BioWare Details How They Made Mass Effect Legendary Edition Look So Good

BioWare outlined some of the painstaking effort that went into the Mass Effect Legendary Edition graphics enhancements, ,and it’s much more than a simple upgrade.

For one BioWare had to catalog every asset, and included every cinematic, sound byte, and interface file.

The next step was figuring out which ones could be improved on without breaking the rest of the game, always assuming the source files were present to begin with.

(They sometimes weren’t.)

The next step was upgrading Unreal Engine 3 and increasing limits on texture sizes.

Only then could the actual enhancement work could begin, by hand.

BioWare ensured the best versions of each character model were ported across the entire trilogy with the necessary tweaks to details such as uniforms.

Read more: Mass Effect Legendary Edition: Release date and everything we know

BioWare Details How They Made Mass Effect Legendary Edition Look So Good

The BioWare artists then set to work regressing each model back to its “original sculpt” to re-build it with improved geometry and textures, not to mention improving particle effects, among other things.

All this work extends to the worlds as well, improving texture quality, expanding the sky, and creating more nuanced light-and-shadow-effects.

Much of this work was based on the original Mass Effect concept art and gave the team a chance to create the worlds they first envisioned back in 2007 and earlier.

And we’d say the efforts paid off.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is looking rather lovely and even has fairly reasonable PC requirements.

[Source: PlayStation Blog]