BioWare shows Mass Effect Legendary Edition comparison trailer against the original trilogy

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Numbers first: more than 30,000 textures redone, pre-rendered cinematics reprocessed in 4K and three games brought together in a single package. In April 2021, BioWare published a comparison trailer for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remastered collection of Mass Effect (2007), Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012), side by side with the original versions.

Along with the video, the studio detailed the technical work in a separate text. Translating from the jargon:

Engine: the games stayed on Unreal Engine 3, but in an updated version unified across the three titles. BioWare even studied migrating to Unreal Engine 4 with Epic and gave up, because it would require redoing large parts of the games, such as all the scenes;
Materials and lighting: no physically based rendering (PBR), but with metals, fabrics and other materials reacting to light “more convincingly”. Skin, hair and eyes got better shaders;
Effects: new particles in the environments, better shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), anti-aliasing and bokeh depth of field. Mass Effect 3’s dynamic volumetrics were carried over to the first two games;
Videos: the pre-rendered cinematics were redone in 4K and, for those that could not be recaptured, the team used an artificial intelligence upscaling program;
Bugs: scenes and dialogues had “dozens, if not hundreds” of errors fixed.

In practice, this means the first Mass Effect was the one that changed the most, with adjustments also to combat, aiming and the Mako vehicle’s controls, to bring it closer to the sequels.

What came next

Mass Effect Legendary Edition launched on May 14, 2021 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, with specific improvements on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S via backward compatibility. The package brought almost all the single-player content released after each game’s debut. Left out were Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer and the Pinnacle Station DLC, whose source code was corrupted. Critical reception was very positive.