“You need to keep what I think is the heart of what the franchise was, what people remember it to be, what choices you made, the characters you met, the encounters you had with them.”
– Mac Walters of BioWare shares why the ending of Mass Effect 3 remains unchanged, and why some other changes have been made to the trilogy along the way.
The remastering of a game involves more than just graphics improvements, as a recent Metro article can attest. The next Mass Effect Legendary Edition splashes a new coat of paint in BioWare’s decade of life Mass effect trilogy, while making some small changes along the way to address things that have been overlooked in the past or that are worth reevaluating in the current era.
Some of these changes deal with the way the game’s camera frames certain chats, including one for an infamous scene with a serious conversation with the character Miranda who bizarrely points the camera straight at her rear.
In that interview with Metro, project director Mac Walters answers a question about whether the change to certain character models ever came about during the development of Legendary editing of the mass effect. Walters notes that while the characters themselves remain largely unchanged, some considerations have been made along the way about how certain characters are betrayed.
“Kevin actually called for some camera cuts that were just … why were they focusing on Miranda’s ass? So in some cases, we said, ‘Okay, we can make a change there,’ explains Walters.
“But ultimately, changing an entire character model or something was not really … it was a decision that was made as part of many creative decisions and just showing it as faithfully as possible so that we can move forward is really the choice for all the art we had. “
In other cases, Walters says his team worked to navigate certain omissions, like how someone plays Mass effect since your female PC would adopt clearly configured postures with the male PC in mind. These fixes, he tells Metro, required some ingenious changes to fix, since the team lacked the resources or the ability to simply change the original animations.
“Specifically in relation to animations, we couldn’t really change many of them, but there were times when you could change the camera so as not to focus on one of those animations,” says Walters. “So an animation of a male shepherd would have you sitting with your legs wide open with a low camera where, if you were wearing a skirt, it would be a little unfavorable. So we can’t necessarily change this animation, but you can zoom in slightly raised to reduce the problem. “
The rest of the interview offers insight into some of the other differences between Mass Effect Legendary Edition and the original games, including considerable gameplay adjustments made in the first game in the series and the studio’s decision to leave Mass Effect 3the then controversial untouched end.