Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Download is Stuck on Steam and EA Desktop – Is it bugged

Mass Effect Legendary Edition download stuck – Mass Effect Legendary Edition has been finally released across all the major platforms and the game is doing fairly well so far. With the Legendary edition, players are getting the highly acclaimed Mass Effect trilogy. The game includes the entire base content and over 40 DLC from Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3, including weapons, armors and packs. Everything remastered and optimized for 4K Ultra HD.

Now, I already knew that the game has some technical issues. And it is a quite normal scenario among remastered titles nowadays. But from what I saw after going through the forums, some users are having trouble downloading the game. Their Mass Effect Legendary Edition download is getting stuck. And it is happening to both Steam users and EA Desktop users.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Download is Stuck on Steam and EA Desktop – Is it bugged

Apparently a lot of people who bought Mass Effect Legendary Edition on EA Desktop and Steam, are facing an issue where, either the download of the game is getting stuck after a certain point or the download is extremely slow. No matter what they do, the installation bar is reluctant to move or make any sort of progress. People have been trying all types of things like pausing and then resuming the download, restarting the download, restarting Steam or restarting their PC, etc.

Unfortunately nothing seems to help. So is this some sort of bug or glitch?

Why is my Mass Effect Legendary Edition download stuck? Can this issue be fixed?

Actually the truth is, this is neither being caused by a bug, nor by a glitch. If you go and look at the download folder of Steam you will notice that there is nothing over there. Steam will actually download the installer file first. And once the downloading is completed the unpacking will take place.

When Steam is showing that Mass Effect Legendary Edition is still being downloaded, that is not what actually is happening. It is unpacking the game instead to get it ready for installation. And then there are other installations like the C++ Redistributable and the latest DirectX.

You have to understand that you are actually downloading a total of 3 Mass Effect titles. And all 3 of them are remastered. The file size of Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a whopping 120 GB. So all you have to do is wait for a while. The process did not take much long for me as I am using a WD Black NVMe SSD that has Read and Write speeds up to 3100 MB/s and 1600 MB/s respectively. But for normal HDD users, even if they have a 7200 RPM one, the entire installation process is going to take some time. And there is no way to speed the procedure. It is the same case for EA Desktop as well.

What I think EA Desktop normally does is (I may be wrong), it downloads a chunk then installs it and then downloads some more. So you will notice a lot of stops during the whole process. I would suggest that you take a look at the official Steam Discussions page of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. You will find a lot of players discussing these exact same issues.


If you think this guide had helped you then let us know in the comment section below. Also, if you are facing other problems with the game then try checking out our other guides on Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Who knows, you might end up finding a fix.


That’s all folks!

Last Updated on May 14, 2021

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