Much to the annoyance of players who valued the remove Mass Effect 3's multiplayer.
Similar to Gears of War's Horde mode or Halo's Firefight, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer pitted up to four players against the antagonist factions in the war against the Reapers: Cerberus, the Geth, the Collectors, and mutated Reaper foot soldiers. The multiplayer featured several playable classes and allowed for character customization. The entire experience was quite fleshed-out and served as some very entertaining side content. The issue, though, is it didn't operate solely as side-content.
In order to achieve the "best" ending in Mass Effect 3, players had to achieve a high enough score in their Galactic Readiness, one measurement of how prepared Commander Shepard was to face the Reapers in the game's Galaxy at War system. Although the optimal ending could be achieved solely in single-player, raising Galactic Readiness without dipping into multiplayer was significantly more difficult and time-consuming. This problem was only exacerbated by the fact that players on the Xbox 360 would have to be subscribed to Xbox Live Gold in order to have online functionality.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Will Be Better Without Multiplayer
With Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, BioWare is hoping to deliver the all DLC in the Legendary Edition, in an attempt to give players a complete and polished package. Much of the work on the Mass Effect remasters went into modernizing the first game, which already felt dated by Mass Effect 3's release in 2012. Bringing forward ME3's multiplayer mode would require a similar amount of resources, making it a necessary cut. But its removal will likely end up improving the game, anyway.
BioWare seems to have learned from its past mistakes and is going all-in on a unified vision of a single-player-only experience. While Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was fun, it was a far cry from the main draw of the series. The original Mass Effect trilogy was always heavily centered around Commander Shepard and their crew aboard the Normandy SR-1 and SR-2. The games are heavily character-driven, with hours upon hours of dialogue and character development. Cutting the multiplayer in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition's remaster of Mass Effect 3 only serves to tighten the focus on the game's core, action-RPG experience.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition will come to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 14, 2021.