“You have to keep what I think is at the heart of what the franchise was, what people remember it, that’s the choices you’ve made, the characters you meet, the encounters you’ve 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.
There’s more to remastering a game than just graphics enhancements, as a recent piece from Metro can attest to. The following Mass Effect Legendary Edition splashes a new coat of paint on the ten-year-old BioWare Mass effect trilogy, while also making some minor changes along the way to address things that had been overlooked in the past or that are worth re-evaluating in the current era.
A handful of those changes have to do with how the in-game camera portrays certain chats, including one for an infamous scene featuring a serious conversation with character Miranda bizarrely aiming the camera at her butt.
In that interview with Metro, project director Mac Walters responds to a question of whether changing certain character models ever emerged during the development of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Walters notes that while the characters themselves remain largely unaltered, some considerations have been made along the way with how certain characters are portrayed.
“Kevin actually called out a few camera cuts that just… why was that aimed at Miranda’s butt? So in some cases we said, ‘Okay, we can change something there,’” explains Walters.
“ But in the end, changing a full character model or anything like that wasn’t really … it was a decision made as part of many creative decisions and it’s really the choice to show it as faithfully as possible that we could move forward . for all the art we had. “
In other cases, Walters says his team worked to go through certain mistakes, such as how someone played Mass effect as his female PC would assume positions clearly set up with the male PC in mind. Those fixes, he tells Metro, required some clever tweaks because the team didn’t have the resources or the ability to simply change the original animations.
“We couldn’t change much of that, especially around the animations, but there were times when you could change the camera to not focus on one of those animations,” says Walters. So a male shepherd animation would leave him with his legs open wide with a low camera, where if you were wearing a skirt it wouldn’t be a little flattering. So we can’t necessarily change that animation, but you can raise that camera slightly to lessen the problem. “
The rest of the interview provides insight into some of the other differences between Mass Effect Legendary Edition and the original games, including significant gameplay tweaks made to the first game in the series and the studio’s decision to leave Mass Effect 3then controversial ending untouched.