Mass Effect Legendary Edition (Review) Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has...problems (but is also totally worth it!)

Introduction

I first played Mass Effect during the lockdown in 2020. This was around the time I switched from Mac to PC, and I had always been interested in Mass Effect as an outsider looking in. My new machine finally had decent integrated graphics, and so I was finally able to try out all the games I'd wanted to play for years. Mass Effect was top of that list.

I’d heard about it from some people in a online writing community I was involved in at the time, and I’d seen a friend playing it years earlier on their PC. I played the games using secondhand discs I picked up from the local JB-HiFi (Australian consumer electronics chain, for those reading in non-inverted nations), and I was hooked from the get-go. Mass Effect is now one of my all-time favourites.

So, of course, the next step was to play the remaster. And…

Well, the title says it all, really.

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is in many ways an incredible improvement, but it also has some changes that are detrimental. Most of these relate to the original Mass Effect; as well as EA/Bioware’s treatment of the remaster post-launch.

I know that many people here will have already bought and downloaded LE; this post is mainly intended as a guide for people who have not yet purchased the remaster, but who have some degree of familiarity with the series (whether as a veteran or a prospective player).

I won’t be discussing story details- because honestly there are no changes there; but there may be minor spoilers in this post, and I’d advise caution while reading. I also won't be discussing much about the graphical changes, primarily because most of the big changes were made to the first game, and also because I approve of most of the changes, regardless of whether or not EA did indeed properly upscale the game to 4K resolution (which, according to some users, they failed to do properly. I wouldn't know, as my PC doesn't do 4K).

Mass Effect 1: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Garrus Scars

I'm sure most people reading this have gone over the list of changes between the original retail release of ME1 and the LE remaster, so I'm not going to go into depth here. However, it is important to note that the bulk of the visual and gameplay changes made to the trilogy have been applied in ME1, with the sequels receiving more minor changes to graphics. LE!ME1 has been changed to such a degree that I'm temped to call it more of a remake than a simple remaster, at least when compared to how little the sequels were changed from the original releases.

ME1: The Good

To start with, there is quite a few things that have been changed for the better. Here's a short, but not exhaustive, list of actual improvements made to gameplay.

The M35 Mako- while still handling like it's made from Styrofoam- now has slightly improved handling, an added boost mode similar to the Nomad from Andromeda, and has received changes to turret aiming (in the original, the turret could only fire at objects that it could elevate or depress to fire at, meaning if you were too close to a target, the gun wouldn't hit them. Now, the turret fires at the reticle, and is not dependent on the elevation of the barrel). You can now also repair the vehicle while moving, which is greatly appreciated.

Weapons now have different fire modes depending on their model. In the original, all weapons fired in identical ways (e.g. assault rifles would always fire on full auto). Now, some assault rifles will fire in burst fire, as will some pistols and sniper rifles.

There are now two separate progression systems in the game, namely the original 1-60 system, and a new system that caps off at level 30. The only change this seems to bring to gameplay is that you receive skill points faster, and weapon progression is also more rapid.

The controls have been changed for both the Mako and on-foot combat. The most notable difference is that the grenade key is no longer bound to 'R' by default (which is an amazing change, as anyone who played the original will tell you), and is now bound to 'G' like most other shooters do. The ability to order your squad-members to specific locations with dedicated hotkeys- as introduced in the original ME2- has also been backported into ME1.

UI has been changed to be more readable, and you can now see accurate representations of you and your squad's health, rather than the slanted and barely intelligible readouts in the original.

These changes are very welcome, although a fair number are simply to make switching between the entries of the trilogy easier. There are a host of other QoL changes, like the introduction of a headshot mechanic, better sprinting (although you still run out of stamina way to fast for my taste), and enemies no longer yell "I WILL DESTROY YOU" every ten frelling seconds. As I said, I'm not here to discuss the graphical changes, but I will note that ME1 looks far better now, especially in the case of the Presidium.

ME1: The Bad

My biggest issue isn't really a fault of ME1 alone, but rather the entire remaster: The game is too frelling big. While I understand that this is essentially three games- that were all around 10-20 gigs individually on their own- crammed into one game, the remaster takes up a whopping 110GB of storage space.

