Space opera enthusiasts, rejoice! BioWare announced that a Brand new Mass Effect game is currently in the works. Also, fans will be getting a 4K remaster of the original Mass Effect trilogy coming to PS4, Xbox One & PC in 2021. The Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is a remaster and not a full remake. It will include all single player content for all three games including all the bonus and DLC content.
I am always happy to get remastered versions of games I love (though how happy might depend on the price point, as I still own all the originals). Won’t lie, though: I was hoping for more of a ‘remake’, at least as far as the first game is concerned, as I would have loved for BioWare to tweak its actual gameplay to be more in line with the latter two. I still love that first game, but the last couple of times I’ve replayed it – especially when going immediately to two and three – the actual gameplay mechanics like combat and inventory are… yeah. ‘Haven’t aged well’, let’s say.
My issue is much more with, as you say, the “feel” of the controls, the movement but also (primarily, even), the shooting. The assault rifle always just felt like a fire hose, with no sense of precision at all, and while the sniper rifle could almost – almost! – be ‘forced’ into being fun, to do so it had to be played from so far away (usually on the non-mission-specific planets) that it always felt more like a test of patience than a viable tactic. The other two guns were…also there.
Look, I wouldn’t necessarily want them to completely change the general pace or the approach of the game – I wouldn’t trade the more ‘open’ non-mission-critical planets for anything, as an example – but I still think you can make the basic fundamentals of the gunplay a lot more fun without losing some of those unique features
Every time I replay the trilogy, I have the same two thoughts: there’s more daylight between the structure of two and three than I remember (three really is paced, just, perfectly, in my own opinion), and the gameplay of 1, after you’ve played the other two, is actively un-fun, something you force yourself through so you can re-live the story again.
Granted, when I played the first one back in the day my expectations were more at KOTOR than other, actual shooters, and I still find the basic Mass Effect gameplay more engaging than KOTOR’s, even though ‘not having a lightsaber’ is pretty much always a mark against a game. And I get it, ISHT clicks different with different people. I’m the guy who thinks Dragon Age II is hands-down the best in that series, so I get what it’s like choosing a hill to die on.
I tend to assume (probably somewhat cynically) that the remasters are more of a ‘goodwill exercise’ than anything else; they want to remind players (and newcomers) just HOW good those first three games were before delivering the new game that’s theoretically in production. So, even though the combat is a bore and a chore. I’ll happily take what I can get.
–Dagobot
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