Getting some more detail about Mass Effect Legendary Edition
The Mass Effect Legendary Edition showcase provided a wealth of information, from their objectives and aspirations, to how the visuals were enhanced and how the gameplay was brought forward, whilst hopefully not breaking what players were expecting.
At the end of the showcase, there was time for some Q and A and given there was quite a few folks on board, there were some really great questions to be discovered. We had Mac Walters: Project Director, Crystal McCord: Producer and Kevin Meek: Environment and Character Producer on hand to answer, so here we go.
Q. How accessible will the remastered trilogy be for newcomers to the franchise?
A. Mac: That’s a great question and I talked about it earlier and that is friction, especially with Mass Effect 1, there is a lot working against us. When we were working on that game we were working on a new engine, we were creating a new ip, we were trying to work out all the rules and obviously we started to perfect those as we progressed through the series. So with Mass Effect 1 we are bringing those experiences from the later games into it, which should ease players in a lot more. But also, as we talked about before, we put the game in front of a lot of people already, some of who hadn’t played before, so we got a lot of good feedback about things like ‘I didn’t know what to do’ or ‘I didn’t know where to go’, so we are looking at ways to ease new players in and help them out.
Then we also have other additive features, for example we have the character codes from 2 or 3 now work in 1, so if you wanted to grab a character from the internet you can. Plus we have unified the experience across the games, which should help players.
Q. Is there any additional content planned for the Legendary Edition, maybe content that was cut from the original games?
A. Mac: No there isn’t, I mean if you look at all the work that was done to Mass Effect, I can honestly tell you playing it and we’ve had this feedback, it does feel like playing it for the first time again, so in and of itself that entire first game feels fresh and new. But honestly we had looked at stuff that might have been left on the cutting room floor and things like that, that we could bring in, but a lot of the time that isn’t really in a state where you can just resurrect it and use it, it would require rebuilding from scratch and at that point you are diverting effort away from the remaster itself.
Q. Was multiplayer ever on the table?
A. Mac: We’ve talked about doing the remaster for sometime now and at one point, everything was on the table, and ultimately we looked at what it would take to do it, it had a lot of challenges, for example what do you do with crossplay, because that’s an expectation now. What do we do with people who are still playing multiplayer now, how do we honour that, how can we bring them in, is there a way to bridge that gap?
Of course these are not insurmountable challenges, they are all things that we could do to fix them and get multiplayer in there, but when you looked at the amount of effort it was going to take, it was easily greater than uplifting all of Mass Effect 1 and our focus was really on the single player experience and at some point you just need to draw the line. I love the multiplayer, but I think that Mass Effect Legendary Edition is just a better representation of the trilogy, because we were able to focus on those single player moments.
Q. What are the plans to enhance the audio of the games, for example will there be things like Dolby Atmos support or is there plans to support the 3D Audio on the PlayStation 5?
A: Mac: That’s a great question and since the holidays we have been doing our audio mix passes, but I don’t believe we have support for the 3D Tempest Audio, but we have done some improvements throughout Mass Effect and some cutscenes and weapons have been improved.
Q. How did it feel re-approaching the more divisive aspects of Mass Effect 3? Is the Extended Cut now the standard ending?
A. Mac: I will answer the last part first. Yeah, we wanted to include as much of the content as possible as DLC and incorporate it into the experience as you would if you had downloaded that content. So for folks who downloaded the Extended Cut, that was the experience for them, so that will be the experience for everyone playing the Legendary Edition.
Ultimately and this was something I mentioned before, when a game is done there are things you wish you could do and for us the Extended Cut was the opportunity to add on and add a little bit more love and context around the endings, so to me that is part of the cannon.
Q. Are the animations going to have any kind of tweaks, to make the movements feel more natural, specifically in Mass Effect?
