Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be including Mass Effect 3‘s Extended Cut ending as the default, canon ending. According to VG24/7, players won’t be able to experience the original shorter and more controversial ending at all. Another thing players won’t be able to experience is the Pinnacle Station DLC as this won’t be one of the 40 DLCs included in the Legendary Edition package.
When Mass Effect 3 was first released, it had a controversial ending that left unanswered questions and many fans asking for more. To soothe the outcry, BioWare added an Extended Cut ending, which expanded on the endings with additional scenes and epilogue sequences. This ending will be the default, canon ending in the Legendary Edition, with fans no longer being able to view the game’s original truncated ending. Project Director Mac Walters explains why:
We wanted to include as much of the content as possible as DLC, and then also incorporate it into the experience as you would if you’d downloaded that content. For those people who had the extended cut, that sort of became the experience for them, and so that will be the experience for everybody playing the Legendary Edition as well.
Ultimately, y’know… you finish a game and there’s things that you wished you had been able to do, things that you’d want to add on… for me, the extended cut was really that opportunity to add a little bit more love, a little bit more context around the ending. So to me, that is part of the canon.
The Legendary Edition will include the single-player base content and more than 40 DLCs from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3. One DLC that will be missing, though, is Pinnacle Station. As GameInformer explains, this is because the DLC’s source code has become corrupted, the same reason PlayStation 3 players weren’t able to experience the DLC when the game was released on that platform. Even the studio that originally created the DLC, Demiurge Studios, was unable to provide a backup because their data had been corrupted too.
Pinnacle Station could only be included if the team was to remake it from scratch, a process that would take an additional six months. To leave out the content was a decision Walters called “heartbreaking”, but delaying the game purely for this reason would not have made sense. Extra development time is a reason why the game’s multiplayer will not be included either. To do so would have meant the team trying to find a way to implement cross-play between PS3 and PS4, as well as trying to create a great experience for both new players and those still playing the original multiplayer today.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is set to release on May 14 on PlayStation 4. The title will have forward compatibility on PlayStation 5, including performance enhancements for the next-gen console.
[Source: VG24/7, GameInformer)
