Bioware Details Some Changes Coming in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is set to come out next month, and people are getting excited to relive the adventures of Commander Shepard and his crew on the Normandy for the… fourth time, or something? We’ve been doing this a lot. But in any case, while this remaster has suffered its fair share of controversies due to what it’s changed, specifically the look and feel of certain locations, Bioware isn’t just upgrading the graphics: they’re also making gameplay tweaks across the trilogy, many of which were detailed in a new post on the PlayStation blog.

Unsurprisingly, the lion’s share of the changes are happening in Mass Effect 1, the first and by far clunkiest of the games. For one, they’re turning it up to be more like a mainstream third-person action game and less like an RPG — so no more missing your shots because some RNG wasn’t behaving. They’re also putting melee attacks on a specific button, allowing you to sprint outside of combat, giving you the option to issue commands to individual party members, and enabling head shot bonus damage — which was sometimes turned off for even humanoid enemies.

They’re also changing the Mako, the lovably awful car you’d use to navigate a planet’s surface every time you touched down. They’ve fine-tuned the physics, made it less bouncy, and changed it so you take damage when you touch lava instead of straight-up ending the mission. They assure us, however, that you can still swan dive off cliffs, which is of the utmost importance.

That said, it’s not just Mass Effect 1 that’s getting changes. New cover is being added across all games, and certain bosses are being retooled to be a bit less awful, for example.

It’s an interesting list of changes, and for the whole story, I suggest you check out the blog yourself.