EA and Bioware have detailed the upcoming Mass Effect: Legendary Edition’s visual upgrades and released a new trailer for the remaster.
You can view the complete list here, but here are just a few of the tweaks BioWare and EA have applied to the original Mass Effect trilogy to turn it into the new, remastered Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. They:
- Used an AI program to help upscale textures to four times their size
- Improved skin, hair, and eye shaders
- Beefed up particle effects
- Re-rendered cutscenes in 4K, where possible
- Added buildings where appropriate
Basically, there’s too much too list it all here, but the teams behind the remaster worked in three phases, to give Mass Effect a total facelift. Sounds great, right? We thought the same, until we watched Legendary Edition’s new trailer.
The trailer compares shots from the original game with their new remastered versions and in some cases, they’re a little off, seemingly because of they way they’ve been relit.
Take Eden Prime, for example. We already knew that Bioware and EA were moving the placement of the sun but without the gloom of the original, it looks a lot less unsettling. Another example is the scene where Shepard is talking to a Salarian, shown at the top of the article; her face has a strange sheen to it whereas, with shadow, she looks more human.
Speaking of oddities, going by the trailer EA and Bioware have made Liara’s breasts bigger or, at least, more prominent. That nasty grey stripe was just getting in the way of her, so they’ve removed it and now you can see her boobs in all their enhanced glory. No, really.
Still, there may well be options to tweak Mass Effect: Legendary Edition’s graphics; maybe dialing down the brightness in the final release will help. You can judge for yourself just how much of an improvement this remaster is when it arrives on PC, PlayStation and Xbox this May 14th.
