For instance, popular mods gave players more hairstyles to choose from, more casual outfits to wear away from combat, and a photo mode to frame and capture their favorite moments-all features of the Legendary Edition. They also helped show other changes players were interested in. The improvements made by modders set a benchmark for what BioWare wanted to achieve. Yeah, it was quite the entertaining half hour of us trying to debug a game that was 14 years old."Īfter the AI upscaling, artists played through each area to see what else could be improved, altering things to bring them more in line with the initial intent for a scene, taking advantage of modern processing power to fill spaces left blank or remove walls placed to break line-of-sight while the area behind them loaded. I mean, it wasn't this bad.' And then going back to YouTube videos, we were like, 'Oh no, I guess that is what it looked like.' Not say that the original looked bad, but we'd just been staring at the new one for so long. "It was like, 'You're not doing it right. "We literally spent like 20 minutes trying to convince ourselves something was wrong," says project lead Mac Walters. "Then you go back and you play the original for marketing material or something, and you're like, oh, wow! It's jarring."Īs the project neared its end, various members of the team replayed the original over one of their regular Friday afternoon Zoom chats, looking back to remind themselves where they'd begun.
"You kind of forget how far you've come," says character and environment director Kevin Meek. This is BioWare's chance to bring the "spectacular RPG of the future" into the future it helped create. But over a decade later, it clearly is-which is why BioWare have taken it and its two sequels, plus almost all of their DLC, and remastered and tweaked them to make Mass Effect Legendary Edition. That makes it strange to think of Mass Effect as old.