Mass Effect Legendary Edition: Kill or Free the Rachni Queen?

Like a lot of other impactful choices you will make in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, letting the Rachni Queen live or kill her on the spot is another one that will have consequences down the line. In Mass Effect 1 you spend a good amount of time slaying hordes of her forces, and eventually it comes down to you if you will let their Queen live or die, which impacts some events in the later entry of the series, Mass Effect 3. In order to see what your choice should be, feel free to check out below everything you need to know.

Should you kill or free the Rachni Queen in Mass Effect Legendary Edition?

In order to avoid spoilers, events that are leading down to this choice will be absent from this article. Therefore, we will jump forward to when this option becomes available for you, which is right when you have the Rachni Queen’s fate in your hands.

You can decide on slaying the Rachni Queen for good, which will lead to the literal extinction of her whole race, or choose to sparing the Queen, even if you did kill hundreds if not thousands of her kin to reach her. Letting her free will award you with Paragon points, while killing her will raise your Renegade rank. And this is pretty much the only difference in Mass Effect 1. Letting her go or killing her, doesn’t change anything to this entry. However, your actions here will determine some outcomes in Mass Effect 3, which we will take a look into right away. Just to note that there will be some spoilers, if you decide to keep on reading.

What happens in Mass Effect 3, if you kill or save the Rachni Queen?

If your choice was to slay the alien queen, then her race will go extinct and they will pose no threat further down the road. That said, in Mass Effect 3, Reapers find a way to close/ replicate this extinct race and they will force these artificial Rachni to attack you. This increases the amount of enemy forces you have to deal with, making things a little bit harder. If this ends up being the outcome in your adventure, you need to make sure that this time, they will be gone for good. If you don’t deal with them accordingly, they will keep on joining forces with the Reapers, lowering your overall readiness score as time goes by.

In case you decided to free the Rachni Queen and let her live, then the exact opposite will take place. The Reapers will be advancing against them, and enslave them in the process. Then, you will jump into a mission of actually rescuing the queen and if you manage to pull through, she will join your Alliance with other races and help with your readiness score. To be honest, even if you are not a fan of this bug-like race, the latter sounds way cooler so why not letting her help you out with your fight against the Reapers?

And that is all in regards to what happens with the Rachni Queen. Mass Effect Legendary Edition made sure to keep the hard choices you need to make intact, so you once again need to take decisions of literal life or death scenarios.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is available on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. For more related content about the game, feel free to take a look at our list right here.