BioWare has dropped a new video and blog update comparing the differences between the original trilogy and the remastered versions, and the complex, super technical design process involved in revamping Ashley’s facial geometry without compromising its smug, I-am-the-worst-ever aesthetic.
According to the blog update by the Mass Effect Legendary Edition team, this process is divided into three phases:
- Unreal Engine tech improvements to accommodate the visual improvements, including res limit increases and new compression algorithms for the game’s 30,000+ (!) textures
- Visual improvements for assets, including characters, gear, and vehicles, and 4K cinematics
- Visual improvements for levels, including lighting particle effects
Besides hyping up the new much-wow graphics, it’s also a fascinating exposition of the studio’s iteration over three games. A lot of assets, for example, were reused from one game to the next. I guess it’s obvious if you think about it, but… I didn’t think about it until now.
Some assets—most frequently, characters and generic props—were shared between the games, and many had already been improved in a later title or DLC. For those cases, we generally used the improved asset as our base, improved it further, and then ported it across the whole trilogy. This resulted in more consistent and higher-quality assets, but we had to carefully ensure this process didn’t flatten the sense of the passage of time and the overall narrative.
Our character artists worked their way through a prioritized list of hundreds of armors, creatures, characters, guns, and vehicles across the whole trilogy. They would frequently take an asset back to its original high-poly sculpt, focus on achieving a consistent texture resolution, add supporting 3D geometry where needed, and fix errors with baked normal maps or texture mapping. Central to our efforts was increasing the sense of realism in the surface response.
Huh. I would’ve just replaced every asset with Garrus and sent it to the printers, but maybe that’s why I didn’t get the job.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition launches on 14 May.