Mass Effect: Legendary Edition gameplay changes revealed by BioWare

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition will make some subtle but impactful changes to the way each game in the trilogy plays, and BioWare is explaining some of the specific tweaks we can expect.

BioWare community manager Jay Ingram laid out the Legendary Edition's changes to balancing and mechanics in a guest post on the PlayStation Blog. Each game has been retouched in the process of updating the collection, but the biggest changes by far have come to the original Mass Effect. It was always a little different compared to the following two games, and Ingram explained that BioWare wanted to make some changes that would unify the whole trilogy without removing what makes each game unique.

So, you won't suddenly have thermal clips to "reload" your weapons with in the original game, but weapons will cool down much faster overall. Weapons will handle better with less immediate reticle bloom, and the camera for aiming down sights has been improved for better accuracy. Individual character abilities have been tweaked too, allowing all classes to wield every weapon type (though specializations are still limited) and tweaking Immunity to provide a temporary buff rather than a passive, low-level damage reduction.

The original game now lets you issue commands to individual squadmates, several combat encounters have been revised, and the Mako has rear thrusters now for powerful cliff climbing (on top of other tweaks to how the Normandy's weird little space SUV works). Meanwhile, the changes to the following two games have mostly been focused on fixing bugs that could make certain paths and choices too hard to encounter, and reworking the Galaxy at War system from Mass Effect 3 - if you skip straight to 3, you'll have to get closer to 100%-ing the game to get one of the less-cataclysmic endings. But, you won't have to use the app or play online, since neither of those things are part of Legendary Edition anyway.