Mass Effect Legendary Edition is blowing up, but in a good way. The iconic franchise has been given a new lease on life, and tons of players are getting into it. If you’re playing through all three of these new games, you might want to import your character in Mass Effect Legendary Edition between games. This is something the original Xbox 360 and PC releases supported, since the three games were meant to be a contiguous story. Here’s how to import your character in Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
And no, you can’t backport a character between games. You cannot go and take a ME2 character and bring it back into the first game. The transfer is a one-way trip. Don’t worry about increasing difficulty either, as this is not New Game+. The function of importing your character in Mass Effect games is to bring the story along with you, not necessarily all the unlocks and gear you had previously.
It’s easier in some games than others. If you want to import a character from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2, all you need to do is select to create a new game. You will see an option on the character creation menu to choose a male or female character, along with the option to “Import ME1 Character.” Click that button and the game will ask you to point to your save file for importing. You don’t need to have the base game installed, but you do need that save file.
It’s important to note that the option will only show up if a completed save file from the previous game is detected on the machine. If you deleted or moved the original save, you might not see it. Also, if you didn’t finish the first game all the way to the end, the save won’t be detected as complete.
What about older copies?
Finally, if you want to move entirely over to the new remaster, you can. You can also copy over your characters from the original games to the legendary edition. However, this only applies to both the second and third games, not the first one. For some reason, you cannot import your character in Mass Effect Legendary Edition’s version of ME1.
This process on PC is very similar, and is just a matter of moving files. You can do this very easily. If you go to your Documents folder for the user on your PC and select BioWare, you’ll see your save files for all BioWare games on that machine. This should persist if you remove the base game’s files. Just select the character file from the game you wish to transfer and copy/paste it into the new install location.
