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Mass Effect Legendary Edition

New official comparison video has dropped.
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Random notes: -
  • The volumetric lighting really does wonders for the citadel interior....but birds on the presidium? Were those always there? Seems a bit odd, no?
  • WAY more vegetation on Virmire. Hanging vines and everything.
  • Kirrahe's ME1 armor looks like a it's been completely replaced with the ME3 version, but retextured to look more like his ME1 look. If so: good use of shared assets.
  • The difference in the lava effects is night and day! Not just because of the particle effects but the texture too. It now actually looks like an active lava flow instead of a big bowl of glowy orange punch.
  • Still kinda bothers me that the Geth seemingly use to the exact same ship design at every scale, from the dropships, to the frigates, all the way to dreadnaughts. I'd hoped that they'd at least switch out the drop ship for the fighter model in some instances, given that ME3 gives them access to a much higher quality model than ME1 originally had.
  • It's weird how the new and vastly superior character models just look like how you thought they looked originally until you see a side-by-side and realise how low res and low poly the original assets actually were! Probably a good sign that they're not loosing the spirit of the characters in the process.
  • Speaking of: it's so weird seeing a high quality version of ME1 Tali since her ME2/3 redesign has replaced my mental image of what she originally looked like.
  • Had a similar reaction to the new ME1 Liara, but less so. Curious to see what she'll look like in ME2, given the starting the Shadow Broker DLC has her look radically change between scenes. Though I suppose now all it'll look like is that she put on darker lipstick and also her eyes suddenly became a slightly darker shade of blue, because reasons?
  • Also as with Kirrahe's armor; her labcoat/onesie she wears in ME1 seems to have been replaced with a retextured ME3 asset.
  • Nice to get a glimpse of the SR1's drive core. I wondered if they were going to replace it with something that looks more like the big humming sphere in the SR2, but no; sticking with weird spinny claw thing with glowy light...
  • Nice to see they corrected that weird thing where the eyelashes seemed to render *in front* of the helmet visor, while the eyes were almost entirely obscured by the reflections. Such an off putting thing so early in the game you'd have thought they'd have addressed it in the original release!
  • The custom Shepard looks amazing, though I'm curious (and a little worried) to see how some of my old facecodes (especially my "canon" Shep) will look in this.
  • Ear geometry of all things still looks a little crude though, making them seem a little on the puffy side. You'd think that'd be a simple fix given they could just import the MEA ears which were way better.
 
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Oh and there's also a new blog post detailing how the project as a whole proceeded, especially with regards to the visual enhancements. As I suspected above, for the ME1 assets that were later upgraded for ME2 & 3, they've just gone and used those versions as their starting point and ported them back into ME1.

They didn't say so here, but you have to think some of those assets are going to be sourced from Andromeda too, since a fair amount of assets--a lot of the guns, some armor, plus a ton of mundane items like cargo crates, datapads etc.--retained the same design but of suitably higher quality. I mean we know for a fact one of the MEA hair designs is being ported across, so why stop there? I wonder if they'll use the MEA reload animations too? It's a small detail but in MEA they actually went to the trouble of showing HOW the thermal clips fit into the weapons by having them break open and the like. Whereas in ME2 & 3 the models were static and is was kinda cheated with just a sound effect, Shepard miming the action, and spent heatsink popping out of thin air.
 
I realllly hope the remaster gets good reviews. Can't wait to play this again on a current gen console! I got my PS3 out a few months ago, before the remaster was officially announced, since I was thinking about playing the trilogy again, but none of my controllers work any more. Luckily it wasn't too much longer until the Legendary Edition was announced, but that was November, and here we are looking at one more month till this thing comes out...

Regardless, I'm super excited for it!
 
RE: Birds on the presidium Yup! Just loaded up a save and apparently that was a thing in ME3 at least. There's like a million of them all hanging out on the awnings around the cafe/shopping area. It actually looks like an asset spawning bug as there's so many crowded all in one spot. Still don't ever recall seeing them in ME1 though.
 
I see the stuff they are putting out and I’m simply not impressed by it.
 
Yeah I am hearing people are all mixed feelings on this. I have the trilogy already so really don't want to buy another version of what have and love.
 
BillJ said:
I see the stuff they are putting out and I’m simply not impressed by it.
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OK, but short of a full on from-scratch remake, what more did you really expect from a HD remaster of a decade old set of games?
Personally I AM impressed simply because I expected this to be a minimum effort, slap-dash upscale, minimal bugfix so that it'll run on a modern system, and shove it out the door. Clearly a lot more effort than that has gone into it, so it's deserving of praise, for the team doing the actual work at least, if not the studio bankrolling the project.
Gingerbread Demon said:
Yeah I am hearing people are all mixed feelings on this. I have the trilogy already so really don't want to buy another version of what have and love.
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Yeah, I'll be in no rush to get it myself (probably wait for the winter sales) as likewise, I already own all three on PC. However at the same time there's going to be a whole generation that have never been exposed to these games (especially ME1) simply because they never owned that system. So I'm glad it exists as if nothing else it means they franchise gets to be a continuing concern between now and when ME5 comes out.
 
