BioWare has announced that its heavily anticipated collection of Mass Effect remasters, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, will be released on May 14 for PC (Steam, Origin), PS4, and Xbox One with backward compatibility for next-gen consoles.
To celebrate the occasion, EA has published a comprehensive website that details the remastered trilogy’s various improvements, such as a stunning 4K Ultra HD presentation with enhanced textures, lighting, and models; reduced loading times; gameplay tweaks; and a unified character creator that ensures the consistency of Shepard’s appearance throughout all three games. The original Mass Effect has also received some exclusive upgrades in the form of a “full world-building pass” with especially pronounced relighting, as well as a revamped user interface and improved controls.
“The Mass Effect Legendary Edition includes single-player base content and over 40 DLC from the highly acclaimed Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 games, including promo weapons, armors, and packs—remastered and optimized for 4K Ultra HD,” BioWare explained. “Supports ultra-high refresh rates on PC, and offers a choice between ‘Favor Quality’ for increased resolution or ‘Favor Framerate’ to boost your FPS on consoles. Enjoy a modernized PC experience across all three games with native controller and 21:9 widescreen support, user interface navigation improvements, and DirectX 11 compatibility.”
“With improved hair, makeup, eye color and skin tones you can create your Shepard in a unified character creator with all options available across the full trilogy, or choose to play as the iconic Femshep from Mass Effect 3 now available in all titles. Enjoy improved aiming and weapons balance, sound effects, better Mako controls, input/controls, squad behavior, cover behavior, and gameplay cameras [for the first Mass Effect].”
You can check out a new 4K reveal trailer that provides a glimpse at what the Mass Effect Legendary Edition looks like in motion below. BioWare has also shared comparison images that demonstrate how much work went into remastering the original Mass Effect in particular—thanks to new textures and lighting, it almost looks like a full-blown remake.
