The release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has both given players a chance to relive the original trilogy, as well as giving modders a newly updated version to start fiddling with. One modder in particular has taken to correcting a legendary glitch from the original release of the trilogy that was eventually made into the canon of the Mass Effect story by Bioware.
This bug that managed to make it all the way from Mass Effect 2 and into Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is the Conrad Verner glitch, which would cause the NPC to misremember his first encounter with Commander Shepard. While Bioware eventually added a storyline in Mass Effect 3 that explained the character's memory loss in a different way, this new mod simply fixes the issue and restores the previously unavailable outcome.
The glitch in question specifically involves the first time the player meets Conrad Verner, a Commander Shepard super-fan, who wants to follow in the player's footsteps and join the military and eventually the elite N7 forces. This could go one of two ways, either with a Paragon Shepard politely warning Verner of the troubles of combat, or a Renegade Shepard pointing a gun at the NPC and scaring him away from military service. While this is one of Mass Effect's many choices that players expect to have ripple effects down the line, the original Mass Effect 2 didn't exactly remember what players chose correctly and would always have Verner remember the Renegade option.
Thanks to Mass Effect 3 establishing that Verner has a memory issue that caused the effects of the glitch, it has been preserved in the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. However, the mod Conrad Verner Remembers (ME2LE) Bug Fix restores the initial outcome where the character can properly remember the Paragon option instead of only the Renegade. This is accomplished by adding a photo of Verner to Shepard's room on the Normandy in Mass Effect 2, where the player can choose which option they picked in the previous game and restore the Paragon response.
Bioware has had a habit in the past of doing covering for previous glitches with newly established lore that addresses the issues of older games, or even adding this new canon to DLC adventures. An entire NPC relationship in Dragon Age was eventually established as a result of a character unintentionally standing on a chair, so it isn't too much to imagine that Verner's memory could be a catalyst for canon. However, sometimes fans will go above and beyond themselves to repair the decisions in games like Mass Effect 2, so everyone can see what the developer's original intent had always been.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Nexus Mods (via Eurogamer)