Ok, I’ve played about 4 hours of the original Mass Effect at this point. I mean, why wouldn’t you start the trilogy off with the first installment? Aside from that chronological thing, replaying the original game that I haven’t played since I completed it the first time has been fun. Funny thing about the brain, it looks almost identical to how I remember the game looking back in 2007 when it launched. I mean, look at this difference between Garrus in 2007 and Garrus in 2021.

Just looking at Garrus, the armor shading and textures are better, colors are better, smaller details are sharp and defined. You can almost feel what Garrus’ bird face feels like. And then you look in the background and notice the sharper details on the water, among other things. I swear, when I originally played, Garrus looked exactly like 2021 Garrus. I guess the brain fills in the missing details. It’s visually amazing, at I’m not even playing on 4K resolution. Or 1440p for that matter. The Normandy looks better, both inside and out. Planets have some amazing new details I don’t remember seeing though.

Weapons just feel better in this game. The recoil system has been reworked, as firing an assault rifle at full auto doesn’t require constant mouse movement to adjust for recoil. It’s a comfortable balance, and accuracy is more affected by the length of a burst than recoil. The aiming reticle seems to bloom just a bit earlier, but you can manage that with shorter bursts. Sniper rifles feel solid, as do shotguns and pistols. I picked the Adept class for my Shepard, which has an unlockable Pistol skill. The best weapon I have right now is my pistol slot, as the Adept class is best adapted to using pistols. In the original, the weapon system would destroy any accuracy if you didn’t possess the skill for weapons. The Vanguard class was terrible with sniper rifles, and you had a 50/50 chance that your shots would miss completely. Unless you were using the weapon for your chosen class. This seems to be gone, though my assault rifle accuracy is still terrible compared to pistols or sniper rifles. It may just be that I’m still using the Lancer I, which has some pretty bad accuracy anyway.

The Mako! Honestly, I don’t remember much about this vehicle from the original. I had to have used it constantly. I just have no recollection of controls being janky or the physics being off. However, the remastered Mako is pretty fun to use. The first mission I did once I got the Normandy, was the asteroid X57 mission. Rescue/find some missing engineers on this huge metallic asteroid. Jumps felt solid, the booster worked nicely, and the suspension felt good enough. I turned off mouse aim steering though, as shooting things while still trying to drive just did not work. Neither did trying to turn around with mouse aiming. If you looked behind you and pressed to go forward, the Mako will just drive backwards. Won’t turn around, will not turn, it just drives backwards. Same if you looked to one side or the other, instead of turning, it would just guess (seemingly) what you wanted and either drive forwards or backwards. After turning it off, I had much better results when steering. (And don’t forget to use medi-gel to repair your Mako when taking damage. On PC, this is “R” on the keyboard for some reason. I kept trying to use “V” because that’s what it is when controlling Shepard.)

I haven’t really gotten deep in to the game yet. I have figured out how to edit some files, which would allow things like setting your FOV, which BioWare did not add to the game menu for reason. I will not be covering these here at this point, I’ll have a full tutorial up on what you need to do this. The console has been seemingly removed, or at least, just moved, but there is a work around to this. I have been able to set my FOV to 100, turn off mouse acceleration, and modify my Paragon at this point. Keep an eye out later today, or possibly even tomorrow, for this info. Hopefully this method will be made obsolete once more people get around to making mod tools, but it’s relatively simple to do.