Reaper. You still said 'fuck you' to the Queen." From there, it's pretty similar to the Control ending, with Shepard using the reapers for good.

The final option was the Synthesis ending, but instead of being the most difficult to obtain, and therefore coded as the 'best' option, it would be "the ending everybody could get", with the others presumably relying on how many paragon or renegade points you earned. As Wilkinson says, in this ending "the Queen was like, 'We're gonna use space magic, and we're gonna combine the best parts of you and the best parts of me and we're gonna send that out to the universe and it's gonna change everything." Which sounds just as nonsensical as the version we got.

Wilkinson doesn't mention whether these endings would involve the mass relays seeming to be destroyed, or the Normandy crashing on a random garden world that happens to be nearby, but otherwise these endings broadly map to the ones the finished game had. Still, not having the AI that looks like a ghost kid and makes a weaksauce argument that synthetics and organics are doomed to never get along seems like it would have gone down at least a little better.

"Is this the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy?"

"That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy."

So begins one of the best and most unexpected gaming mashups I've ever seen. It's been years since I've watched them and your mileage may vary, but the Austin Powers films were mostly hilarious. Youtuber and memester eli_handle_b (nice Half-Life reference) had a simple idea: what if, instead of Captain Shephard, Mass Effect featured international man of mystery and part-time secret agent from the 1960s, Austin Powers?

There's so much to love here, from the short Mako tribute to the absolutely brilliant catalyst scene, and what's funny is how well Powers can fit into Mass Effect's often rather silly universe. The character's unique approach to sexuality is supposed to be cringeworthy and, frankly, a bunch of the Mass Effect romance dialogue (as demonstrated here) is also quite cringey. Things like the dancing are almost made-to-measure, and the fact that eli_handle_b manages to get a decent approximation of Mass Effect's arc into 85 seconds is totally groovy.

If nothing else, you have to see the reporter scene.

The creator's done a few other gaming videos so, if you also want to see Patrick Bateman in Fallout 4, you're covered. And if seeing Austin Powers in Mass Effect got you horny, why not invest in a Garrus body pillow.

A year before Mass Effect came out, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion gave us the Adoring Fan. Become grand champion of the arena and he follows you around offering backrubs and getting in the way. Everyone hated him. Mass Effect's Conrad Verner seemed like another Adoring Fan, so we were destined to hate him too. 

A dweeb with a terrible goatee, he hangs out on the Citadel trying to get your attention. First he wants an autograph, then a photo, then he wants you to recruit him as a Spectre so you can work side by side as equals. That escalated quickly?

Playing the trilogy for the first time, with a couple of years separating ME2 and ME3, I forgot Verner's deal between games. Seeing him return in each one was a shrug emoji kind of situation. When I replayed the series back-to-back a few years later, I didn't finish his quest in ME1 and never saw him again. Only now, marching through the trilogy a third time in the Legendary Edition, do I finally appreciate Conrad Verner.

Part of Verner's value is that he illustrates your rise. He's impressed the first time you meet, when you're the hero who shot up "a hundred geth". By the next time you see him you've become a Spectre—a special agent with frankly obscene extrajudicial powers. Verner's clumsy salute and blathering praise make you feel a little puffed up. "This guy who already thought I was hot shit is surprised by what I've managed. Maybe I am pretty great?"

Verner has to push it though, and when he starts trying to talk his way into your crew, enough is enough. I'm not going to let someone even less cool than Kaidan on board, come on. (Sorry, Kaidan.) The renegade option has Shepard threaten Verner at gunpoint, because that's Renegade Shepard's solution to basically everything in the first game. The paragon choice is to talk him down, to remember the wife he's mentioned and explain that he should stay behind for the sake of his family. You need people like him on the home front to remind you what you're fighting for.

Not that this choice matters in Mass Effect 2. Thanks to a bug, both the renegade and paragon flags get set in your save file whichever you choose, and the renegade one takes precedence. That's why in ME2 Verner accuses you of pointing the gun at him no matter what you did, even in the Legendary Edition (though there are mods to fix that).

Between games you spent a year dead for tax purposes, and during that time Verner ignored your advice, bought a replica suit of N7 armor, and has been cosplaying as a videogame hero to fill the gap you left. There's a meta joke about how he wanders around asking random people if they need help, just like you, which in his case ends with him caught up in a conflict over the ownership of a bar. This becomes your problem, like everything else in the dang galaxy, and once again Paragon Shepard tries to talk Verner into going home. (Renegade Shepard shoots him in the foot.)

In Mass Effect 3 Verner's found among the Citadel's dockside refugees. Having heard you were working for Cerberus, he tried to join the organization and was manipulated into being a distraction while they sabotaged some nearby medical stations. Verner's goofed again, though this time at least he realizes it and apologizes. He also apologizes for accusing you of pointing a gun at him that one time, "when you didn't actually do that. I was really stressed out." (This line is why BioWare didn't bother fixing the save file bug in the Legendary Edition, I guess.)

When Verner asks if there's anything he can do to make up for his mistake, Shepard snarks at him, even if you've been a patient paragon till now. "Conrad, I'm building an ancient prothean dark-energy device to stop the reapers. Can you help with that?" 

