In 2010, a Mass Effect film adaptation was picked up by Legendary Pictures with Warner Bros.
Recently, however, as video game sales break records, the controller-to-remote pipeline has exploded, from Netflix's upcoming Assassin's Creed series and Amazon's Fallout to HBO's The Last of Us and Warner Bro.'s Minecraft. The desire to adapt video games into attempted Hollywood cash cows has been around for decades, with 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or 1993's critically panned Super Mario Bros. film. Many of the supporting cast will die or survive based on how the player chooses to move around the galaxy, prompting every choice to cause a massive effect. While the phrase "Mass Effect" comes from the in-game technology that allows manipulation of mass, like faster-than-light travel, the title fits as well in how the game takes the player's choices into consideration. The trilogy surrounds Commander Shepard, the first human nominated to serve as a member of Spectre: the galactic policing body in the year 2183. The space RPG game series, now fourteen years old, recently celebrated with an acclaimed Legendary Edition, remastering the first three games in the series all in one.
They caused most of the biggest headaches, not just because of the psychedelic effects they create when not working.The Mass Effect movie adaptation was canceled to turn it into an entire television series instead. We had to completely reverse engineer how they worked and then figure out how BioWare had changed them for LE. They are very large and complicated assets. Terrains are not really used in the later games, nor later editions of Unreal Engine and no ME modder had looked at them before. In Pinnacle Station they are much smaller, for example the ground of the Volcano level, but we had no alternative to replace them. "These are the assets that give ME1 its undulating mountains that the Mako famously struggles with.
"The single item that sticks out for me is Terrains," says Kinkojiro, creator of the Expanded Galaxy mod (opens in new tab). So even though a lot of Pinnacle Station was built with existing Mass Effect assets, that didn't make it an easy task. "That's the result of many years of reverse-engineering effort, and it allowed us to focus our efforts on the comparatively small number of object types that were significantly different between the games." For the sake of compatibility with all the games in the series, Legendary Explorer can edit files from seven different versions of UE3, automatically resolving format differences. "Most of the assets are repurposed from elsewhere in LE1," SirCxyrtyx adds, "but all the objects that define the level (the lights, the locations of all the meshes, etc) and the gameplay (UE3's Kismet visual scripting) had to be converted." The original and remastered versions of Mass Effect run on different versions of Unreal Engine 3, which meant all of those objects were saved in different formats. The DLC is probably about 95% assets from the main game." This means we just pull LE versions of assets like meshes, sounds, etc, because porting everything would likely be impossible. "I built a 'donor' system", Mgamerz says, "given an object path in the original game, this system looks for the same named object in the Legendary version of the game, which if found, is then used in the converted file instead. Getting this planet to look right was tricky because it used a lot of shaders that aren't in the Legendary Edition.
We love making improvements such as these, because they can boost the productivity of everyone who mods Mass Effect, not just the ME3Tweaks team." HenBagle says, "we re-wrote a section of our Asset Database tool to make it easier for us to find replacement materials and textures. Things only in Legendary Edition, like being able to run much more often, have a significant effect on the difficulty."Īs well as updating Pinnacle Station, the modders updated the tools they were using to work with it.
As Mgamerz says, "this is Mass Effect 1 AI we're fighting.
Some of the modes and maps have had their difficulty retuned in response to feedback from testers, since combat is fairly different in the Legendary Edition-and often easier. The original audio experience felt terrible, you essentially shot silent meatbags while Ahern yells at you." For example, adding music to the level has had a pretty profound effect on making it feel more engaging. "While this is a 'port', we’ve put in considerable effort to improve the quality of life of the combat. "It's definitely feeling better than the original version when I've had to run comparisons between the two for testing", says Mgamerz.
The mod has a few improvements over the original Pinnacle Station. The mod fixes it, and you can see how he looks now by scrolling up. In the DLC this turian's mesh had the wrong texture, which went unnoticed by many due to dark lighting.