“Sometimes the stuff they were able to pull off was because they kind of didn't know any better, and just kind of went headstrong into something crazy. A lot of the guys making these levels were relatively fresh out of school,” Meek says. It was the first time going into a new engine. “I think especially with Mass Effect 1, there's just this feeling that I think people were a little bit naive about it. Much of the battle takes place in zero gravity, with Biotics being capable of flinging enemies into space as the whole level rotates at 90 degrees. Meek talks about how the original Mass Effect’s big finale, in which Shepard fights across the exterior of the Citadel, would be a “significant undertaking” in Unreal Engine 4 or Frostbite. “Adding to BioWare’s determination to keep the project’s ambitions firmly under control was the Mass Effect trilogy being somewhat unique from a technological standpoint, particularly the original game. We knew at that point that we’d really sort of start to take away the essence and spirit of what the trilogy was.” “A really crisp example of that would be if you look at the Kismit scripting language, it’s a visual scripting language from, there’s no real copy-paste for that to go into Unreal Engine 4, meaning that every moment, every scene… everything would have had to essentially be redone from scratch.
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“t very quickly became clear that level of jump would really change fundamentally what the series was how it felt, how it played,” Director Mac Walters told IGN. The possibilities were tantalizing - Unreal Engine 4 is a substantial step up from its predecessor - but ultimately BioWare opted to stick with the Unreal Engine 3 that underpinned the trilogy from its debut in 2007. The team wanted to know if it would be feasible to use Unreal Engine 4 for the remasters, in effect rebuilding Mass Effect on modern technology. When work was first getting underway on Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the new remastered collection due in May, BioWare had a conversation with Epic, creators of the Unreal Engine that Mass Effect 1-3 were built on.