Mass Effect Legendary Edition: Everything you need to know about the remasters (2023)

Nearly a decade after the original trilogy ended in 2012, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition was released to remaster all three games. BioWare's sprawling space trilogy was the start of a new era for the studio that is now almost synonymous with its two great RPG series.

Whether you've played Mass Effect many times or not at all, it's definitely the newest and most convenient way to pick up all three games. From new PC configurations to updated visuals and modern system requirements, we've rounded up everything you want to know about the remastered Legendary Edition.

What is the Mass Effect Legendary Edition release date?

Mass Effect Legendary Edition lançadaMay 14, 2021both of usOrigineVapor.

What's in the Legendary Edition?

Mass Effect Legendary Edition includes the original trilogy remastered plus "over 40 DLC including all story content, promotional weapons, armor and packs available from the start." However, it does not include a holographic training mode, the Pinnacle Station DLC, becausethe source code was lost, and it's so small that it's not worth rebuilding from scratch. Since the LE doesn't include Mass Effect 3 multiplayer (read), it obviously doesn't include any multiplayer DLC either.

The game has a unified front end, i.e. a menu screen where you choose between the three games and of course your progress and decisions carry over to the sequels as usual.

The three games are visually remastered for 4K, HDR and DX11, with "tens of thousands" of improved textures, improved models, lighting, shaders and VFX. It will support high refresh rate andultra long plies (21:9) non-PC. There are also improvements to depth of field, anti-aliasing, and a frame rate cap of 240fps.

There is a universal character creator across the trilogy with "a lot" more customization options and unified settings options across all three titles on PC.

Probably the biggest relief in BioWare's demo was when an elevator ride was shown in the PC version. This was in the Citadel, and ME:LE took 14 seconds to load where the original game took 52 seconds.

On that note, the original games included squad dialogue and news reports to cut down on waiting times in elevators. If you want to stick around and hear this,you can choose not to skip loading.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition vale a pena?

Now that the remasters are out, players are putting them to the test: many of the Steam user reviews are positive so far, thoughthere are some technical complaints. We're still working on an in-depth technical review and analysis, so we'll have more to say soon.

Is it a remake or a remaster?

Erm... it's complicated. The original Mass Effect game received a more substantial touch-up than Mass Effect 2 and 3, mostly around the combat system and user interface. This makes sense, as the first game was more of an RPG and the sequels greatly improved the combat: so Mass Effect 1 is getting something of a rework.

The game's UI and various interfaces have been overhauled, and combat and exploration are in line with sequel improvements: better aiming, squad controls, team AI, and camera placement. On that last point, for example, you'd normally take cover in that game and get a brief glimpse of the inside of Shepard's skull: nothing more. Finally, and perhaps most desired of all, the Tonka-like Mako surface vehicle's handling has been overhauled. I've always hated the way this thing drives, so good news.

Other than that, there aren't any major changes to the adventure itself. At one point, there were discussions about taking a more ambitious route, technologically speaking, but that would have put BioWare in a position where, essentially, games were being rebuilt from the ground up.

"One of the first questions is, if we're remastering this, what does that look like and what does that mean to us," says Mac Walters, Mass Effect Legendary Edition project director and longtime developer at BioWare. "It quickly became this archeological discovery, getting things out [...] of cement, and every time you tried to clean up some of the cement, you worried about marring the paint or taking off a mirror..."

"Very early on, we talked to people and Epic and asked what it would be like if we took it to Unreal Engine 4, and it quickly became clear that this leap really fundamentally changed what the trilogy was, and how it felt, how it played. An example it would be Unreal Engine 3's scripting language, Kismet, there's no copy-paste equivalent to that, so every moment, every scene would essentially have to be remade from scratch and we'd take away the essence of what the trilogy was about. So what mattered it was the fidelity, removing some of the rough edges that people would expect."

As for changes to the narrative and character interactions, Walters says that "we considered things like story and character, but that's such an important part of your experience and memory of it that we took that off the table pretty quickly."

However, he later said that some aspects had been tweaked, such as Mass Effect 2's somewhat unforgiving morality system.

What about Mass Effect 3 multiplayer?

No. "We looked at what it would take to do this," says Mac Walters, project director. "What do we do with cross-play, what do we do with people playing multiplayer now, how do we honor that, bring them in, bridge that gap, and of course those are not insurmountable challenges [...] you looked at the amount of effort it would take to do this, was easily proportionate to, if not greater than, say, raising the entire ME1.

"And I think our focus really was on the singleplayer experience and at some point we just had to draw the line... I think the product, the overall ME:LE is a better representation of the original trilogy because we're able to focus on those singleplayer elements. "

What about clipped content?

"No, there's no [additional content]," says Walters. "Although, at the same time, when you look at all the work that's been done [...] I feel like the whole first game feels fresh and new.

"We checked to see if there was stuff on the cutting room floor that we could bring in, and a lot of times it's not really in a state where you can just resurrect it and use it. rebuild it from scratch, and at that point, you're diverting real remastering effort away from everything else...

