BioWare has released an in-depth look at the visual upgrades and enhancements coming to Mass Effect Legendary Edition when the remastered trilogy arrives on 14th May for PS4, Xbox One and PC. The game will also have certain enhancements targeting the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
As you can see from the trailer, the revamp has been extensive. BioWare has sought to retouch almost every aspect of the trilogy, both to make the games better suited for running in 4K instead of 720p, and also to bring the games up to a certain standard across the board.
This has taken place in three stages, starting off with remastering over thirty thousand individual textures, partially through an AI up-ressing program, and bringing all three game code bases to a more modern version of Unreal Engine 3.
Phase 2 then saw them modernise each game’s look, through feeding some assets back from Mass Effect 3 to the first game. They’ve obviously maintained character changes through the trilogy and stylistic tweaks to how the uniforms evolved, but ME3’s character models were much higher quality than ME1’s. That wasn’t the end of it, as the artists could still go back and increase things like poly counts and normal maps.
Then they improved skin, hair and eye shaders, expanded upon particle effects for things like fire and explosions, and just the general environment, depth of field, volumetric fog, and on and on. Personally, the biggest change comes from the lighting, I feel. Cutscenes that were once ridiculously dark are now brighter and more nuanced to show more of the character details.
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- The overhauled Feros is much brighter…
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- … than a very dark Feros of before.
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- Eden Prime has had a dramatic overhaul…
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- … so it no longer looks totally different to the version in ME3
Some environments have also been overhauled to try and more closely match the original intent of the art direction – Eden Prime was previously revealed in a cutscene and looks dramatically different to what it did in the original game, but this is explained as trying to make the world look like more of a paradise, as seen in the Mass Effect 3: From Ashes DLC.
I’m sure that some of the changes are going to be divisive among fans, but on the whole, this does look like a solid revitalisation of a trilogy that was gradually looking more and more dated.
