"When playing the game at 1080p to 4K with texture mods, those cutscenes were the biggest thing holding it back from looking like a true remaster." "The pre-rendered cutscenes in Mass Effect are 720p videos that were heavily compressed to allow the game to fit on the disc," Ainsworth tells me. "Because of this, there are only a handful of people in the community that can use the toolset to its fullest capability."Ī prime example exists in the low-res story sequences in the original Mass Effect.
"I can't overstate how difficult it is to mod a PC game that was designed primarily for consoles on an engine that offers no mod support whatsoever," Ainsworth explains. However, modding Mass Effect is no easy endeavour, nor is it a phenomenon BioWare encouraged or even facilitated. "Another team member designed a script that can automatically check through hundreds of videos in the mod for errors such as missing frames or an incorrect framerate." Meanwhile, a dozen team members volunteered to upscale frames to 4K using Gigapixel in an ambitious attempt to meet the mod's scheduled release date last year. "We have 2TB of dedicated Nextcloud storage on a Gigabit connection thanks to our team member bosp," Ainsworth says. Citadel arrival in Mass Effect 1 using the A Lot of Videos mod.
The aim of this enterprise is to complete Mass Effect Modding Workshop creator Ryan "Audemus" Ainsworth's own labour of love, ALOV ( A Lot Of Videos), which is the result of a community-wide effort to remaster Mass Effect's inaugural iteration. "People hated them with such passion that it spawned an entire community that wanted to fix them."Īlthough the ensuing ending mods were relatively renowned within Mass Effect circles, the movement didn't stop there: accepting the unlikeliness of an official remaster, these dedicated tinkerers decided to work on a complete 4K overhaul of the entire trilogy, as well as orchestrating their own original mods to boot. "We only have Mass Effect 3 mods because of the terrible endings," Spectre Expansion Mod author Tydeous tells me in a recent interview. Thus the Mass Effect modding community was born, brewed from a chaotically potent cocktail of discontent and desire for more. After the divisive denouement of Mass Effect 3 ripped a fissure in the community, a group of fans banded together to rewrite the series' disgruntling culmination. However, there exists a monumental issue that has plagued this cutscene for over a decade: it has aged like a fine wine, if only said wine had its cork removed long before it was shelved.įortunately, there is a fix.
Shortly thereafter the wonder of the galaxy's epicentre hits you like a sledgehammer, its empyrean skyline a majestic marvel among the cosmos. "Stand by for clearance Normandy," bellows Captain David Anderson as the iconic ship approaches Citadel Dock 422.
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