Although a romance in Mass Effect between male Shepard and Kaidan is obtainable in Mass Effect 3, any relationship between the two in the first games is relegated to ‘just friends’ despite the existence of fully voiced dialogue for male Shepard suggesting otherwise. As such, many players believe that the relationship was cut content from BioWare, though the developer recently revealed that a relationship between the two in the original Mass Effect game was never planned.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Mass Effect Legendary Edition director Mac Walters was asked whether or not the romance between Kaidan and male Shepard was cut from the original game. “No,” Walters immediately replied, though he thankfully elaborated further. “So, this is an interesting one. What had happened in the original first game – actually in all of them – is when we would record the male and female Shepard lines, you actually had to go in and manually flag every single line that shouldn’t or should be recorded for either gender at the time,” Walters explained. “The process for that, as you can imagine – like our tools had just been created on Mass Effect 1 – relied on every human to go in and actually select every single line”

What you’d find is that there, it’s not just the lines, there are other lines that got recorded that shouldn’t have been recorded, because they weren’t checked so they’d just get printed off as a script, they’d go to the studio, the actors would record them, they’d come back to the game, and that’s what shipped.”

Mac Walters adds that while the team did everything they could to ensure that lines such as male Shepard’s to Kaidan didn’t make it into the game, they unfortunately did anyways. As such, they won’t be added into the Mass Effect Legendary Edition because “it wasn’t intentional in the original,” and the team has a very good reason to keep the story exactly the way it was.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition releases on May 14th for PC through Steam and Origin, PS4, and Xbox One. The title will be forward-compatible with PS5 and Xbox Series X.

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