On that note, the trilogy ending will remain that of Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut, a controversial topic at the time: fan reaction to the 'original' ending was so vociferous that BioWare was seen by some as having capitulated to the crowd. changing things.

"The Extended Cut will be the experience for everyone who plays ME:LE," says Walters. "For me, the Extended Cut was really an opportunity to add a little more love, a little more context to the ending, so for me that's canon."

Here's a look at the Mass Effect photo mode

What better way to enjoy the new looks than with a photo mode? BioWare showed off some screenshots taken with Mass Effect LEgendary Edition's photo mode, which you'll be able to open from the pause menu. Based on the photos that have been shared, we expect you to have settings like adjustable focal length, aperture settings, filters, character controls, and other features.

Hit me with system specs

Okay, you're a squire.Our full summary is here, and it's not very demanding, although you'll need 120GB of storage.

Minimum requirements for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

• SO: Windows 10 de 64 bits
• Processor: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-8350
• Memory: 8GB RAM
• Graphics: GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X GPU RAM: 2GB Video Memory
• DirectX:Version 11
• Storage: 120 GB available space

Recommended requirements for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

• SO: Windows 10 de 64 bits
• Processador: Intel Core i7-7700 ou AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• Memory: 16GB RAM
• Graphics:GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 / RTX 200, Radeon Vega 56, GPU RAM: 4GB Video Memory
• DirectX:Version 11
• Storage: 120 GB available space

How much more beautiful are we talking?

Development of the visuals for Mass Effect Legendary Edition started with improving the AI ​​before the art team started looking at assets and adding the human touch. "We knew we wanted to increase the resolution of every texture in the trilogy," says Kevin Meek, environment and character director, "so with every visual effect, UI, environment art, character art, every texture, we hit immediately with two major changes: first, we increased the limits the engine places on texture sizes, second, we ran all of the original art uncompressed through an AI high resolution program, along with some custom batch tool resolutions [. ..] upscaled by less than four times, if not potentially 16 times, if they had been previously created at a higher resolution."

After that, the team started to drive improvements manually, using the incredibly simple tactic of having artists play through levels normally (instead of using an editor) and deciding what was important to focus on in a given area.

Meek showed what he called a 'baseline' video that had previously been used as an internal presentation, demonstrating real-time reflections, vastly improved surfaces on things like eyes, the huge improvements to NPC textures, and so on. Sadly, those 4K textures were being demoed in a 1080p stream, but caveats aside, the differences between the older Garrus model, for example, and the brand new one stand out: the lines on his face are deeper, the damage in his armor craters more in the material, his holo-eye reflections are more 'realistic'.

The fact that the game is on UE3 precludes technology like ray tracing, but what was that about real-time reflections? "Continuing with Unreal 3 is a whole different bunch of opportunities because it's such an old engine," says Meek. "It's called advanced rendering instead of deferred rendering, it opens up this opportunity for us where we can actually render the scene twice, and what we've done is whether in ME1, 2 or 3, if there's a really reflective surface and the performance supports it , we can add a second camera to the world and render a texture reflection on surfaces, so you see dynamic reflections in real time [...] down fundamentally changes rendering threads and things like that."

Meek went on to discuss how to delve into rock textures, which I'll spare you. One last detail is that, once the team made basic improvements, original trilogy art director Derek Watts was hired to help arrive at the final look of the LE.

character customization

Kevin Meek spoke briefly about one of the trilogy's mistakes, the late introduction of a pattern or what BioWare calls the 'iconic' appearance for the female Shepard in Mass Effect 3 (players who created their own FemShep in the first two games had the option to continue with this, or switch to the new look). LE introduces this default FemShep early on in the trilogy should players wish to use this model, along with a host of improvements to character model details.

Additionally, character customization options have been expanded with more hair, makeup, and skin tone options, and persist across all three titles. Perhaps most surprisingly, it retains character code functionality introduced later in the trilogy, which Walters says has some issues but more or less works.

BioWare calls this a 'passion project'

Since the one-two punch of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, some have lost faith in BioWare. People openly say that the studio is not what it once was, with many major players having long since moved away.

That kind of context seemed to be behind part of this presentation, with BioWare's various developers ensuring their good faith was clear. "I've been with BioWare since we were releasing KOTOR way back in the day," Mac Walters began. "I didn't do much there, but I kept working on Jade Empire, but then in 2005 I switched to Mass Effect and honestly, except for a short period at the beginning of Anthem and the end of Anthem, I've had all of Mass Effect all the time since 2005 ."

"Fans have been asking for a remaster for some time now. This is as exciting for someone like me as it is for our fans, when we develop a game there's always that moment of letting go," continues Walters. "The unique thing about the franchise is that we could take all that developer angst and put it into the next game, then the next game [and] the opportunity now to come back with all the lessons learned, and all the advancements and stuff that we've seen in the trilogy... first of all it's a dream, but ultimately it's also been a huge passion project. You don't get a chance to revisit a lot of that stuff."

In fact. Then,what are you going to do differently?

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