I'm not too worried, as I have a fairly roomy SSD, but for people with limited data plans, or who don't have a ton of storage on their computer, this can be a definite turn-off. It didn't have to be like this either. A good example of what BioWare could have done is what Microsoft did with the Halo: Master Chief Collection, where downloading all of the Halo titles was optional, and individual titles could be downloaded at will after installing the launcher.

I'm lucky enough to have unlimited monthly data, but my issue comes from the fact that Australia hasn't had the best history with installing high-speed internet. Unless you're willing to pay out of the behind, generally the best data transfer speeds you can get are in the 6MB/s range, or around 48 megabits per second if we're talking real units.

Other countries have it worse, and even in the US, I know for a fact that internet connections and bandwidth can be spotty. Nobody wants to wait three days to play a game, even if it's Mass Effect (of course, this is an exaggeration, but, at the same time, it is entirely possible that this might actually be the case for some parts of the world).

ME1: What The Frak Were They Doing With Their Time And Money (AKA, The Ugly)

There are some serious, serious issues with this remaster that possibly make it a poor introduction to the Mass Effect franchise for new players. These boil down to the following:

Husks are now significantly less intelligent. Something clearly went wrong with the AI, because 90% of the time, Husks will run endlessly in circles, occasionally running towards the player, before circling round a bit more. This isn't exclusive to husks either. Every enemy based on the Husk body type (Thorian Creepers, the mutants on the Salarian organ harvester's ship, etc.) behave in this way, leading me to believe it's an error with animation rigging rather than the AI scripts in general. This is a massive issue that should have been picked up in QA, and it still hasn't been fixed months after release. While I can't say if every player has had a similar experience, I have seen plenty of people talking about this, which implies that this is not just an issue specific to me.

A number of uncharted worlds have been poorly remastered to the point where I have to wonder why they were touched up in the first place. Chief among these poor redesigns is Eletania, the planet with the infamous space monkey sidequest. Whoever redesigned it put far too much grass down, which even first-year game design warns about (I know this from experience, this was a criticism of one of my projects when I did my Introduction to Video Games course in my first year of my degree. BioWare's "qualified" employees should know better than this). It lags horribly (like, 50-60FPS on my machine everywhere else; 15FPS on this one planet) as a result, which is thankfully an uncommon criticism with the remaster. Eletania is by far the worst, and the others are admittedly much better off, but again, this shows a complete lack of dedication to properly QA testing the game prior to release.

On the subject of poor QA testing, there are a number of exploits and bugs that were known about in the original release that were never even fixed in the remaster, and were- in some cases- made even more broken or buggy. For example, in the original, there was a way to get the Mako into the Geth Colossus fight during Liara's recruitment. All you hard to do was drive the Mako into the rock formation that generally blocked off the vehicle at the right angle, drive or fight your way to the dig site, and you could cheese the boss fight without fail. With the addition of the boost engines in the remaster, this becomes laughably easy, to the point where you might as well not even bother fighting the intended way.

There's also several bugs that the remaster introduces. For example, you can't enable or disable your squadmates' helmets if you accessed the skill menu with the 'u' hotkey. You have to go out of the menu, open the pause menu, use that to access the skills menu, and then change the helmets. There's another bug where your character can randomly get stuck on a rock, which will sometimes fix itself, but can also force a reload (to my memory, I never encountered this in OG ME1, only in ME2 and ME3) if you can't find a way to get unstuck. Sometimes, squadmates will randomly freeze in place (noticed primarily on Feros (in the tunnels under Zhu's Hope) and on Novaria (at Peak 15, at the entrance to the loading bay), and will not respond to any move commands, and will only move if you enter into a conversation, in which case they will simply be stuck at the new location. Only way to fix this is saving then relaunching the game.

Another remaster-general bug is that if you start up one of the games bundled in the remaster, then try to play another game in the trilogy without relaunching the launcher from Origin/Steam, the game will helpfully inform you that "a instance of this is already running". These are basic QA problems, most of which can be fixed with two lines of code minimum, if not just a few edits to existing code. The fact it got into the final version AND has not been patched since release is laughable. Most of them are minor, sure. But it does display a complete lack of care on the behalf of EA/BioWare/Whoever, and shows that they did indeed cut a large number of corners with the remaster.

