A celebratory cheer was let loose around the Stuff offices when EA confirmed that it was properly remastering the original Mass Effect franchise last year. It’s one of our favourite games and knowing it’ll be playable on modern (console) hardware was a real treat. The project went fairly quiet in subsequent months but news released last night, alongside a bunch of screens and videos, showed off exactly how Bioware is fixing up some of the less well-aged elements of the games.
To bring you up to speed, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition takes the three original games, Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 (Extended Cut) and neatly packages them together alongside over 40 pieces of DLC content. Of course, what makes this an even more appealing collection is the the fact that it’s being properly remastered with the edition of 4K support, HDR, improved character models and just a load of tweaks and changes to the graphics to bring them closer to modern gaming experiences.
Textures have been adjusted to actually look like the material they’re meant to represent and many reoccurring bugs have been squashed for good (hopefully). The first game in the Shepard trilogy is nearly 13 years old and it’s certainly seen better days, even before the Reapers invaded…
Mass Effect had a… mass effect on us. Sorry, we can do better
Speaking to the scale of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, project director Mac Walters described the process as being like, “restoring a beautiful, beloved car. But then it quickly turned into sure, if that car had been buried in cement, and every time you tried to clear off some of the cement you were worried about dinging the paint, or ripping off a mirror.”
“The opportunity now to be able to go back with all of those lessons learned and with all of the advancements … [has] been a dream for me,” continued Walters, who’s been working on Mass Effect for years.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is out on 14 May on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. It’ll also be available on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S with the help of backwards compatibility but don’t expect severe next-gen improvements. Just enjoy the faster load times of those SSDs.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t turn out like another Mass Effect: Andromeda…
(Source: The Verge)