Legendary BioWare now it is not in its best condition. She has long since lost her status as the king of the RPG genre and has lost the trust of her fans, but still hopes to return loudly in the future. Despite the fact that during its history the studio managed to create a variety of projects, it is the games of the series Mass effect can be identified as pivot points when analyzing the current state of BioWare.
The first part of the space opera about Captain Shepard managed to combine the mechanics of RPG and shooters, for which it received a lot of positive feedback from both players and the press. This moment can be described as the peak of the studio’s success. The sequel that followed also turned out great, and is even considered by many fans to be the best representative of the series. Then BioWare began to have disagreements with the parent company EA, as a result of which various perturbations in the team followed, which could not but affect the quality of the games being released. The first sad call was the release of an unsuccessful sequel for Dragon age… Followed him Mass effect 3 was quite a good game, but caused a storm of negative emotions among fans as the final part of the entire trilogy about Captain Shepard. After that BioWare released several more projects, but not one of them was able to return it to the conditional “royal throne”, and some even plunged the team to the very bottom. Now, in order to somehow remind of its former greatness, the studio decided to release a collection Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, which includes the first three parts of the cosmooper with all the additions. We tested it and will now share our impressions.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition greets players with a dedicated menu with game choices and basic settings. The developers have unified the character editor, so in each part it has absolutely identical parameters and capabilities. In addition, if you prefer to play a female character, you can choose a look from the third part and go through the entire trilogy of the same red-haired warrior, whose model first appeared only in Mass Effect 3. The uniforms of the Alliance and some other characters were also brought to a single style.
On the technical side, the authors have done a great job. The picture in the updated versions feels clearer and more detailed compared to the original releases. In some places, you can still see small ladders near the elements of the environment, as well as not the best filtering of textures in the background, but this is if you find fault with it a lot. For the most part, the collection looks good enough, and the solid age of the first Mass Effect gives out only a small amount of details and characters in locations.
It is worth noting that despite the stability and smoothness of operation, in some moments you can notice that the reflection in glasses or other smooth objects is reproduced in jerks. Such moments are immediately striking, but they are not very common, so they are unlikely to be very annoying. I would also like to note that Shepard’s animation in the triquel, unfortunately, remained unchanged, and the main character there still moves like a “log”, which is much worse than it was in previous games.
In addition to the increased detail and clarity of the picture, the developers have reworked the lighting and changed some light filters, which made the image less contrasting, and the play of light and shadow now seems softer. Someone may not like this, others, on the contrary, will seem like a good idea, but personally, these changes did not cause any purely negative or positive emotions for me. But what really upset was some glitches. At the time of this writing, the developers have already released an update that partially fixes them. Hopefully, they’ll fix everything over time, but some annoying bugs still remain in the game. For example, during missions on Feros, the main character’s companions periodically refused to move and simply stood still, occasionally teleporting to the area near the main character. In addition, along with the updated textures and 3D models, a strange glitch appeared in the game, which makes some characters, including the main character, bulge their eyes – much like in that video about “the door was washed down for me”. After the patch, this happened less often and not so clearly, but it still occurs. The situation is similar with another oddity – the unnatural animation of the mouth during conversations. Some characters’ lips move in a chaotic manner, which gives the impression that the speaking character is either with a broken jaw, or with a strongly distorted bite. Now that this has been partially corrected, conversations no longer look so comical, but they still seem unnatural in places. However, sometimes during the dialogue, the characters may not open their mouths at all or become abruptly silent in mid-sentence – even after the patch. It is also worth noting that Russian dubbing was included in the remaster of the first part, which often does not fall into the articulation, it is sinful with repetitions of the same fragments and, on the whole, seems simply terrible due to the poor acting out of the actors.
I have already managed to get out of the habit of such bad dubbing, but for some reason the developers do not give the opportunity to play with original voices and Russian subtitles. By choosing English, you simply cannot turn on Russian subtitles. Let’s hope that together with some patch we will be given the opportunity to hear the beloved voice of the female version of Shepard performed by Jennifer Hale without switching to a fully English version.