A. Mac: Animations not so much, there are certainly a lot of animation glitches and bugs that you would see in conversations that were fixed, throughout the course of the trilogy, but as far as diving into the animations themselves, there were a lot of tools that we had developed ourselves to create the games in the first place and it was reliant on us to find those tools and figure out how to get them working again.
We were finding that it would sink a lot of time, anytime we touched anything to do with animation, it seemed like it was a house of cards, make one change to one character and it would impact every character across the game, so we kept saying ‘let’s not touch that yet’ and ‘let’s not touch that now’ and we got to a point where we had everything stable and we decided, it was going to be far to challenging to adjust the animations on a global scale.
Kevin: One thing we were able to do, even though it wasn’t with the animations files themselves is we were able to touch a lot of the systems that connect the animations together. We were able to find these moments where people might be crossed eyed for example and that would really, more than anything cause you to want to throw out the cutscene. So we were able to go through and find those and it wasn’t an animation change, but it was more like, how does the system work, for example when Shepherd would put his head back as he went into cover, he would look up and his eyes would go into the back of his head, so those things we were able to smooth out.
With cutscenes and the cinematics, where the camera is going to switch between people, you would often see people do a 180- or 360-degree spin and those things are now on the content side, in engine that we can smooth out, without having to worry about opening the Pandora’s box of reimporting animations.
Mac: Those are really good points, with Mass Effect we looked at the cameras themselves, the cover systems across all three games and while not necessarily again the animations, there’s a sense of it feeling smoother and one of the things that I was always frustrated with in the original game was the way the camera would always refuse to interpolate, so if Shepherd would pop up on something, the camera would pop up with Shepherd, one-to-one and so it made for a very jittery experience, so we brought in cameras from Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, so the whole experience just feels smoother and elegant when you play.
Q. Are there any specific PC enhancements?
A. Mac: I mentioned early on that we decided to stay with Unreal 3, (see the Overview Story for why), there might have been a way to make that work through software or something, however we did a lot to improve PC across the board.
Crystal: A lot of performance enhancements and graphical enhancements that we could use for the PC experience to be a little bit faster and unleashing the framerate, so players can play at a higher framerate. All that was to give a better experience for the PC, as well as controller support, that was a big deal there.
Mac: Yeah, we have 21:9 support as well and expanding and modernising a lot of the option settings, when we went back and looked at all three games, the options were radically, well not radically, but very different and not building towards something, just different, so picking the best modern options for PC and making sure its harmonised across all three games.
Kevin: I think the other thing is people are talking about RTX and that might have been a really low level, giant programming undertaking that we could have jumped on, right off the bat, but sticking with Unreal 3, it really limited that, but there is a whole different branch of opportunity that you have working with Unreal 3, because it is an old engine, there is a feature called Forward Rendering, instead of Differed Rendering and opens up this opportunity for us where we can just render the scene twice.
So what we’ve done is in the trilogy, if there is a really reflective surface and if there is performance to support it, we can add a second camera to the world, and render the reflective texture on surfaces, so you will see real-time, dynamic reflections as you pass and that is just another camera capturing the scene. It does everything we need it to do, without the need to fundamentally change the rendering threads and things like that.
The other thing, specifically around it being PC or not, I think we took the opposite approach where if you compare PC to PC, that is one thing, but when you compared the original game on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, that was a far more dramatic drop in quality and visuals overall. Where as now, when we are doing comparisons, people will ask what version are they looking at Xbox, PlayStation or PC, the graphics are far more unified, there is no specific feature that we added to PC that we couldn’t add to consoles, the experience visual experience is the same.
Q. Finally, is it one consecutive experience, one game flows right into the next, or do you need to boot up each game on their own?
A. Mac: I guess it’s neither, because we do have a unified launcher, that launches each game, so when you finish Mass Effect, you return to the launcher and then select the next game. So you remain inside of the Legendary Edition, for the length of your experience.
There we go, a few specific topics, but always nice to learn more at a granular level. Mass Effect Legendary Edition is coming out for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on May 14.
