Mass Effect Legendary Edition Coming in May

It’s been a long time since I played through the Mass Effect trilogy. Sure, there was some controversy around how the 3rd game ended, and quite honestly, I didn’t buy into any of it. I loved the whole story arc from start to finish. The hours I put in were vast, and heck, I even enjoyed Andromeda, even if half the things that happened in it didn’t lead to anything… such a waste of its true potential.

Fortunately, the original trilogy is back, and it’s going to look and play better than ever. The Mass Effect Legendary Edition features the single-player base content and 40+ downloadable content (DLC) story, weapons and armour packs from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 and will allow players to relive the legend of Commander Shepard in 4K Ultra HD with HDR.

“It’s been an incredible journey revisiting the stories, characters and iconic moments of the Mass Effect trilogy, enhancing the experience for modern platforms while staying true to the spirit of the original,” said Mac Walters, Project Director on the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and lead writer of the original trilogy at BioWare. “Remastering a game, let alone three, is a huge undertaking as there’s over 100 hours of gameplay included, but we wanted to do this for our fans as well as a new generation of gamers looking to jump into the iconic story of Shepard.”

The textures have been replaced with higher resolution assets, there’s been plenty of improvements to shaders and VFX, the lighting is better, there are new and improved dynamic shadows, volumetric and DoF! And, let’s be honest here, the three games didn’t exactly lack visual style when they launched, so they should polish up nicely for 2021. “Pre-rendered cinematics have also been enhanced to make every story moment feel even more impactful.” it says in the press release, but they don’t say how. I’m guessing AI resolution enhanced, as that’s pretty common these days.

About Mass Effect Remastered

The original Mass Effect game features comprehensive world-building enhancements with added detail and depth to locations like Eden Prime, Ilos and Feros that players will explore in their journey across the galaxy. Mass Effect also includes updated interfaces and UI as well as a variety of quality of life improvements. In addition, combat and exploration are modernized through improved aiming, squad controls and behaviour, Mako handling and cameras.

The Mass Effect Legendary Edition features unified character creation options that persist across all three titles and is complete with an improved and expanded selection of hair, makeup and skin tone options. The iconic Female Shepard default appearance from Mass Effect 3 is now available as the default female Shepard appearance in character creation in all three games, further adding to the unified experience across the trilogy.

Release Date

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is rated M (Mature) by the ESRB and is available now for pre-order on PC via Origin and Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with forward compatibility on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Mass Effect Legendary Edition will launch May 14 worldwide on PC via Origin and Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with forward compatibility on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. I’m not sure if a native release will happen for new consoles, but at the same time, I’m not sure what (if any) difference that would entail.

Also…

Check out the official system requirements here!

“Meanwhile here at BioWare, a veteran team has been hard at work envisioning the next chapter of the Mass Effect universe. We are in early stages on the project and can’t say any more just yet, but we’re looking forward to sharing our vision for where we’ll be going next.” – EA