ME1: The Verdict

So, this is the big question: Is ME1 (Legendary Edition) the best way to experience the franchise for a new player?

TL;DR Version? Yes

Long Version: Conditional Yes.

See, the original game has aged in some ways like wine, but in others like milk. The graphics are dated, sure, as are some of the gameplay mechanics. Overall, it's far less stable on modern machines (despite all the problems with the remaster, it did not crash for me once. The original crashed if you so much as sneezed during a loading screen), but at the same time, it's in many ways much more polished than the remaster. I'm not going to fall into the fallacy of saying "If I had to suffer through bad graphics and clunk, then new players have to unless they're not true fans LOL XD I BIG FAN LOOK AT ME HAHAHA NOOB"

*Deep and painful cringe at even typing that sarcastically*

But I am going to point out that buying this should be a decision made with the knowledge of what it is doing to the quality of future titles. EA sees sales as motivation to make games in a sloppy way. If people still buy something broken, they're not going to have any motivation to sell a product that is actually QA tested properly. I'm not officially saying you should pirate, that's wrong, and also no, you should also not unofficially pirate this (BioWare actually did a pretty amazing job with what resources they had (I doubt EA assigned a comparatively sizeable budget to a remaster, regardless of what games were being remastered), those devs have worked hard under bad bosses and tight deadlines, give them their paycheck please); what I am saying is that we deserve better from EA.

The remaster is a much better way to start the series, yes, but it is in many ways lower quality than what we should have got. The poor QA stuff I noticed is like a litmus test for how much effort a company actually put into their product. This stuff is laughably easy to fix, I've never even seen the inside of the game's source code, and yet I can think of about five or six different ways to fix it without having even finished my computer science degree. It wouldn't have cost any extra time or money to iron out, and some of it is just lazy imports from the original. No, what EA thought they'd do is wow us with fancy graphical overhauls and side-by-side comparisons, while quietly just rushing the game out to keep interest up in time for their next Mass Effect game. This reeks of laziness in so many ways. There has clearly been hard work put into this remaster, don't get me wrong. But it is so very obvious how little it was QA tested prior to release.

So, yes, this is the best way to play the first Mass Effect, for both returning and brand new players. But it's got a host of problems that might make it or break it for people who want the remaster we were promised.

ME2/ME3: Wow. They Barely Changed Anything (aside From The Gorram DLC Weapons)

So...yeah, there's not much to talk about regarding the sequels in terms of their remasters. Graphically and gameplay wise, they've changed the least. Since I'm not here to discuss graphics, this is going to be a short one. But...

ME2/3: Yes, This Is A Rant

...there are some big problems regarding the DLC content and how it was integrated into the game.

Despite the fact that those who bought the DLC weapon/armour packs often had a hugely unbalanced early game, I thought that it was better the way it was. In ME2, from a story perspective, the Illusive Man wants Shepard to have ever advantage they can get. Hell, there's a theory that's bumped around the net for years now which postulates that the Illusive Man is basically Conrad Verner, but richer, better dressed, and less stalker-y. Which is why it's so confusing that several pieces of DLC that were originally given to the player by him can now be found from random merchants around the galaxy.

Notable among the ME2 armours is the Blood Dragon set, which was a Dragon Age: Origins save bonus, if I remember correctly. The armour's description notes that there are signatures telling Shep to "get better" from the sports team who came up with the hardsuit written on the inner lining, and in the original version of ME2, it was a get-well present from The Illusive Man...but in the Legendary Edition version you buy the armour with messages addressed to you from a random Batarian merchant on Omega. What the actual feth??

I'm not going to go on at length about the "immersion" and the ruining of said "immersion", but zarking heck, BioWare, at least edit the description so that it doesn't create a inconsistency! They let you have some of the DLC that was originally given to you at the start, but they chose one of the items that was explicitly a gift from Shep's benefactor as an item that you have to buy later? It's not even that great as a armour! Why not just give it to the player at the start?

