Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is already enjoying a remarkable variety of tweaks, hacks, and mods after a bumper opening weekend sailing to the top of sales charts. It should come as no surprise that the PC version has stirred the creative juices of the modding community, but even the most optimistic mod aficionado might not have been expecting there to be so many available so soon.
The game released on Friday to much acclaim, bringing many welcome changes to the much-beloved trilogy, particularly 2007's original Mass Effect. For some, though, these changes represented merely the tip of the potential iceberg, and so they've already started digging into the game files and settings to find other tweaks to be made.
Some of these are purely technical: one of the most popular mods on the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Nexus is "Better Camera (Higher FOV)" which, as the name suggests, gives players a few different field-of-view options if the over-the-shoulder camera is a little too close for comfort. Elsewhere, mods and .ini files can be found that improve lighting, disable mouse acceleration, tweak the autosave options, and plenty more to get the game looking perfect and playing as well as possible.
A couple of other mods dig into content, though. Of note is Biganimefan2's "Same Sex Mod for Default Sheps" mod, which is a solid go at adding in gay romance options for Mass Effect 1, something that was included in the sequels but remains sadly absent even in the re-release of the original. It's not a perfect option for those who ship Male Shep and Kaiden, though: the mod effectively just changes the gender flag of the player character, so it can lead to awkward silences in conversations where no appropriate dialogue is coded in, and can result in some strange visual effects in some cutscenes. Still, it's a solid go at hacking in some more inclusive romance options.
Ultimately, players aren't likely to get more in-depth content-related mods until the content creation tools for the game are updated, allowing modders to really get into the files and, say, add in the already-voiced dialogue lines for Mass Effect's same-sex romances that were never utilized in the original game. On top of that, fans could end up seeing whole new expansions and reams of extra content in the future once more major modification is made possible. For now, though, fans will have to be content with more surface-level changes.
Still, with over 30 mods available at the moment and plenty more likely in the pipeline, there's already lots of fun to be had in tweaking Legendary Edition. If the lack of expansion mods seems disappointing, perhaps a look at the hundreds of choices and plot threads in all three Mass Effect games via "Trilogy Save Editor" will help to put it into perspective. There's still plenty of excitement to be had in the galaxy in the meantime, after all.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Source: Nexus Mods