MASS EFFECT LEGENDARY EDITION

Make your next playthrough the best one ever.

- Christopher Livingston

Can you feel it? I can feel it. The moment is right, the stars have aligned, and you can lift your eyes from this magazine and meet your PC's knowing gaze from across the room. It's time. It's time to start a new playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy, the brilliant yet flawed yet utterly epic space saga. Welcome back, Commander Shepard.

And when starting over with a series you've already played at least once, if not multiple times, you'll probably want to make some changes, like switching over from the original games to the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The remastered version of all three games in the trilogy will let you enjoy updated visuals, enhanced lighting and effects, and better performance, plus nearly all the original DLC for the original games is included. But there's no need to stop there, because there's no better way to craft a new experience from a classic game than by installing a bunch of great mods on top.

ENHANCED EFFECT

What could be better than the upgraded visuals of the Legendary Edition? How about upgraded visuals of those upgraded visuals? The A Lot of Textures mod was created to enhance the looks of the original game, but even when Mass Effect Legendary Edition arrived, it turned out the mod still made Mass Effect look better in some respects. The mod does away with some of the blocky, static shadows that still appear in Legendary Edition, making the experience much more modern and even more pleasing to the eye. As a companion to A Lot of Textures, you'll also want to install A Lot of Videos, which replaces the cutscenes with crisp, clear, 4K versions, most of which run at a smooth 60fps instead of the vanilla versions' 30fps. It's much less jarring if the improved game doesn't flip back to the original low-quality cutscenes.