TheMass Effectseries is no stranger to unusual glitches. Even 10 years afterMass Effect 3’s release, the same old charming bugs go unsquashed. With the release of 2021’s Legendary Edition, improving upon the graphical fidelity of the original trilogy for the last generation of consoles, BioWare made significant strides fixing decade-old bugs and making much-needed gameplay improvements.
Not everything was changed, however; from enemies stuck infinitely screaming, toCommander Shepard’s eyes spinning in their skull, it’s clear that Legendary Edition left a lot unfixed. One such unpatched bug featuresMass Effect 3’s background characters colliding with furniture.
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User Millennial_falcon92 posted an image to the r/masseffect subreddit of a character phasing through a counter in the Citadel’s Huerta Memorial Hospital. The doctor, clearly meant to be interacting with the microscope in front of her, is instead lodged inside the device, giving Shepard an alarmingly worried look. Thanks toMass Effect’s dated character generation, her face seems strangely contorted, almost as though she’s aware of her peculiar situation.
Commenters like u/Blayn_mines liken the bug toMass Effect 3’s “Synthesis Ending,” whereby the organic races of the Milky Way merge with the synthetic, rendering the Reapers obsolete. User JuicyLucy141 reaches a similar epiphany, highlighting that this is the ‘perfection’ sought by Harbinger,the leader of the Reaper armada and primary antagonist ofMass Effect 2, who aims to extinguish organic life throughout the galaxy.
Millennial_falcon92 goes on to write that they can ‘confidently say thatME3is the most buggy on the Legendary Edition,’ with u/dudeN7 saying that it’s hardly surprising considering how ‘the game itself was extremely rushed’. This echoes the sentiment of disappointment felt by many fans in theMass Effectfandom. AfterMass Effect 3’s hugely controversial release, the comedic farce that wasMass Effect: Andromeda’s facial animations, as well asAnthem’s slow and quiet cancellation, it’s hard not to feel like BioWare, once a titan of the industry, is burning out.
Hours of crunch and overworking has, in the past few years, delivered products that are widely perceived as substandard and rushed. While it’s funny to laugh at the bugs when they crop up - and though they will appear in every game, no matter how polished - they can also be the harbinger of workplace abuse. WithMass Effect 4currently in development, players can only hope that similarly hilarious bugs make an appearance, though not at the cost of the developers’ hard work.
Mass Effect: Legendary Editionis available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
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