Mass Effect High Def Play Experience

Mass Effect to the Modern Age

For the first entry in one of the greatest game series of all time, Mass Effect has some serious flaws. Considering the technology common at the time, these make sense, but if you want to play it today, it looks a bit rubbish. I've spent the better part of the past week finding and tweaking mods for ME1 on PC to get the best possible experience. You can watch the streams here!

First and foremost, the great quality at the time, even on highest settings, looks like a pixely mess today. This is partly due to the textures, and partly due to the engine.

ME1 Graphics Tweaks

This mod is essentially a .ini file that unlocks a good portion of the engine's capability that was just ignored by the base game. It also sets the resolution to 1920 x 1080, because that option was not available in the base game. Be sure to follow the instructions, especially to make the file 'read only' after you've placed it, because otherwise Mass Effect will overwrite it at startup and you won't get any benefit from it.

A Lot Of Textures (ALOT) for ME1 

Now that you have a better rendering instruction set, you need something better to render. This pack of textures is, strictly speaking, not the highest quality available. The MEUITM pack was the first, and is massive. But it`s not entirely stable. Any other graphical or post processing effects you use with MEUITM will actually make the game look worse than when you started. So if you don't want anything except new textures, it's fine, but you'll be seeing them at 1280 x 720, on a less than optimized rendering engine.

 FPS Counter and Post Processing Effects

This one is not strictly necessary, but does provide stability benefits, and if you're colourblind it can help you balance the colours on screen. My use for it comes from the 'AMD Black Blocky Character' glitch. At the time of development AMD CPUs used 3DMax instruction sets. These were soon after abandoned, but ME1 still calls them on any AMD system. So on an FX or later series of AMD CPU, it'll load weird looking blocky characters under certain lighting systems. Most notably on Noveria in Binary Helix labs, and on Ilos toward the end of the storyline. This mod applies post-processing instruction sets which outrank the 3DMax instructions, eliminating the problem even if you don't actually use any of the effects.

So I hope this short post will help anyone who wants to enjoy ME1 in a modern-looking, crisp fashion, taking advantage of far newer hardware than the game was originally designed for. Next I'll be doing ME2, which doesn't have so many texture or engine problems, but does have a few strange mechanics that we're all better off without. Enjoy.