Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Release Date And Trailer Revealed

BioWare and EA have at long last taken the wraps off of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the upcoming remaster of the original trilogy. That includes confirming the release date--Legendary Edition launches on May 14 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with backwards compatibility current-gen consoles--and revealing a new trailer, which you can check out below.

All three games in the core series--Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3--will be available in the package, along with over 40 pieces of downloadable content, including special weapon and armor packs, campaign expansions, and more. All of this will be playable in 4K with HDR. Each game has been given a fresh coat of paint, with character models improved, high-resolution textures, new lighting, depth-of-field, and other visual bells and whistles. You can get more info in our article detailing all the changes in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

"It's been an incredible journey revisiting the stories, characters and iconic moments of the Mass Effect trilogy, enhancing the experience for modern platforms while staying true to the spirit of the original," said project director Mac Walters. "Remastering a game, let alone three, is a huge undertaking as there's over 100 hours of gameplay included, but we wanted to do this for our fans as well as a new generation of gamers looking to jump into the iconic story of Shepard."

In addition to launching on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, the console versions will be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S through backwards compatibility. Playing on those consoles will come with the benefit of improved loading times. This benefit is seen on basically every last-gen game because of the newer systems' ultra-fast NVMe SSDs.

We recently attended a preview event with BioWare, where Legendary Edition game director Mac Walters said that the remaster is a welcome second chance to take another stab at Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

"It's probably no surprise to everyone that's here today, that fans of the trilogy, that fans of the franchise have been asking for a remaster for some time," Walters said. "I think what's interesting and noteworthy today is that this [remaster] is as exciting for someone like me as it hopefully is for our fans."

Walters went on to talk about how, when you're developing a game, there's always an unfortunate moment where you're forced to let go of the project. But because you've been working on it for so long, you can still see all the ways that the game isn't perfect.

"The unique thing about the [Mass Effect] franchise was that we could sort of take all that developer angst and move it into the next game, and then into the next game," he said. "So over the course of three games, we were fortunate enough to build on that and really bring the game and the franchise to where we saw it in our mind's eye at the very beginning."

He continued: "So the opportunity now to go back with all those lessons learned and all those advancements and changes we saw in the original trilogy and go back to Mass Effect 1 and back to Mass Effect 2 has been a dream for me in order to do that, to get back in there and see all these familiar locations and characters again. But ultimately, I think it's also been a huge passion project as well. You don't often get a chance to revisit a lot of these things, and the opportunity to do that, for me, has been wonderful."

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition was announced alongside news that a new Mass Effect game is in development. EA and BioWare also showed a very brief teaser-trailer that featured a character speculated to be Liara T'Soni. She is seen picking up an N7 Armor fragment. It appears this game could be connecting some elements from the original trilogy as well as Andromeda, which was released before EA put the franchise on hiatus back in 2017.