Mass Effect player discovers game feature after 12 years

One player just found a rather odd little secret hidden right at the start of Mass Effect 3 that most of the community seems to have been equally unaware of.

As spotted by user JustGottaHaveIt over on the r/masseffect subreddit, it would seem that there’s a little more to Captain Anderson than meets the eye.

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That’s because, unbeknown to seemingly most of us, you can actually upgrade Anderson during the first mission in the game.

During the opening of Mass Effect 3, there’s a little segment where Shepard and Anderson fight off some enemies before boarding the Normandy SR-2.

Anderson is actually treated as one of your squad members during this sequence, but usually, you can’t really edit his skills at this point as Shepard hasn’t been levelled up.

However, once you go through this mission again in new game plus you can actually level up a bunch of Anderson’s skills - including his unique “Alliance Admiral” skill.

I think the implication that Anderson is only a level one Alliance Admiral before this point is pretty funny though. Dude, haven’t you been doing this for years? You should be a little better than a level one Admiral at this point chief.

Now a few folks in the comments are theorising that this could possibly imply that further content featuring Anderson as a squad member was cut from the game, but I think there’s a simpler explanation here.

It was probably just easier for the developers to treat Anderson as a squad mate during this segment, complete with a skill tree to upgrade. Otherwise, they may have potentially had to program specific AI for him during this mission.

Sorry to potentially burst your bubble folks, but I don’t think we were deprived of a buddy-cop-style DLC featuring the adventures of Anderson and Shepard (as awesome as that would have been).