The upcoming Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is lining up to deliver the original trilogy with a fresh coat of paint and some quality of life updates. However, it seems as though BioWare originally intended to not only bring older Mass Effect content to modern consoles, but to upgrade the game to a brand new engine.
Project Director Mac Walters revealed to PCGamesN during a preview event that BioWare was in talks with Epic Games about bringing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition to Unreal Engine 4, the successor to the engine the original games run on. It would appear that the idea was scrapped due to the increased workload that comes with transferring between the computing languages of Unreal 3 and 4, keeping the new edition firmly in the category of remaster over remake.
According to Walters, the visual scripting language used in the Unreal Engine doesn't exactly have a copy/paste function, meaning that everything would have to essentially be remade from scratch. This would mean re-coding every scene and moment found in the original trilogy, which may have meant fundamental changes to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition from the original. As Walters puts it, the game feel would have drastically changed over the course of that type of update, essentially calling for a full remake that might give a different experience as a result of these changes.
In the case of presenting Mass Effect: Legendary Edition as a definitive version of the original trilogy with a fully customizable Commander Shepard, and all three games delivered in one tight package, Walters believes this to be the right call. Since the plan for this new edition was never to remake the game but to update it for modern hardware, sticking with Unreal 3 might be the safer bet in the long run. Of course, that doesn't mean that future Mass Effect titles won't try to see what new and classic characters might look like in Unreal Engine 4 as the series moves forward.
While fans would have certainly enjoyed seeing Mass Effect's Commander Shepard and their crew in Unreal 4, it's more important that BioWare is able to hold onto the game feel that made the series shine in the first place. The ways that a series like Mass Effect feels to play is an elusive target to keep track of, and if upgraded visuals might have sacrificed it, then it might not have been worth it. After all, if a fresh-faced Shepard does feel like Shepard, then it really doesn't matter how good that new coat of paint is in the long run.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is set to release on May 14th, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: PCGamesN