With Mass Effect Legendary Edition's launch, it's going to bring the highly touted space opera trilogy to the next generation. A slew of performance, visual, and gameplay upgrades will allow avid fans of the series to experience Commander Shepard's original story again, but this time, in gloriously high resolutions and frame rates.
But undertaking the task of bringing Mass Effect Legendary Edition to life is not that easy, even to several of the industry's most experienced game developers. So, they looked to a group of talented, passionate people who have been avid fans of their games for years; people who have been upgrading the old games without asking for anything in return.
In this article, we're taking a look at the undisputed power of the game modding community, and how their amazing efforts were used
Fans and Developers Pitch In
A report in NME stated that Bioware and EA developers actually used fan-made mods as guides to help them work on the Mass Effect remake. This was revealed by project director Mac Walters, who claimed that the team used a website that a lot of Mass Effect fans (and gamers, by extension) probably recognize: NexusMods.
Speaking to PCGamer, Walters said that they looked at a handful of the mods on Nexus and set them as their "minimum." Then, he claimed that the team's main job was to "go bigger" from there. Among the mods they checked out were the extremely popular A Lot of Textures, which aimed to upscale the original games' texture assets to 4K and even 8K resolution.
And with all the industry-standard tools that developers have, they were able to take these mods (which are basically crafted from scratch) and improve them even more in terms of visuals. This resulted into the modifications looking far more spectacular.
A Long-Running Partnership
Game modding communities have existed since the OG Doom game, which was released in 1993. Since then, hundreds (if not thousands) of different groups have sprouted over the years. The biggest ones involve several of the most popular games in history, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the GTA series, Minecraft, and the Fallout series, to name a few.
During their decades of existence, modders have been able to do things with games that not even developers can achieve. With a few code changes and some 3D modelling magic, they've added tons of new quests, visual upgrades, gameplay tweaks, and even full-blown game modes that otherwise wouldn't have existed or ever released. As a result, the old game improves tenfold in terms of gameplay, design, and even story.
There are even times when modders are able to fix certain bugs in otherwise poorly optimized titles. Remember GTA IV? That was a perfect example of a broken game that was "fixed" by the modding community. We're putting the word "fixed" in quotes, however, since GTA IV on PC is still one of the worst-optimized ports of all time. Not even a modern graphics card like the RTX 3070 can run that game on max settings without terrible stuttering and glitches, even if it released way back in 2008.
It's Not Just Mass Effect, Too
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is far from the only one who's taking advantage of fan-made mods to help with a next-gen transition. The Witcher 3, one of the greatest games of last gen, is also one of them.
A report on Kitguru states that CD Projekt Red is looking to collaborate with a certain modder who made the HD Reworked Project mod. The mod is considered one of the greatest ever made for Witcher 3, due to its aim of upscaling the vanilla game's muddy textures to resolutions such as 4K and beyond. It is said that CD Projekt will use the base of the modder's work as a guide in the upcoming next-gen upgrade for Witcher 3, which will hit the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles sometime this year.
Final Thoughts
Mass Effect Legendary Edition serves as proof that game developers and modders can work together to achieve one goal: make their beloved games better in a lot of aspects. It also goes to show that with enough encouragement, even the industry's best devs can learn a thing or two from people who actually love the games they modify. It's a symbiotic relationship at best, where both parties are the undisputed winners.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
