Discovering how the visuals have improved in Mass Effect Legendary Edition

When dealing with any sort of remaster, one of the areas that is always going to get the most attention are the visuals and for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, that is also true.

During a recent showcase event, Kevin Meek the Environment and Character Director for the project spoke about the challenges they faced. Given that the newer consoles were going to support 4K and some folks have PC’s that can go even higher, the first challenge that they issued to themselves was to increase the resolution on all of the assets. Now given that across the three games, there are potentially tens of thousands of different assets, the team got some support from an AI program and some other internal tools, to boost things up in bulk, before they started to touch them up manually. Once that was sorted, it was time for them to do the manual work, but they took a unique approach here as well, instead of listing all the assets in the game, the art team was given sections of the game to play, so they could see how things would look, from the player perspective and then choose what part they wanted to enhance.

Once the base textures were done, the team would then go in and look at the effects, lighting, particles and so forth, to see what needed to be enhanced next, in order to provide the best look for the scene. As Kevin explained, if there was something massive off in the distance, there was no point in an artist spending days on it, if there were assets that were right in front of the camera that looked out of place. Check out these before and after shots of the Mako on the planet Feros, with the first showing some destroyed buildings, the Mako front and centre and some ominous clouds in the background and then the updated look.

As you can see there is a lot of enhancements done, but the shot still looks the same, there are some more elements to help sell the destruction, more debris on the ground and with those same ominous clouds in the sky, being able to pass light through in a more realistic way, the scene is lit very differently.

That was all well and good for locations, but what about characters, across the three games there were dozens of characters that could be included in the squad and when it comes to NPC’s there were hundreds, if not more and not all of them human. This is where things started to get trickier, the team had to ensure that any outfits worn by someone, that had versions in later games, didn’t show up wrong in the earlier ones, because if there was a story driven change in Mass Effect 2, that would impact an outfit moving forward, you wouldn’t want to see that in the first game. The same rules can be applied to the ships and vehicles, for example the Normandy is very different in Mass Effect 2, so they had to make sure that the SR2 version of the Normandy is not a thing in the first game.

Characters were also impacted by this as some characters followed you from Mass Effect all the way through, so having the Mass Effect 3 version of Liara can’t show up in Mass Effect 2 or the original. But it wasn’t just a matter of them having the right outfits for characters to wear, they also took the time to reshape characters, smoothing out faces, to allow for a more realistic way for the lighting to work, scars that were raw in the first game, would need to be healed or worse in the sequels, but more than that, it just allowed for a tighter look. Now they didn’t go out of their way to change things up massively, think of it more as a tightening of the looks, rather than a complete redesign, the below shots of Thane can highlight just how well that now looks.

Perhaps the area that is going to resonate with a lot of folks, more than anything else is the updates to the character creator, allow you to do things like play as Female Shepherd, the one that was shown off in Mass Effect 3 as the default female version, from the outset of the first game. But as always you don’t need to stick with the default look of the character, because they also brought back some of the more advanced options and features from the later games into the original, giving you more choice on how you want to define your Shepherd. The example that was provided by Kevin was that there are now more eye colour choices, more hairstyles, more make up looks, just to give players the choice. Not content with that though, they managed to take it even further, providing new skin tones, in order to allow anyone to create a version of Shepherd that looks like them, and you can carry that look from the first moments of the first game, to the credits of the third.

Finally, if you manage to create a look for Shepherd that you think is truly iconic, you can now share the unique code for that specific Shepherd with friends, letting them see just what you did and maybe they can tweak from there. While we did get to see a lot of comparisons between the original version and the new, there is so many more characters and locations to see and I can’t wait to check them all out.

The game is set to launch on May 14 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with backwards compatibility on the next gen platforms.