It’s anyone’s guess when we’ll return to the Mass Effect universe, but we’ll always have the games that gave us that universe in the first place. If you somehow never played BioWare’s science fiction trilogy, want to know what the fuss is all about, and can spare six dollars, the Legendary Edition remasters are hella cheap on PlayStation and Xbox.
The first three Mass Effect RPGs and most of their DLC are on sale for $6 on both platforms until April 9. Though they have improved resolution and framerate on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, these are technically PS4 and Xbox One games, so if you’re being priced out of the new generation of consoles as costs keep going up, you can still play BioWare’s magnum opus on older hardware for less than it would cost you to grab a sandwich at the bodega.
Mass Effect and its first two sequels follow Commander Shepard, a human soldier who finds themselves wrapped up in an intergalactic conspiracy that could have apocalyptic ramifications. Each game has hard decisions that carry over to the rest of the trilogy, and while not every choice makes as big an impact as fans hoped, it’s still one of the most impressive examples of a studio giving narrative weight to your decisions in ways that span multiple games. It was incredibly ambitious at the time, and it’s not surprising that no one, not even BioWare, has really tried to emulate it since.
BioWare followed the trilogy up with the divisive Mass Effect: Andromeda, and is currently working on a fifth game after the studio was hit with a massive restructuring last year. An Amazon series is in the works, though it apparently has hit a snag with the company wanting rewrites for “non-gamers.” The series will take place after the original trilogy, which raises a lot of questions about how the show will handle continuity with the games considering the varying states players could leave the universe in at the end of Mass Effect 3.