Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition: How to Play on Windows 7

Hi Everyone! This short guide should be able to help people who purchased Mass Effect: Legendary Edition for their Windows 7 Computer, in this guide i will be including the fix for the “Please reinstall your game” issue, and perhaps maybe later on i will include other fixes for other problems.

Without any further ado let’s dive right in.

First off, some of you may have been trying to run the game through steam or origin for the first time, but each time you do you keep getting an error telling you to reinstall your game, something along those lines.

So you probably validated the files through steam, or repaired the game files through origin and both come back clean, so you try running the game again and get the same error, this is why.

Although Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is really just a upgrade to visuals mostly, surprisingly Windows 10 is listed as the MINIMUM REQUIREMENT to run the game.

However, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition does not include any features that require for example, the DirectX12 API, so it’s pretty strange that they’d list Windows 10 as the minimum requirement to get the game running, because anyone with the original copies of all 3 games can run them just fine and they are all pretty much the same when it comes to core of each game when you compare them to their Legendary Edition counterparts, as i said, it’s mostly been visual changes.

The real reason as to why the game isn’t running on Windows 7 is because some Mass Effect LE players have an artificially limited selection of languages in their original BioWare Mass Effect LE launcher. Which is why when you go to launch the game, it won’t work.

It took me some looking around on online forums until i found a solution that worked for me, as a Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit User, this should help anyone else suffering from the same problem.

What does this solution fix exactly?

The fix itself is actually just replacing the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition launcher with a modified file from the Nexusmods forums,here i’ll show you the steps on downloading and replacing the file in your game directory.

You’ll need a nexusmods account before you can download the file.

1. Go to this link – https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition/mods/46?tab=description

2. Click on the “Files” tab, when it loads you’ll see “Main files MassEffectLauncher-MELo”
Select “Manual Download” then “Slow download”.

3. Save the downloaded file to where you can access it.

4. Open the folder with a file managing tool like 7zip, and you should see 3 files, MassEffectLauncher.ahk, MassEffectLauncher.exe, and a readme file.

5. Next open up the directory of where you installed your game, just open up steam and right click MELE, go to properties, local files, browse.

Now go to the “Game” Folder, Launcher, and click and drag the MassEffectLauncher.exe from the downloaded folder into the Launcher folder, you will be prompted to replace the file, click yes.

NOW DO NOT CHANGE THE EXE IN ANYWAY, Like changing it to “Run as Administrator” as it is known to cause problems.

Once you’ve done all that, just run the game through steam or origin normally and you should see the new custom launcher, select the game you wish to play and call me daddy!

I hope this helps people who are having trouble getting past the launcher on Windows 7, it took me awhile of looking through various forums until i found a link to the mod.

Thanks to dvidebyzero for creating this modification, we all greatly appreciate it!

NOTE: You will still be able to grab achievements and track your game time, so don’t worry about that! 🙂