Reverend said:
OK, but short of a full on from-scratch remake, what more did you really expect from a HD remaster of a decade old set of games?
Personally I AM impressed simply because I expected this to be a minimum effort, slap-dash upscale, minimal bugfix so that it'll run on a modern system, and shove it out the door. Clearly a lot more effort than that has gone into it, so it's deserving of praise, for the team doing the actual work at least, if not the studio bankrolling the project.
Click to expand...

I think the biggest disappointment for me isn't the graphics, it is that they aren't bringing the combat and other objects in line with how they worked on the second and third games. I'd have rather they rebuilt the first game from the ground up than tinker with the other two that already hold up pretty well.
 
BillJ said:
I think the biggest disappointment for me isn't the graphics, it is that they aren't bringing the combat and other objects in line with how they worked on the second and third games. I'd have rather they rebuilt the first game from the ground up than tinker with the other two that already hold up pretty well.
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Again though, what you're describing is not a remaster, it's a remake. You can't just drag and drop gameplay mechanics from one game to another. They're what the whole thing is designed around, from the level design to the AI, to how the narrative is paced.
Remaking the first game from scratch would cost almost as much as making an entirely new game, which was clearly never on the table.

I'll take a prettier, less janky version of ME1 over absolutely nothing any day!
 
BillJ said:
We will have to wait and see how "less janky" this ends up being. It is EA after all! :rofl:
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From the footage it's clear that there's a marked improvement. Not as tight as the later two games of course, but they've quite obviously closed the distance. And it's not EA. This seems to be almost entirely a Bioware in-house joint, at least in terms of production priorities.
 
Outsourcing grunt work still means that the production priorities are being set in-house, not by the publisher.
 
Reverend said:
And apparently there's going to be a photo mode too?!
I mean, cool I guess? Not exactly a feature I'd even considered, but I suppose it's just more evidence that they're really going all out on this one.
I swear though if after THIS they still have that stupid photoshopped picture of Tali...
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Challenger2090 said:
Heh, no kidding. Especially since they have plenty of concept art to draw from and create a real quarian face.
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Yeah, that pissed me off. After all of the questions about what the Quarians look like, I was really disappointed all we got was a barely altered stock photo of a random woman. I was expecting them to look a lot more alien.
 
Reverend said:
Outsourcing grunt work still means that the production priorities are being set in-house, not by the publisher.
Click to expand...

I thought EA actually owns BioWare now? They would have to approve of the budget and other concerns.
 
JD said:
Yeah, that pissed me off. After all of the questions about what the Quarians look like, I was really disappointed all we got was a barely altered stock photo of a random woman. I was expecting them to look a lot more alien.
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And only if you romanced her. So not even that much for the femsheps.
The dumb thing is there's even a perfect time for it right there in the game when she takes her mask off *right in front of Shepard*. I don't buy that it was a budget thing since they apparantly had the time and resources to jam a pointless stunt cast net personality in there with a custom made face no less. There's a reason she only ever speaks to Shep and Traynor: it was the 11th hour and everyone else had already recorded their all their lines.
BillJ said:
I thought EA actually owns BioWare now? They would have to approve of the budget and other concerns.
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They probably negotiated the overall budget, sure. But that's not the same as dictating production priorities as they would with a new game development.
 
BillJ said:
I think the biggest disappointment for me isn't the graphics, it is that they aren't bringing the combat and other objects in line with how they worked on the second and third games. I'd have rather they rebuilt the first game from the ground up than tinker with the other two that already hold up pretty well.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that Mass Effect 1 DID get some combat improvements from ME2 and ME3.
In fact, in the previously released footage where they describe what changes were made, they have gone to say that optimizations were added to the combat section in ME1 to bring it more in line with ME3, however that because of how the original game was built, it was not doable or practical to overhaul the entire combat system and replace it with ME3 one (it was similar with the inventory system).

I don't mind that as the first game was far more of an RPG than it was a shooter, and I liked it for that (the only thing I could have done without was excessive exploration missions for some side-quests where you had to drop on other planets and drive around to get to what was stated - could have substantially shortened those bits as it felt like you spend a huge amount of time to get it all done - I've done it in all my playthroughs, but it felt too repetitive).

Otherwise, the changes being done are actually quite good for a remaster.
ME 1 and 2 has some lighting/shadow issues that had to be corrected.
 
Deks said:
I don't mind that as the first game was far more of an RPG than it was a shooter, and I liked it for that (the only thing I could have done without was excessive exploration missions for some side-quests where you had to drop on other planets and drive around to get to what was stated - could have substantially shortened those bits as it felt like you spend a huge amount of time to get it all done - I've done it in all my playthroughs, but it felt too repetitive).
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To be fair, the only real consequence of NOT doing all those collections and side-quests is a few less levels worth of XP, and you don't get that funny Conrad Verner bit in ME3. Also, when has any game with this amount of open world exploration NOT been padded out with paltry side quests that are mostly just there to get you to admire the pretty environments?
The only thing that actually bothered me about some of those was the interiors that were either way too spartan to get good cover, or way too crowded for the AI cope with. Oh and almost always a re-use, with difficulty spikes that were just crazy (I'm looking at you, Luna!)
 
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