Mass Effect Legendary Edition: How Long Does It Take To Beat?

"Mass Effect: Legendary Edition" finally arrived in May 2021. Fans new and old are eagerly returning to explore the Milky Way, build up their team, and defend the galaxy from the Reaper threat. This new collection of Bioware's story-driven space odyssey combines all three of the original "Mass Effect" games (better luck next time, "Andromeda") and pretty much all of their expanded content into a single pack — complete with streamlined graphics, modified gameplay, and a few select directorial changes to content that didn't age well.

The original saga was already packed with an incredible amount of gameplay. HowLongToBeat puts the first game alone at 17 hours for the main story missions and 28.5 hours to complete all of the available content. Admittedly, a lot of that time was spent riding the elevator, but let's not dwell on awkward loading screens.

With all the games put together in one easy collection, you might be wondering, how long does it take to beat the entire "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition?"

A lot of the new changes are going to affect your time to beat the series. Having reduced loading times makes a big difference. That means more time making progress in the game and less time watching those rings spin on the Mass Relay while you wait for your next location to load. On the flip side, having all of the expanded content (except for the "Pinnacle Station" DLC from "ME1") is going to give all you completionists a lot more to do.

Several publications have posted runtimes for "Legendary Edition" that seem to match up fairly well. Attack of the Fanboy has the main story mode of "ME1" clocking in at 18 hours — 30 with all side missions and DLC. Meanwhile AOTF put "ME2" at 25-36 hours and "ME3" at 25-35 hours. This all adds up to around 68 hours to complete the game and a whopping 101 hours when you add in all of the side missions and DLC. GameSpew came to similar results, reporting runs ranging from 70-100 hours.