Comparison on Mass Effect Legendary Edition To Classic Versions

Is the Mass Effect Legendary Edition worth buying? Is it a worthwhile investment? How lazy was the "remaster"? Today, we will answer that question with a bunch of Mass Effect Legendary Edition screen shots. Mass Effect Andromeda has been notorious for their awkward faces and odd facial animations. Has the new "style" of faces brought into Andromeda translated into the Legendary Edition? It seems it has.

This is the same character, but you can see the face itself has changed drastically. Now, whether this is an actual upgrade or not (Legendary Edition is on the right) is very debatable. I would even say the left feels a little better, though the hair looks better in the new version. But for an "upgrade" you really shouldn't have to be asking what details you can see, it should be very obvious which is the update and which isn't.

Here's another example of some faces, but you can see Mass Effect Legendary Edition does look a bit better with the lighting, though it's not incredibly impressive in the amount of progress that's been made.

Yet another facial comparison, you can see the skin texture looks better in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, though the lighting is completely different. Legendary Edition is much brighter, which is more of a style choice than an improvement in graphics. The eyes in the original are also shinier and look a bit better in my opinion.

While I've been focusing on the faces, a lot, due to Mass Effect Andromeda's reputation with them, we should take a look at some environments too.

This scene has been changed, a lot. While Mass Effect Legendary Edition looks far better, it seems it's completely missed the artistic choice and atmosphere of the original game. You can tell in the original Mass Effect that things are not very good, something bad is in that tower. But in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, it's unclear if that place is really bad or not. The lighting is more natural and it doesn't look scary at all. It's a very odd artistic choice for this scene. While it's definitely an improvement graphically, it seems like it misses the original point of this area and the feeling it should convey.

You can start to see some of modern Bioware's Andromeda influence in the faces. He looks like he's found some sort of dropped candy bar on the floor and is excited to pick it up or something. Again, we can see the original intent of the scene has been changed. It's gone from concern to more of a surprise. I'm not sure I like it as much. The facial expression kind of makes me want to laugh.

Overall, it seems like Mass Effect Legendary Edition is not worth it if you've played the originals. If you've played on PC and modded them, it's even less worth it. But people who are new to the series and want to experience it for their first time will probably enjoy the Legendary Edition.

Hopefully some of these issues can be addressed in patches and updates. But as you can see this is the type of "remaster" that leaves people analyzing screen shots and trying to decide what's changed, instead of looking at a remaster and being impressed and having an obvious increase in quality. Considering the original Mass Effect came out in 2007, around 14 years ago, you'd think there would be some more obvious improvements, enough to make your eyes drop. If you consider it's been 14 years, and Playstation 1 came out in 1995 and PlayStation 3 came out in 2006, you'd think you'd see a lot bigger improvements. I really can't recommend buying Mass Effect Legendary Edition if you're expecting to replay classic games updated for the current generation. But it's "satisfactory" if you're new to the series or missed out on some of the games in the series.

The latest big update on Steam seems to fix some terrain textures, eye shaders (which would address the eyes looking off), some lighting improvements, and more. We'll see how much effort they put into fixing these graphics with the patch. But the patch is 11GB so there must be some serious work going on in Mass Effect Legendary Edition for a patch of that size.