As part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, there is no multiplayer component at all. A decision that Project Director Mac Walters talked about in detail in an interview.
As officially confirmed recently, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be available for consoles and PC from May 14, 2021. While on the one hand, all three classic Mass Effect adventures with the associated updates and DLCs are on board, on the other hand, the multiplayer mode of Mass Effect 3 was completely dispensed with.
A decision that, according to Project Director Mac Walters, was made consciously, as the resources necessary for the multiplayer flowed into the preparation of the single-player adventure. As it is said, an implementation of the multiplayer would be associated with numerous challenges.
“You look at everything from what you do with cross-play–because that’s kind of an expectation now–what do we do with people who are still playing multiplayer now, how do we honor that, how do we bring them in, can we somehow bridge that gap? And, of course, these aren’t insurmountable challenges–they’re all things that we could do to fix that problem and get multiplayer in there,” said Walters.
The project leader said: “But when you look at the amount of effort that it was going to take to do that, it was easily commensurate if not greater than uplifting all of Mass Effect 1. And I think our focus really was on the single-player experience and, at some point, we just had to draw the line. I love Mass Effect 3 multiplayer–and like I said, people are still playing it today, but ultimately the product, the overall Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, is a better representation of the original trilogy because we were able to focus on those single-player moments.”
The Mass Effect Legendary Edition will release on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 and, thanks to the support of backwards compatibility, it can also be played on the new PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S consoles.