This is when Verner tells you he wrote his doctoral dissertation on xenotechnology and dark-energy integration. 

Across three games, all the time you've known Verner, you never once asked what he does for a living. Turns out he's an expert on alien technology. What follows is an amazing pay-off for this string of sidequests that ropes in other sidequests from just as far back. Verner checks with an academic colleague who has some schematics for ancient tech that might be useful, and that colleague happens to be one of the colonists from Feros in the first game. If you helped that guy retrieve his data back then, he repays the favor now. 

It continues with Shepard and Verner coordinating resources back and forth as they make calls and bring up their computer screens. "Oh no," he says, "the schematics are in an ancient asari dialect!" "Would this collection of asari matriarch collectibles I spent way too long scrounging for in the first game help?" "Why yes, they would! But the schematics are also patented by Elkoss Combine and I don't have a licence." "No worries, I bought one of those in the first game as well." "What an amazing coincidence!"

If you've been enough of a completionist to collect everything you need, that hard work is satisfyingly acknowledged here, and Verner finally gets to be useful. You wrap up your conference call, click on him a few more times to hear some bonus metatextual gags, find out that he never actually had a wife but does have a "tasteful" shrine to you, and then wander off to repair the sabotage and complete this silly sidequest.

At which point, Verner reappears. He's spotted the Cerberus agent who tricked him, and shouts, "You're under arrest!" The agent turns, drawing his gun. And then spots a better target: Commander Shepard. 

Realizing what's about to happen, Verner slow-motion dives in front of you as the gun goes off, then falls to the floor. You deck the agent, then rush back to where Verner fell. In that moment, kneeling over him, I felt awful for disrespecting Verner. I underestimated him. I even compared him to the Adoring Fan.

But Mass Effect isn't done fucking with you yet. There's one last sidequest from the first game with a pay-off yet to come. If you helped Jenna—a waitress at the Chora's Den strip club secretly working as an informant—she returns out of the blue to explain she saw what was happening and used an old trick she learned from those days to sabotage the agent's gun. Verner lives, and not only that, Jenna's so impressed by his bravery that the two walk off together into an oddball happy ending.

This chain of events has a wild amount of reactivity, so many small decisions from across the series remembered here, almost as if to apologize for that one moment of forgetfulness brought about by a save game bug. 

ME3 isn't always great at respecting the decisions you made earlier in the trilogy—if you chose to replace the Citadel Council with humans they're aliens again, and if you chose to have the comically slimy Councillor Udina replaced by Keith David like a sensible person, then Udina's nevertheless back on the Council for reasons you have to look in the Codex to find. And yet, in this one missable sidequest, Verner's story is altered because of everything you've done. 

It's a moment where Mass Effect lives up to its promise, the idea that this is your Shepard, with all your choices—even small ones—gaining relevance and significance in the end.

The Mission Complete pop-ups appear and a new war asset is unlocked. Verner's dark energy dissertation helps you build your superweapon and adds to your military strength. Mass Effect has one last gag, though. Next time you check your war assets for the details, you see the reward for perfectly combining everything you needed for this mission, for the work you did stretching across the entire trilogy, is five measly points of military strength.

It's enough to make you consider going back to shoot Conrad Verner in the foot.

Warning: the above video gets very loud about ten seconds in, watch those speakers. It shows a new mod for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the basic description for which is straight-to-the-point: "This mod turns all Sovereign-class reapers in Mass Effect 3 into Among Us imposters."

Okay I guess. The reaper capital ships are one of Mass Effect 3's great spectacles, two kilometre high battleships with a giant cannon that can take vast amounts of punishment. Why they're now giant Imposters stomping around like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man... well, creator and regular Mass Effect modder Mentlegen went straight for a copypasta explanation, which I think first appeared on reddit about seven months ago in Among Us flavour, but has been around the internet a lot longer.

I'll spare you the whole thing but, as mod descriptions go, this does some sterling work. "I can't fucking take it. I see an image of a random object posted and then I see it, I fucking see it. 'Oh that looks kinda like the Among Us guy' it started as. That's funny, that's a cool reference. But I kept going, I'd see a fridge that looked like Among Us, I'd see an animated bag of chips that looked like Among Us, I'd see a hat that looked like Among Us. And every time I'd burst into an insane, breath-deprived laugh staring at the image as the words AMOGUS ran through my head."

"I'll never hear the word suspicious again without thinking of Among Us. Someone does something bad and I can't say anything other than 'sus.' I could watch a man murder everyone I love and all I would be able to say is 'red sus' and laugh like a fucking insane person."

So that's why the reapers are imposters now: all for the love of memes. Unsurprisingly the mod cites Thomas the Reaper Engine as an inspiration, a mod that (you guessed it) turns all the capital ships into Thomas the Tank Engine.

Before the descent into seeing Imposters everywhere Mentlegen's been a regular modder of Mass Effect, including the More Gay Romances mod and allowing players to access unused romance options across the series. The game continues to receive mods large and small tweaking and adding elements to this beloved space opera, though admittedly few have come with descriptions quite as good as this.