There's also the inconsistent distribution of the game's items among the various vendors. I expected a high-tech Alliance Military handgun like the M5 Phalanx to at least be sold in a place like Illium. That would make sense, it is a very stylish looking gun, and is clearly built for human/Asari-sized hands. Which is why I was completely baffled when it was instead sold on Tuchunka! I don't even think handle of the pistol in-game can be theoretically held by a Krogan, let alone fired! Also, how did they get hold of it? Are we expected to believe that it just fell off the back of a truck?*

*Admittedly, this is in fact how Jacob acquired the gun for you in the original release, so I guess that isn't out of the question. Also, I guess that Vorcha could fire it, but why would you give such a gun to a gorram Vorcha?

In ME3, this issue is exasperated by the fact that most of the DLC guns- while now sold in a mostly sensible way- are now so gorram expensive. Like, there were originally three guns that cost around the same in the original release (the Black Widow, the M11 Wraith, and the M-77 Paladin, all sold by Spectre Requisitions), but now there's dozens of them, and they all cost more than 100,000 credits apiece!

Before, it was something you saved up for your entire playthrough, and it was rewarding to get. Infiltrators became godlike with the Black Widow for example. But now, the cruddy one-shot Blood Pack Executioner costs about the same, and while it is amazingly powerful, it's actual usefulness in gameplay is highly questionable. At the very least, I can't recall any of the descriptions referencing who gave the weapon/Armour to Shep, so at least there's no in-universe inconsistencies as far as I'm aware.

ME2/3: But Why?

In fact, I have no frelling idea why this balance change was even made to ME2 and ME3! I played through the originals with the DLC, and they were still fairly challenging early on. Heck, most of the progression in ME2 isn't tied to weapons; more to your powers (there are so few weapons to begin with that they serve more as a direct upgrade system than as a arsenal most of the time).

ME3 had far more weapons, with far more variety, and it was really cool to always have options for dealing with different encounters! One mission, you could be rocking an awesome sniper rifle, the next a assault rifle! The greater variety was so much better! Now, you're lucky if you have even two of the DLC weapons by the end your NG+ run, if you even bother with that at all after experiencing the ending for the first time.

ME2/3: Should I Buy, Then?

Short answer? No.

Long answer? Heck, no.

Longer and more useful answer?

I don't even think the remastered work is even that noticeable. Graphics are mainly what was updated, and even then, outside of some small things (like character model improvements, some updated cutscenes that look better, and some minor post-processing changes that really don't stand out that much in comparison to the work done to ME1), these two entries are basically the same as they were in their original releases. Apart from some controversial buttock-shot removals, and the DLC changes; the conversations and gameplay play out identically. Really, the most noticeable changes were made to the pre-rendered cutscenes (like the Suicide Mission, the opening of ME2, and so on).

That doesn't mean that changes weren't made. Some of the AI behaviours are noticeably better in ME2 (for example, Archangel's recruitment mission is noticeably more challenging during the tunnel fighting section), ME3 has some less buggy dialogue (although there are still frequent audio interrupts where a character will begin speaking, and the character who was already talking will stop mid-word) there's some better squad behaviour when using powers, and some of the jank has been ironed out.

However, these are basically the same games they were at launch, and you shouldn't expect anything on the level of ME1's facelift.

As for whether you should buy...

As I said in the ME1 section, this is the best way to experience the trilogy for both new and old players. It's better optimised overall, and ME2 has had those really long loading screens cut way down. I'd argue that if anything, you should be buying for the ME1 remaster rather than for the sequels. Think of them as the cherries on top of the ice-cream sundae that is the ME1 remaster. I'd recommend buying it, so long as you acknowledge that this game is by no means an indication that EA has upped their game in any way. Close inspection reveals the rot of laziness that has spread into the fabric of the remaster. Also, there hasn't been a patch since just after launch, despite there being a plethora of bugs present. YMMV

TL;DR, it's a flawed remaster, but well worth it for new and old players. But for feth's sake, buy the game on sale. It's too frakking expensive, no matter how much content or remastering is present in the product.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2690554973

(Review) Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has...problems (but is also totally worth it!)