Now thatMass Effect: Legendary Editionwent gold and arelease date is locked, EA is focusing their marketing strategy on showing us how much more beautifulMass Effectis in this new edition. In a newly released comparison trailer, the team behind this latest iteration puts the original trilogy and theLegendary Editionside-by-side. The trailer also comes with an in-depth analysis of how BioWare developers achieved the magnificent result, published inEA’s official blog.
The blog states that the main challenge for the art department ofMass Effect: Legendary Editionwas to improve all the visuals while staying true to the original games’ art direction. The transformation of the original trilogy into 4K couldn’t become too distracting or lose the identity BioWare built across the years.
First, the art team had to identify and catalog every asset in the trilogy. That means every texture, model, particle, sound effect, cinematic movie… basically, everything that you can see and hear in a game. This process resulted in a list of more than thirty thousand textures across the trilogy, all needing an improvement, since the original games were released for consoles that supported only a 1080p resolution and lower quality audio, while the new generation can go up to 4K and high definition sounds.
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With all the art assets properly identified, the second step was actually updating every asset. This brought new issues to the team, as the same characters and scenarios were often used across the entire original trilogy, with obvious improvements from one game to another. This means the team had to prioritize the assets used inMass Effect 3as the closest to their goal.
With all assets updated individually, the third phase of the visual improvement was to go back to the original concept arts for each level and start to work on better versions of all scenes. It was not enough to just update assets, but offer new improvements once the team could see all the unique parts interacting with each other. This meant adjusting light, texture and sound effects, to better convey the original vision for each game, even if the technical limitations of their original release prevented the art team to bring it to life at that time.
Afterreporting several improvements, this new deep dive into the visual improvements ofMass Effect: Legendary Editiongives us more details about how much work was put into the special release, and what players can expect of the remake.Mass Effect: Legendary Editionis available now for pre-order on PC via Origin and Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One with compatibility on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Mass Effect: Legendary Editioncomes out May 14. Check out the new trailer for the upgraded trilogy below:
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