Shoehorned Multiplayer in Mass Effect 3

When I wrote about the ending of Mass Effect 3, I mentioned how the military strength score comes into play. What I didn’t tell you then is that your military strength score is affected by a multiplier. Military Readiness starts at 50% by default, which means your effective military strength is exactly one half of your base military strength score.

Naturally, the readiness percentage can be increased. There are a few ways to do this:

• Purchase and play the Mass Effect Infiltrator iOS game
• Download the Mass Effect Datapad iOS app
• Play the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode

I don’t have any iOS devices and I have no interest in gimmicky tie-ins anyway, so the third option is my only hope. Fortunately, it only takes a few hours of multiplayer gaming to increase your readiness to 100% with relative ease. Note that an online pass is required to go this route. The pass comes with all new copies of ME3 but purchasers of a used game will have to buy a pass separately (what a smarmy move).

The first thing to notice about ME3 multiplayer is that you have to purchase and unlock equipment and upgrades using credits earned in-game. Alternatively, you can spend real life money to purchase these packs; I’m sure this is what Bioware and EA want you to do, which casts even more negative light on this whole scheme.

But that’s not all. It’s annoying enough to be pushed into what seems like a shoehorned multiplayer addon laced with microtransactions. This real kicker comes in the form of a simple question: what happens when EA decides to shut down its ME3 servers in a few years? Not only will it be impossible to play the multiplayer portion of this game, but it will become nigh impossible to earn a high enough military strength score to obtain the “better” endings in your single player campaign.

Bioware says it’s possible to earn such a military strength score without ever going online, but I don’t see how it can be done without purchasing all DLC for all Mass Effect games and starting over in Mass Effect 1 to replay the entire trilogy from scratch, making immaculate and meticulously planned decisions along the way because now you know what decisions (hint: paragon) to make in order to boost your future ME3 score.

Unhappy about the situation, I plunged into multiplayer anyway with plans to increase my readiness and get out quickly. I never expected to actually enjoy the gameplay.

As it turns out, the multiplayer mode is pretty fun. You choose a character race and class, then build that character up with abilities, equipment, and upgrades. The gameplay is purely combat-based. Each map (recognizable as the single-player campaign as the N7 missions) contains 11 waves of varying enemies which you must defeat in cooperation with up to three other players. Given the typical behavior of the average Xbox Live user, I was relieved to find that communication between players is largely unnecessary. Still, these missions would be a lot of fun to play with real friends.

I probably won’t keep coming back to ME3 multiplayer. It’s not as deep as it could have been, but on the flip side it’s not quite as shoehorned or tacky as I expected. At worst, the multiplayer mode is a mild annoyance. At best, it kept the disc in my Xbox for a few extra days and I had some fun with it.