Last week, BioWare gave fans an in-depth look at all the changes and improvements the developers have made to the gameplay of the seminal space opera role-playing series for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Now, the spotlight is being shined on the many graphical adjustments and upgrades being given to the trilogy to make it seem like it truly belongs in the current generation.
Alongside some fancy slider comparisons that you can check out in the official blog post, alongside an awfully in-depth and lengthy writeup about the process of how the team tackled visually upgrading the games, there is also a video giving us a proper comparison of the visual changes in motion.
Some interesting things to note are that, while there has been a great deal of unification across the three titles to make them closer in terms of gameplay and visuals, some deliberate differences were maintained.
Some characters who pop up in two of the three titles or across every entry of the trilogy retain their different designs across the games to signify the way they change or mature over the years. It wasn't only real-world years that passed between the release of the games, but the story also has some time skips that would make it strange if characters would use the same assets in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
This means that, while Garrus loses the low-rez head textures in Mass Effect one, it will still be spotless, whereas his stunt in Mass Effect 2 where he decides to block a warhead with his face will leave him scarred. In both cases, the native game's assets were touched up instead of both using a new one. Another example is Liara, whose face changes a bit between the games - though, to be honest, this is a stranger decision, as there is a notable shift in design between Mass Effect 1/2 and Lair of the Shadow Broker that cannot be chalked up to "maturing".