The Mass Effect Legendary Edition trailer just came out yesterday, but we already have a side-by-side comparison with the original trilogy. Check out the video above and read on for details.
We know that Mass Effect Legendary Edition includes the original remastered trilogy for 4K and HDR with 60fps support on Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, PS5 and Xbox Series X, while the PC has a high refresh rate and 21: 9 screen. Legendary Edition will also include enhanced character design textures, better lighting, shading and ambient art. YouTuber Cycu1 removed all scenes from the Mass Effect Legendary Edition trailer and compared them to the appearance of the original Mass Effect trilogy. The first half of the video shows consecutive photos in order of display in the trailer, while the second half uses sliders to cycle through each screenshot in the trailer.
The most notable differences that I can detect in these side-by-side comparisons are the lighting and the added textures / depth. At about 12:29 am, you see a scene of Commander Shepard standing on a ledge overlooking a vast grid of lights with broken glass raining down in front of her. The Legendary Edition graphics show numerous more individual lights and there is more lighting in the foreground that makes the whole scene more readable. The huge and impressive photos of the space that show Normandy, the Reapers and the Citadel also benefit greatly from the graphic updates – there is only a better sense of scope and grandeur.
If you feel like you can’t see that much visual difference, there is certainly a valid reason for that – Mass Effect Legendary Edition is running on the same Unreal Engine 3 as the original trilogy. That’s because BioWare would have to reconstruct almost every scene in the trilogy from scratch to transfer all three games to Unreal Engine 4. However, according to Gamespot, BioWare went to great lengths to push the limits of Unreal Engine 3 – including direct rendering which is very similar to placing “another camera in each scene, rendering each twice”, which allows “dynamic reflections in real time “.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be released on May 14th, and I for one can’t wait to return to Normandy. Here it is 10 of the most interesting improvements in Mass Effect Legendary Edition to cheer you up.